Dewey Quotes & Sayings

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

It is merely a linguistic peculiarity, not a logical fact, that we say "that is red" instead of "that reddens," either in the sense of growing, becoming, red, or in the sense of making something else red. — John Dewey

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

Education Proceeds ultimately from the patterns furnished by institutions, customs, and laws"- If the patterns of institutions, customs, and laws are broken for this philosophy education should fix itself. There should be several different things taught instead of one "Supreme Factor. — John Dewey

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

You want to live?
Yes!
Then quit thinking you're gonna die! — Laurel Dewey

A society which makes provision for participation in its good of all its members on equal terms and which secures flexible readjustment of its institutions through interaction of the different forms of associated life is in so far democratic. Such a society must have a type of education which gives individuals a personal interest in social relationships and control, and the habits of mind which secure social changes without introducing disorder. — John Dewey

What is there glorious in the world, that is not the product of labor, either of the body or of the mind? — Orville Dewey

I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn't think anything of what he had done to the city's name. Later I heard men who could manage their r's give it the same pronunciation. I still didn't see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves' word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better. — Dashiell Hammett

As believers in democracy we have not only the right but the duty to question existing mechanisms of, say, suffrage and to inquire whether some functional organization would not serve to formulate and manifest public opinion better than the existing methods. It is not irrelevant to the point that a score of passages could be cited in which Jefferson refers to the American Government as an experiment. — John Dewey

Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining is the aim of living. — John Dewey

A narrow and moralistic view of morals is responsible for the failure to recognize that all the aims and values which are desirable in education are themselves moral. Discipline, natural development, culture, social efficiency, are moral traits - marks of a person who is a worthy member of that society which it is the business of education to further. — John Dewey

The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation. — John Dewey

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

Plato defined a slave as one who accepts from another the purposes which control his conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legal sense. It is found wherever men are engaged in activity which is socially serviceable, but whose service they do not understand and have no personal interest in. — John Dewey

I like to think of myself as an original. I have my own sound. That's not easy to come by, I worked on it for many years. But I like to think that I sound like Dewey Redman — Dewey Redman

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

A man seems never to know what anything means till he has lost it; and this I suppose is the reason why losses
vanishing away of things
are among the teachings of this world of shadows. — Orville Dewey

Giving and taking of orders modifies actions and results, but does not of itself effect a sharing of purposes, a communication of interests. — John Dewey

Librarying is a harder profession than the public realizes, he said. People think it's all rubber stamps, knowing that Dewey 521 is celestial mechanics and saying 'Try looking under fiction' sixty eight times a day. — Jasper Fforde

Only in education, never in the life of farmer, sailor, merchant, physician, or laboratory experimenter, does knowledge mean primarily a store of information aloof from doing. — John Dewey

In the mass of people, vegetative and animal functions dominate. Their energy of intelligence is so feeble and inconstant that it is constantly overpowered by bodily appetite and passion.Such persons are not truly ends in themselves, for only reason constitutes a final end. Like plants, animals and physical tools, they are means, appliances, for the attaining of ends beyond themselves, although unlike them they have enough intelligence to exercise a certain discretion in the execution of the tasks committed to them. Thus by nature, and not merely by social convention, there are those who are slaves - that is, means for the ends of others. — John Dewey

New inventions, new machines, new methods of transportation and intercourse are making over the whole scene of action year by year. It is an absolute impossibility to educate the child for any fixed station in life. — John Dewey

In England, philosophers are honoured, respected; they rise to public offices, they are buried with the kings ... In France warrants are issued against them, they are persecuted, pelted with pastoral letters: Do we see that England is any the worse for it? — 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

It is not truly realistic or scientific to take short views, to sacrifice the future to immediate pressure, to ignore facts and forces that are disagreeable and to magnify the enduring quality of whatever falls in with immediate desire. It is false that the evils of the situation arise from absence of ideals; they spring from wrong ideals. — John Dewey

It is part of the educator's responsibility to see equally to two things: First, that the problem grows out of the conditions of the experience being had in the present, and that it is within the range of the capacity of students; and, secondly, that it is such that it arouses in the learner an active quest for information and for production of new ideas. The new facts and new ideas thus obtained become the ground for further experiences in which new problems are presented. — John Dewey

The most important factor in the training of good mental habits consists in acquiring the attitude of suspended conclusion, and in mastering the various methods of searching for new materials to corroborate or to refute the first suggestions that occur. — John Dewey

