Quotes from John Dewey

The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative.

The connections of the ear with vital and out-going thought and emotion are immensely closer and more varied than those of the eye. Vision is a spectator; hearing is a participator.

An educated person is the person who has the power to go on and get more education.

We naturally associate democracy… with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of thought behind it is only chaos.

Our historic imagination is at best slightly developed. We generalise and idealise the past egregiously. We set up little toys to stand as symbols for centuries and the complicated lives of countless individuals.

Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situations of experience its own full and unique meaning.

Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home.

Genuine ignorance is... profitable because it is likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open mindedness; whereas ability to repeat catch-phrases, cant terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with varnish waterproof to new ideas.

We talk much more about individualism and liberty than our ancestors. But as so often happens, when anything becomes conscious, the consciousness is compensatory for absence in practice.

Man is not logical and his intellectual history is a record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to what he can in his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical basis.

All genuine learning comes through experience.

Americans don't want to think. They want to know.

Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent.

Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is, not a preparation for life; education is life itself.

Education is life itself.

Luck, bad if not good, will always be with us. But it has a way of favoring the intelligent and showing its back to the stupid.

Modern life means democracy, democracy means freeing intelligence for independent effectivenessthe emancipation of mind as an individual organ to do its own work. We naturally associate democracy, to be sure, with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of thought behind it is only chaos.

Of what use, educationally speaking, is it to be able to see the end in the beginning?

Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.

Social engaged intellectuals must accept reality as they found it and shape it toward positive social goals, not stand aside in self-righteous isolation.

The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs. Self-conceit often regards it as a sign of weakness to admit that a belief to which we have once committed ourselves is wrong. We get so identified with an idea that it is literally a pet notion and we rise to its defense and stop our eyes and ears to anything different.

There is no discipline in the world so severe as the discipline of experience subjected to the tests of intelligent development and direction.

We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts.