John Dewey Quotes



Best 22 Quotes by John Dewey

“A society with too few independent thinkers is vulnerable to control by disturbed and opportunistic leaders. A society which wants to create and maintain a free and democratic social system must create responsible independence of thought among its young.
John Dewey”

“All learning begins when our comfortable ideas turn out to be inadequate.”

“Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.”

“Creative thinking will improve as we relate the new fact to the old and all facts to each other.”

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

“How can the child learn to be a free and responsible citizen when the teacher is bound?”

“I believe that the teacher's place and work in the school is to be interpreted from this same basis. The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences.”

“If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.”

“Schools have ignored the value of experience and chosen to teach by pouring in.”

“The interaction of knowledge and skills with experience is key to learning.”

“The real process of education should be the process of learning to think through the application of real problems.”

“The school must be a genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons.”

“We do not learn from experience... We learn from reflecting on experience.”

“You cannot teach today the same way you did yesterday to prepare students for tomorrow.”

Democracy and Education Quotes

“Education is not an affair of 'telling' and being told, but an active and constructive process.”

Democracy and Education

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

Democracy and Education

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“As society rapidly changes, individuals will have to be able to function comfortably in a world that is always in flux. Knowledge will continue to increase at a dizzying rate.

This means that a content-based curriculum, with a set body of information to be imparted to students, is entirely inappropriate as a means of preparing children for their adult roles.”


More quotes by John Taylor Gatto

Experience and Education Quotes

“All genuine education comes about through experience.”

Experience and Education

“Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying at the time.”

Experience and Education

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

Experience and Education

The Early Works Quotes

“I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.”

The Early Works

The Middle Works Quotes

“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.”

The Middle Works

The School and Society Quotes

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

The School and Society

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“Philosophy begins in wonder. And at the end when philosophic thought has done its best the wonder remains.”


More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead