110+ John Dewey Quotes On Education, Pragmatism And Education And Democracy

John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer. He was a major representative of the progressive movement in the United States at the turn of the 20th century. He is best known for his work in the fields of philosophy, psychology, and education, in particular for his book, Democracy and Education, which has had a lasting impact on American educational theory. Following is our collection on famous quotes by John Dewey on education, pragmatism, education and democracy.

Top 10 John Dewey Quotes

1. Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
2. We do not learn from experience...we learn from reflecting on experience.
3. Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is, not a preparation for life; education is life itself.
4. You cannot teach today the same way you did yesterday to prepare students for tomorrow.
5. Education is not an affair of 'telling' and being told, but an active and constructive process.
6. 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.
7. If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.
8. To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.
9. I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.
10. The real process of education should be the process of learning to think through the application of real problems.

John Dewey Image Quotes

We do not learn from experience...we learn from reflecting on experience. — John Dewey

If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow. — John Dewey

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

We only think when we are confronted with problems. — John Dewey

Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife. — John Dewey

The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to feel important. — John Dewey

To me faith means not worrying. — John Dewey

John Dewey Short Quotes

• Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
• Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home.
• The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to feel important.
• To me faith means not worrying.
• The need for growth - what we might call immaturity - is not a negative state of being.
• Time and memory are true artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart's desire.
• No man's credit is as good as his money.
• Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live.
• One lives with so many bad deeds on one's conscience and some good intentions in one's heart.
• As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure.

John Dewey Quotes About Education

Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living. Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live. Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. — John Dewey

There is no god and there is no soul. Hence, there is no need for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable truth is dead and buried. There is no room for fixed and natural law or permanent moral absolutes. — John Dewey

Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife. — John Dewey

The problem of education in a democratic society is to do away with ... dualism and to construct a course of studies which makes thought a guide of free practice for all and which makes leisure a reward of accepting responsibility for service, rather than a state of exemption from it. — John Dewey

Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind. — John Dewey

The result of the educative process is capacity for further education. — John Dewey

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

Vocational training is the training of animals or slaves. It fits them to become cogs in the industrial machine. Free men need liberal education to prepare them to make a good use of their freedom. — John Dewey

Any education given by a group tends to socialize its members, but the quality and the value of the socialization depends upon the habits and aims of the group. Hence, once more, the need of a measure for the worth of any given mode of social life. — John Dewey

The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education — or that the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth. — John Dewey

John Dewey Quotes About Reflection

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

A man really living alone (alone mentally as well as physically) would have little or no occasion to reflect upon his past experience to extract its net meaning. — John Dewey

Language fails not because thought fails, but because no verbal symbols can do justice to the fullness and richness of thought. Ifwe are to continue talking about "data" in any other sense than as reflective distinctions, the original datum is always such a qualitative whole. — John Dewey

You can teach students to develop the ability to think reflectively, and you can help them understand what this means, but if they are not inclined to do so they never will. — John Dewey

An idea is a method of evading, circumventing or surmounting through reflection, obstacles that otherwise would have to be attacked by brute force. — John Dewey

John Dewey Quotes About Democracy

Talk of democracy has little content when big business rules the life of the country through its control of the means of production, exchange, the press and other means of publicity, propaganda and communication. — John Dewey

Everything which bars freedom and fullness of communication sets up barriers that divide human beings into sets and cliques, into antagonistic sects and factions, and thereby undermines the democratic way of life. — John Dewey

Democracy is a form of government only because it is a form of moral and spiritual association. — John Dewey

A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. — John Dewey

Doctrine that eliminates or even obscures the function of choice of values and enlistment of desires and emotions in behalf of those chosen weakens personal responsibility for judgment and for action. It thus helps create the attitudes that welcome and support the totalitarian state. — John Dewey

Democracy is a way of life controlled by a working faith in the possibilities of human nature. . . . This faith may be enacted in statutes, but it is only on paper unless it is put in force in the attitudes which human beings display to one another in all the incidents and relations of daily life. — John Dewey

Democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail. — John Dewey

The struggle for democracy has to be maintained on as many fronts as culture has aspects: political, economic, international, educational, scientific and artistic, religious. — John Dewey

The method of democracy is to bring conflicts out into the open where their special claims can be seen and appraised, where they can be discussed and judged. — John Dewey

We have advanced far enough to say that democracy is a way of life. We have yet to realize that it is a way of personal life and one which provides a moral standard for personal conduct. — John Dewey

John Dewey Quotes About Teachers

I believe that in this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God. — John Dewey

Too rarely is the individual teacher so free from the dictation of authoritative supervisor, textbook on methods, prescribed course of study, etc., that he can let his mind come to close quarters with the pupil's mind and the subject matter. — John Dewey

Any genuine teaching will result, if successful, in someone's knowing how to bring about a better condition of things than existed earlier. — John Dewey

The origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion or doubt. — John Dewey

One can think effectively only when one is willing to endure suspense and to undergo the trouble of searching. — John Dewey

Teaching can be compared to selling commodities. No one can sell unless someone buys ... yet there are teachers who think they have done a good day's teaching irrespective of what the pupils have learned. — John Dewey

Every teacher should realize the dignity of his calling. — John Dewey

How can the child learn to be a free and responsible citizen when the teacher is bound? — John Dewey

One of the saddest things about US education is that the wisdom of our most successful teachers is lost to the profession when they retire. — John Dewey

One might as well say he has sold when no one has bought as to say he has taught when no one has learned. — John Dewey

John Dewey Quotes About Learning

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

Since there is no single set of abilities running throughout human nature, there is no single curriculum which all should undergo. Rather, the schools should teach everything that anyone is interested in learning. — John Dewey

Experiences in order to be educative must lead out into an expanding world of subject matter, a subject matter of facts or information and of ideas. This condition is satisfied only as the educator views teaching and learning as a continuous process of reconstruction of experience. — John Dewey

To "learn from experience" is to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequence. — John Dewey

How many students ... were rendered callous to ideas, and how many lost the impetus to learn because of the way in which learning was experienced by them? — John Dewey

To be interested is to be absorbed in, wrapped up in, carried away by, some object. To take an interest is to be on the alert, to care about, to be attentive. — John Dewey

The plea for the predominance of learning to read in early school life because of the great importance attaching to literature seems to be a perversion. — John Dewey

The school must be "a genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons". — John Dewey

There is no greater egoism than that of learning when it is treated simply as a mark of personal distinction to be held and cherished for its own sake. ... [K]knowledge is a possession held in trust for the furthering of the well-being of all — John Dewey

The mere absorption of facts and truths is so exclusively an individual affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat. — John Dewey

John Dewey Quotes About Teaching

The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think -- rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with the thoughts of other men. — John Dewey

As societies become more complex in structure and resources, the need of formal or intentional teaching and learning increases. — John Dewey

Not only does social life demand teaching and learning for its own permanence, but the very process of living together educates. It enlarges and enlightens experience; it stimulates and enriches imagination; it creates responsibility for accuracy and vividness of statement and thought. — John Dewey

Teaching may be compared to selling commodities. No one can sell unless somebody buys. — John Dewey

What's in a question, you ask? Everything. It is evoking stimulating response or stultifying inquiry. It is, in essence, the very core of teaching. — John Dewey

I do not think that any thorough-going modification of college curriculum would be possible without a modification of the methods of instruction. — John Dewey

The development occurs through reciprocal give-and-take, the teacher taking but not being afraid also to give. — John Dewey

All learning begins when our comfortable ideas turn out to be inadequate. — John Dewey

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

John Dewey Quotes About Educational

Education, in its broadest sense, is the means of this social continuity of life. — John Dewey

Cease conceiving of education as mere preparation for later life, and make it the full meaning of the present life. — John Dewey

Education has no more serious responsibility than the making of adequate provision for enjoyment of recreative leisure not only for the sake of immediate health, but for the sake of its lasting effect upon the habits of the mind. — John Dewey

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

The conception of education as a social process and function has no definite meaning until we define the kind of society we have in mind. — John Dewey

Purposeful action is thus the goal of all that is truly educative. — John Dewey

Every living being needs continually renewed, and education is simply the chief process by which renewal occurs. — John Dewey

By various agencies, unintentional and designed, a society transforms uninitiated and seemingly alien beings into robust trustees of its own resources and ideals. Education is thus a fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating, process. — John Dewey

The central problem of an education based upon experience is to select the kind of present experience that live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences. — John Dewey

I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child's powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself. — John Dewey

John Dewey Quotes About Progressive

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

That which distinguishes the Soviet system both from other national systems and from the progressive schools of other countries is the conscious control of every educational procedure by reference to a single and comprehensive social purpose. — John Dewey

A possibility of continuing progress is opened up by the fact that in learning one act, methods are developed good for use in other situations. Still more important is the fact that the human being acquires a habit of learning. He learns to learn. — John Dewey

Change as change is mere flux and lapse; it insults intelligence. Genuinely to know is to grasp a permanent end that realizes itself through changes. — John Dewey

Nature as a whole is a progressive realization of purpose strictly comparable to the realization of purpose in any single plant or animal. — John Dewey

John Dewey Quotes About Life

Confidence is directness and courage in meeting the facts of life. — John Dewey

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. — John Dewey

Always make the other person feel important. — John Dewey

The premium so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home. — John Dewey

