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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

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John Dewey
Age: 92 †
Born: 1859
Born: October 20
Died: 1952
Died: June 1
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More quotes by John Dewey

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Things gain meaning by being used in a shared experience or joint action.
John Dewey
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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.
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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?
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In brief, the function of knowledge is to make one experience freely available to other experiences.
John Dewey
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Education as growth or maturity should be an ever-present process.
John Dewey
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Inside the modern city, in spite of its nominal political unity, there are probably more communities, more differing customs, traditions, aspirations, and forms of government or control, than existed in an entire continent at an earlier epoch.
John Dewey
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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
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When words do not enter as factors into a shared situation, either overtly or imaginatively, they operate as pure physical stimuli, not as having a meaning or intellectual value. They set activity running in a given groove, but there is no accompanying conscious purpose or meaning.
John Dewey
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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
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As a child lives today, he will live tomorrow.
John Dewey
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Every one of the constituent elements of a social group, in a modern city as in a savage tribe, is born immature, helpless, without language, beliefs, ideas, or social standards. Each individual, each unit who is the carrier of the life-experience of his group, in time passes away. Yet the life of the group goes on.
John Dewey
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If the eye is constantly greeted by harmonious objects, having elegance of form and color, a standard of taste naturally grows up.
John Dewey
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The words environment, medium denote something more than surroundings which encompass an individual. They denote the specific continuity of the surroundings with his own active tendencies.
John Dewey
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Intellectually religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it.
John Dewey
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There is no common understanding, and no community life. But in a shared activity, each person refers what he is doing to what the other is doing and vice-versa.
John Dewey
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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
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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
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Since in reality there is nothing to which growth is relative save more growth, there is nothing to which education is subordinate save more education.
John Dewey
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Choice is the declaration by self that a certain ideal of self shall be realized.
John Dewey
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Each generation is inclined to educate its young so as to get along in the present world instead of with a view to the proper end of education: the promotion of the best possible realization of humanity as humanity. Parents educate their children so that they may get on princes educate their subjects as instruments of their own purpose.
John Dewey