famous quotes by john dewey
40 Famous Quotes by John Dewey
John Dewey is a famous American philosopher and educator who has given the world wonderful wisdom through his writings. This Buzzle article presents a collection of some beautiful quotes by him that deserve to be reflected upon.
"Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself."
John Dewey was a great psychologist, philosopher, educationist, social critic, and political activist from America who lived between 1859 - 1952. He was an exponent of pragmatism, a school of thought that accepts ideas or propositions based on its practical consequences. He was also one of the founders of functional psychology or functionalism. John Dewey wrote on subjects like education, epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, art, logic, social theory, and ethics.
We present to you a collection of quotes by John Dewey in this article.
― John Dewey
John Dewey Quotes on Education and Learning
"I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living."
"We all jump to conclusions; we all fail to examine and test our ideas because of our personal attitudes."
"When a person is absorbed, the subject carries him on."
"It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs."
"A genuine enthusiasm is an attitude that operates as an intellectual force."
"When anyone is thoroughly interested in some object and cause, he throws himself into it; he does so, as we say, 'heartily,' or with a whole heart. The importance of this attitude or disposition is generally recognized in practical and moral affairs. But it is equally important in intellectual development. There is no greater enemy of effective thinking than divided interest."
"To possess all the world of knowledge and lose one's own self is as awful a fate in education as in religion."
"The source of whatever is dead, mechanical, and formal in schools is found precisely in the subordination of the life and experience of the child to the curriculum."
"As long as we confine our gaze to what the child here and now puts forth, we are confused and misled."
"Familiarity breeds contempt, but it also breeds something like affection. We get used to the chains we wear, and we miss them when removed."
"The criterion of the value of school education is the extent in which it creates a desire for continued growth."
"Only diversity makes change and progress."
"Every rigid aim just because it is rigidly given seems to render it unnecessary to give careful attention to concrete conditions."
"The material of thinking is not thoughts, but actions, facts, events, and the relations of things."
"The best type of teaching bears in mind the desirability of affecting this interconnection. It puts the student in the habitual attitude of finding points of contact and mutual bearings."
"For every act, by the principle of habit, modifies disposition-it sets up a certain kind of inclination and desire."
"He is lucky who does not find that in order to make progress, in order to go ahead intellectually, he does not have to unlearn much of what he learned in school."
"The only freedom that is of enduring importance is freedom of intelligence, that is to say, freedom of observation and of judgment exercised in behalf of purposes that are intrinsically worth while."
"Thinking is thus a postponement of immediate action, while it effects internal control of impulse through a union of observation and memory, this union being the heart of reflection."
"We only think when we are confronted with a problem."
"The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action."
John Dewey Quotes on Teaching
"Teachers - and this holds especially of the stronger and better teachers - tend to rely upon their personal strong points to hold the child to his work, and thereby to substitute their personal influence for that of subject matter as a motive for study. The teacher finds by experience that his own personality is often effective where the power of the subject to command attention is almost nil; then he utilizes the former more and more, until the pupil's relation to the teacher almost takes the place of his relation to the subject. In this way, the teacher's personality may become, for the pupil, a source of personal dependence and weakness, an influence that renders the pupil indifferent to the value of the subject for its own sake."
"[Our] desires are the moving springs of action."
"The development occurs through reciprocal give-and-take, the teacher taking but not being afraid also to give."
"Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination."
"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 Quotes on Experience
"There is such as thing as readiness to consider in a thoughtful way the subjects that do come within the range of experience-a readiness thtat contrasts strongly with the disposition to pass judgment on the basis of mere custom, tradition, prejudice, etc., and thus shun the task of thinking."
"Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites."
"Some experiences are mis-educative. Any experience is mis-educative that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience."
"The easy and the simple are not identical. To discover what is really simple and to act upon the discovery is an exceedingly difficult task."
"Every experience is a moving force. Its value can be judged only on the ground of what it moves toward and into."
"Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another."
"Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates to invention. It shocks us out of sheeplike passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving."
"To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness."
"Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes."
Other Famous Quotes
"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."
"By object is meant some element in the complex whole that is defined in abstraction from the whole of which it is a distinction."
"No man's credit is as good as his money."
"Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind."