Quotes from John Dewey

Just because traditional education was a matter of routine in which the plans and programs were handed down from the past, it does not follow that progressive education is a matter of planless improvisation.

On the other hand, if an experience arouses curiosity, strengthens initiative, and sets up desires and purposes that are sufficiently intense to carry a person over dead places in the future, continuity works in a very different way. Every experience is a moving force.

To see the organism in nature, the nervous system in the organism, the brain in the nervous system, the cortex in the brain is the answer to the problems which haunt philosophy. And when thus seen they will be seen to be in, not as marbles are in a box but as events are in history, in a moving, growing never finished process.

The vine of pedant theory is attached at both ends to the pillars of observed subject-matter

The local is the only universal, upon that all art is built.

Mathematics is often cited as an example of purely normative thinking dependent upon a priori canons and supra-empirical material. But it is hard to see how the student who approaches the matter historically can avoid the conclusion that the status of mathematics is as empirical as metallurgy.

We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience.

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.

Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.

Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.

A problem well put is half solved.

We only think when confronted with a problem.

The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

If we teach today's students as we taught yesterday's, we rob them of tomorrow.

Hunger not to have, but to be

Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked.

There's all the difference in the world between having something to say, and having to say something.

Art is the most effective mode of communications that exists.

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

The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.

The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning.

Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry.

To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.