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. — John Dewey

Mere physical growing up, mere mastery of the bare necessities of subsistence will not suffice to reproduce the life of the group. Deliberate effort and the taking of thoughtful pains are required. — John Dewey

...the moment of passage from disturbance into harmony is that of intensest life. — John Dewey

Continuity of life means continual readaptation of the environment to the needs of living organisms. — John Dewey

Even today, in our industrial life, apart from certain values of industriousness and thrift, the intellectual and emotional reaction of the forms of human association under which the world's work is carried on receives little attention as compared with physical output. — John Dewey

Written symbols are even more artificial or conventional than spoken; they cannot be picked up in accidental intercourse with others. In addition, the written form tends to select and record matters which are comparatively foreign to everyday life. — John Dewey

John Dewey Quotes About Thinks

We only think when we are confronted with problems. — John Dewey

Creative thinking will improve as we relate the new fact to the old and all facts to each other. — John Dewey

Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy. — John Dewey

We cannot think of ourselves save as to some extent social being. Hence, we cannot separate the idea of ourselves and our own good from our idea of others and their good. — John Dewey

When men think and believe in one set of symbols and act in ways which are contrary to their professed and conscious ideas, confusion and insincerity are bound to result. — John Dewey

Such words as "society" and "community" are likely to be misleading, for they have a tendency to make us think there is a single thing corresponding to the single word. — John Dewey

I should venture to assert that the most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinking goes back to neglect of context. — John Dewey

Intelligent thinking means an increment of freedom in action-an emancipation from chance and fatality. 'Thought' represents the suggestion of a way of response that is different from that which would have been followed if intelligent observation had not effected an inference as to the future. — John Dewey

For in spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an — John Dewey

Thinking and feeling that have to do with action in association with others is as much a social mode of behavior as is the most overt cooperative or hostile act. — John Dewey

John Dewey Quotes About Experience

That the ulterior significance of every mode of human association lies in the contribution which it makes to the improvement of the quality of experience is a fact most easily recognized in dealing with the immature. — John Dewey

Experience, in short, is not a combination of mind and world, subject and object, method and subject matter, but is a single continuous interaction of a great diversity (literally countless in number) of energies. — John Dewey

Some experiences are mis-educative. Any experience is mis-educative that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience. — John Dewey

Experience alone cannot deliver to us necessary truths; truths completely demonstrated by reason. Its conclusions are particular, not universal. — John Dewey

If there is one conclusion to which human experience unmistakably points it is that democratic ends demand democratic methods for their realization. — John Dewey

Everything depends on the quality of the experience which is had. — John Dewey

If humanity has made some headway in realizing that the ultimate value of every institution is its distinctively human effect - its effect upon conscious experience - we may well believe that this lesson has been learned largely through dealings with the young. — John Dewey

Any experience, however, trivial in its first appearance, is capable of assuming an indefinite richness of significance by extending its range of perceived connections. — John Dewey

The interaction of knowledge and skills with experience is key to learning. — John Dewey

To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience. — John Dewey

John Dewey Quotes About Work

Just as the senses require sensible objects to stimulate them, so our powers of observation, recollection, and imagination do not work spontaneously, but are set in motion by the demands set up by current social occupations. — John Dewey

If the members who compose a society lived on continuously, they might educate the new-born members, but it would be a task directed by personal interest rather than social need. Now it is a work of necessity. — John Dewey

An education could be given which would sift individuals, discovering what they were good for, and supplying a method of assigning each to the work in life for which his nature fits him. — John Dewey

Schools should take part in the great work of construction and organization that will have to be done. — John Dewey

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. What are now working conceptions, employed as a matter of course because they have withstood the tests of experiment and have emerged triumphant, were once speculative hypotheses. — John Dewey

Men have never fully used [their] powers to advance the good in life, because they have waited upon some power external to themselves and to nature to do the work they are responsible for doing. — John Dewey

We never educate directly, but indirectly by means of the environment. Whether we permit chance environments to do the work, or whether we design environments for the purpose makes a great difference. — John Dewey

It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs. — John Dewey

The function of criticism is the reeducation of perception of works of art? The conception that its business is to appraise, to judge in the legal and moral sense, arrests the perception of those who are influenced by the criticism that assumes this task. — John Dewey

John Dewey Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

We do not learn from experience...we learn from reflecting on experience. — John Dewey

If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow. — John Dewey

We only think when we are confronted with problems. — John Dewey

Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife. — John Dewey

The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to feel important. — John Dewey

To me faith means not worrying. — John Dewey

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

It is the office of the school environment to balance the various elements in the social environment, and to see to it that each individual gets an opportunity to escape from the limitations of the social group in which he was born, and to come into living contact with a broader environment. — John Dewey

Independent self-reliant people would be a counterproductive anachronism in the collective society of the future where people will be defined by their associations. — John Dewey

