John Dewey Quotes

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

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.

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.

Faith in the possibilities of continued and rigorous inquiry does not limit access to truth to any channel or scheme of things. It does not first say that truth is universal and then add there is but one road to it.

The goal of education is to enable individuals to continue their education.

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

a problem well put is half solved.

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

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.

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.

As we have seen there is some kind of continuity in any case since every experience affects for better or worse the attitudes which help decide the quality of further experiences, by setting up certain preference and aversion, and making it easier or harder to act for this or that end.

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

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.

Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful.

Like the soil, mind is fertilized while it lies fallow, until a new burst of bloom ensues.

Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes, of likes and dislikes, may be and often is much more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history that is learned.