quotes by John Dewey

"Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself."
— John Dewey

"Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. "
— John Dewey (The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge And Action)

" "For in spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an ‘ism becomes so involved in reaction against other ‘isms that it is unwittingly controlled by them. For it then forms its principles by reaction against them instead of by a comprehensive, constructive survey of actual needs, problems, and possibilities.
"
— John Dewey

"We only think when confronted with a problem."
— John Dewey

"Hunger not to have, but to be"
— John Dewey

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

"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. "
— John Dewey (Reconstruction in Philosophy)

"The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs. "
— John Dewey

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

"Every one has experienced how learning an appropriate name for what was dim and vague cleared up and crystallized the whole matter. Some meaning seems distinct almost within reach, but is elusive; it refuses to condense into definite form; the attaching of a word somehow (just how, it is almost impossible to say) puts limits around the meaning, draws it out from the void, makes it stand out as an entity on its own account."
— John Dewey (How We Think)

"There is no such thing as educational value in the abstract. The notion that some subjects and methods and that acquaintance with certain facts and truths possess educational value in and of themselves is the reason why traditional education reduced the material of education so largely to a diet of predigested materials."
— John Dewey (Experience And Education)

"We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future."
— John Dewey (Experience And Education)

"Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates invention. It shocks us out of sheep-like passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving…conflict is a sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity."
— John Dewey

"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."
— John Dewey (Democracy And Education)

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

"Art is the most effective mode of communications that exists."
— John Dewey

"The only freedom that is of enduring importance is the freedom of intelligence, that is to say, freedom of observation and of judgment, exercised in behalf of purposes that are intrinsically worth while. The commonest mistake made about freedom is, I think, to identify it with freedom of movement, or, with the external or physical side of activity."
— John Dewey

"Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. "
— John Dewey

"Forty years spent in wandering in a wilderness like that of the present is not a sad fate--unless one attempts to make himself believe that the wilderness is after all itself the promised land"
— John Dewey

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

"Education is not a preparation for life; education is life itself."
"
— John Dewey