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

Occupied people are not unhappy people. — Orville Dewey

What makes us moral beings is that ... there are some acts we believe we ought to die rather than commit ... But now suppose that one has in fact done one of the things one could not have imagined doing, and finds that one is still alive. At that point, one's choices are suicide, a life of bottomless self-disgust, and an attempt to live so as never to do such a thing again. Dewey recommends the third choice. — Richard M. Rorty

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

Men have gone on to build up vast intellectual schemes, philosophies, and theologies, to prove that ideals are not real as ideals but as antecedently existing actualities. They have failed to see that in converting moral realities into matters of intellectual assent they have evinced lack of moral faith. Faith that something should be in existence as far as lies in our power is changed into the intellectual belief that it is already in existence. When physical existence does not bear out the assertion, the physical is subtly changed into the metaphysical. In this way, moral faith has been inextricably tied up with intellectual beliefs about the supernatural. — John Dewey

Since changes are going on anyway, the great thing is to learn enough about them so that we will be able to lay hold of them and turn them in the direction of our desires. Conditions and events are neither to be fled from nor passively acquiesced in; they are to be utilized and directed. — John Dewey

Without the English, reason and philosophy would still be in the most despicable infancy in France. — John Dewey

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

Intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume
an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them: we get over them. — 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

Everyone in our culture wants to win a prize. Perhaps that is the grand lesson we have taken with us from kindergarten in the age of perversions of Dewey-style education: everyone gets a ribbon, and praise becomes a meaningless narcotic to soothe egoistic distemper. — Gerald Early

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

Insight into soul-action, ability to discriminate the genuine from the sham and capacity to further one and discourage the other. — John Dewey

The green earth sends her incense up. From many a mountain shrine; From folded leaf and dewey cup She pours her sacred wine. — John Greenleaf Whittier

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

The problem of restoring integration and co-operation between man's beliefs about the world in which he lives and his beliefs about values and purposes that should direct his conduct is the deepest problem modern life. It is the problem of any philosophy that is not isolated from life. — John Dewey

I believe that the school must represent present life - life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the play-ground. — John Dewey

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. — John Dewey

All genuine learning comes through experience. — John Dewey

Have not some religions, including the most influential forms of Christianity, taught that the heart of man is totally corrupt? How could the course of religion in its entire sweep not be marked by practices that are shameful in their cruelty and lustfulness, and by beliefs that are degraded and intellectually incredible? What else than what we can find could be expected, in the case of people having little knowledge and no secure method of knowing; with primitive institutions, and with so little control of natural forces that they lived in a constant state of fear? — John Dewey

Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid; it has been liquefied. it is actively moving in all the currents of society itself — 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

There is nothing left worth preserving in the notions of unseen powers, controlling human destiny, to which obedience and worship are due. — 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

A problem well-defined is a problem half solved. — John Dewey

I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform. — John Dewey

You bring any cannoli?' Mickey whispered, trying to downplay his worry with humor.
'No, but I'm keeping my gun no matter what he says. — Genevieve Dewey

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

The librarian was explaining the benefits of the Dewey decimal system to her junior - benefits that extended to every area of life. It was orderly, like the universe. It had logic. It was dependable. Using it allowed a kind of moral uplift, as one's own chaos was also brought under control.
'Whenever I am troubled,' said the librarian, 'I think about the Dewey decimal system.'
'Then what happens?' asked the junior, rather overawed.
'Then I understand that trouble is just something that has been filed in the wrong place. That is what Jung was explaining of course - as the chaos of our unconscious contents strive to find their rightful place in the index of consciousness. — Jeanette Winterson

The future of our civilisation depends upon the widening spread and deepening hold of the scientific habit of mind. — 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

I don't know what your Company is feeling as of today about the work of Dr. Alice Hamilton on benzol [benzene] poisoning. I know that back in the old days some of your boys used to think that she was a plain nuisance and just picking on you for luck. But I have a hunch that as you have learned more about the subject, men like your good self have grown to realize the debt that society owes her for her crusade. I am pretty sure that she has saved the lives of a great many girls in can-making plants and I would hate to think that you didn't agree with me. — Bradley Dewey

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

It is [the teacher's] business to be on the alert to see what attitudes and habitual tendencies are being created. In this direction he[sic] must, if he is an educator, be able to judge what attitudes are actually conducive to continued growth and what are detrimental. He must, in addition, have that sympathetic understanding of individuals as individuals which gives him an idea of what is actually going on in the minds of those who are learning. — John Dewey

The way our group or class does things tends to determine the proper objects of attention, and thus to prescribe the directions and limits of observation and memory. What is strange or foreign (that is to say outside the activities of the groups) tends to be morally forbidden and intellectually suspect. — 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

The teacher loses the position of external boss or dictator but takes on that of leader of group activities — John Dewey

But progress in knowledge has made us aware of the superficiality of Plato's lumping of individuals and their original powers into a few sharply marked-off classes; it has taught us that original capacities are indefinitely numerous and variable. It is but the other side of this fact to say that in the degree in which society has become democratic, social organization means utilization of the specific and variable qualities of individuals, not stratification by classes. — 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

The ideal may seem remote of execution, but the democratic ideal of education is a farcical yet tragic delusion except as the ideal more and more dominates our public system of education. — John Dewey

Education is a social process; education is growth; education is not preparation for life but is life itself. — John Dewey

Since growth is the characteristic of life, education is all one with growing; it has no end beyond itself. The criterion of the value of school education is the extent in which it creates a desire for continuous growth and supplies means for making the desire effective in fact. — John Dewey

The intermingling in the school of youth of different races, differing religions, and unlike customs creates for all a new and broader environment. Common subject matter accustoms all to a unity of outlook upon a broader horizon than is visible to the members of any group while it is isolated. The assimilative force of the American public school is eloquent testimony to the efficacy of the common and balanced appeal. — John Dewey

For Dewey, the Great Community was the basic fact of history. The individual and the soul were invalid concepts, man was truly man, not as an individual, but as after Aristotle, in society and supremely in the State. Thus, for Dewey, true education mean not the development of the individual in terms of learning, but his socialization.
Progressive education ... educates the individual in terms of particular facts of the universe without reference to God, truth, or morality. — Rousas John Rushdoony

Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live. — John Dewey

wonder is the mother of all science. — John Dewey

Just one word, infused with naked desperation; half prayer, half enchantment. It felt like a freezing charm on her soul making her his prisoner, yet setting her free all at once. — Genevieve Dewey

The educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end. — John Dewey

To feel the meaning of what one is doing, and to rejoice in that meaning; to unite in one concurrent fact the unfolding of the inner life and the ordered development of material conditions
that is art. — John Dewey

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

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

Society exists through a process of transmission quite as much as biological life. This transmission occurs by means of communication of habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the older to the younger. — John Dewey

A large part of the art of instruction lies in making the difficulty of new problems large enough to challenge thought, and small enough so that, in addition to the confusion naturally attending the novel elements, there shall be luminous familiar spots from which helpful suggestions may spring. — John Dewey

Language exists only when it is listened to as well as spoken. The hearer is an indispensable partner. — 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

Since education is not a means to living, but is identical with the operation of living a life which is fruitful and inherently significant, the only ultimate value which can be set up is just the process of living itself. And this is not an end to which studies and activities are subordinate means; it is the whole of which they are ingredients. — John Dewey

We may neglect the wrongs which we receive, but be careful to rectify those which we are the cause of to others. — Orville Dewey

But the player librarians all over the country were raving about most was Marjory Muldauer from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. A gangly seventh grader, a foot taller than any of her competitors, Marjory Muldauer had memorized the ten categories of the Dewey decimal system before she entered preschool. — Chris Grabenstein

Thinking is the accurate and deliberate instituting of connections between what is done and its consequences. — John Dewey

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. The main texture of disposition is formed, independently of schooling, by such influences. What conscious, deliberate teaching can do is at most to free the capacities thus formed for fuller exercise, to purge them of some of their grossness, and to furnish objects which make their activity more productive of meaning. — John Dewey

The problem is to extract the desirable traits of forms of community life which actually exist, and employ them to criticize undesirable features and suggest improvement — John Dewey

To be born, to live and to die is merely to change forms ... And what does one form matter any more than another? ... Each form has its own sort of happiness and unhappiness. From the elephant down to the flea ... from the flea down to the sensitive and living molecule which is the origin of all, there is not a speck in the whole of nature that does not feel pain or pleasure. — John Dewey

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

Whole object of intellectual education is formation of logical disposition — 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

Reading is a mighty engine, beside which steam and electricity sink into insignificance. — Melvil Dewey

The very problem of mind and body suggests division; I do not know of anything so disastrously affected by the habit of division as this particular theme. In its discussion are reflected the splitting off from each other of religion, morals and science; the divorce of philosophy from science and of both from the arts of conduct. The evils which we suffer in education, in religion, in the materialism of business and the aloofness of "intellectuals" from life, in the whole separation of knowledge and practice
all testify to the necessity of seeing mind-body as an integral whole. — 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

We are all students. We are all teachers. — Dewey Dempsey

The eternal conflict of good and the best with bad and the worst is on. — Melvil Dewey