No system has ever as yet existed which did not in some form involve the exploitation of some human beings for the advantage of others. — John Dewey

As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance. — John Dewey

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

The end justifies the means only when the means used are such as actually bring about the desired and desirable end. — John Dewey

Modern philosophy certainly exacts a surrender of all supernaturalism and fixed dogma and rigid institutionalism with which Christianity has been historically associated — John Dewey

Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control environment. — John Dewey

The ultimate aim of production is not production of goods but the production of free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality. — John Dewey

In order to have a large number of values in common, all the members of the group must have an equable opportunity, to receive and to take from others. There must be a large variety of shared undertakings and experiences. Otherwise, the influences which educate some into masters, educates others into slaves. — John Dewey

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. — John Dewey

The intellectual content of religions has always finally adapted itself to scientific and social conditions after they have become clear.... For this reason I do not think that those who are concerned about the future of a religious attitude should trouble themselves about the conflict of science with traditional doctrines. — John Dewey

Nothing takes root in mind when there is no balance between doing and receiving. — John Dewey

The spontaneous power of the child, his demand for self-expression, can not by any possibility be suppressed. — John Dewey

In laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency, in treating the forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as originating and passing away, the Origin of Species introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion. — John Dewey

By reading the characteristic features of any man's castles in the air you can make a shrewd guess as to his underlying desires which are frustrated. — John Dewey

By doing his share in the associated activity, the individual appropriates the purpose which actuates it, becomes familiar with its methods and subject matters, acquires needed skill, and is saturated with its emotional spirit. — John Dewey

The importance of language in gaining knowledge is doubtless the chief cause of the common notion that knowledge may be passed directly from one to another. It almost seems as if all we have to do to convey an idea into the mind of another is to convey a sound into his ear. Thus imparting knowledge gets assimilated to a purely physical process. — John Dewey

The aim of education is growth: the aim of growth is more growth — John Dewey

I believe that in the ideal school we have the reconciliation of the individualistic and the institutional ideals. — John Dewey

With respect to the development of powers devoted to coping with specific scientific and economic problems we may say that the child should be growing in manhood. With respect to sympathetic curiosity, unbiased responsiveness, and openness of mind, we may say that the adult should be growing in childlikeness. — John Dewey

Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational. — John Dewey

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. — John Dewey

[T]he schools, through reliance upon the spur of competition and the bestowing of special honors and prizes, only build up and strengthen the disposition that makes an individual when he leaves school employ his special talents and superior skill to outwit his fellow without respect for the welfare of others — John Dewey

A man can be prevented from breaking into other persons' houses by shutting him up, but shutting him up may not alter his disposition to commit burglary. — John Dewey

The good society was, like the good self, a diverse yet harmonious, growing yet unified whole, a fully participatory democracy in which the powers and capacities of the individuals that comprised it were harmonized by their cooperative activities into a community that permitted the full and free expression of individuality. — John Dewey

By object is meant some element in the complex whole that is defined in abstraction from the whole of which it is a distinction. — John Dewey

To the being of fully alive, the future is not ominous but a promise; it surrounds the present like a halo. — John Dewey

That education is not an affair of "telling" and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a principle almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in theory. Is not this deplorable situation due to the fact that the doctrine is itself merely told? It is preached; it is lectured; it is written about. — John Dewey

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. — John Dewey

The theory of the method of knowing which is advanced in these pages may be termed pragmatic. ... Only that which has been organized into our disposition so as to enable us to adapt the environment to our needs and adapt our aims and desires to the situation in which we live is really knowledge. — John Dewey

Cooperation called fraternity in the classic French formula is as much a part of the democratic ideal as is personal initiative. That cultural conditions were allowed to develop (markedly so in the economic phase) which subordinated cooperativeness to liberty and equality serves to explain the decline in the two latter. — John Dewey

The only way to abolish war is to make peace seem heroic. — John Dewey

Imposing an alleged uniform general method upon everybody breeds mediocrity in all but the very exceptional. And measuring originality by deviation from the mass breeds eccentricity in them. — John Dewey

Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril. — John Dewey

If the eye is constantly greeted by harmonious objects, having elegance of form and color, a standard of taste naturally grows up. — John Dewey

Every serious-minded person knows that a large part of the effort required in moral discipline consists in the courage needed to acknowledge the unpleasant consequences of one's past and present acts. — John Dewey

Life Lessons by John Dewey

1. John Dewey believed in the importance of experience and learning through doing, emphasizing that education should be an active process of inquiry and problem-solving.
2. He argued that education should be focused on developing critical thinking and problem-solving skills, and that it should be tailored to the individual needs of each student.
3. He also believed that education should be a continuous process, not a one-time event, and that it should be focused on developing the whole person, not just on academic knowledge.