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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

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John Dewey
Age: 92 †
Born: 1859
Born: October 20
Died: 1952
Died: June 1
Aesthetician
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Professor
Psychologist
Sociologist
Teacher
Trade Unionist
Burlington
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Dewey
Power
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Atheist
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Never
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Men
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Waited
Life
Nature
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The educative value of manual activities and of laboratory exercises, as well as of play, depends upon the extent in which they aid in bringing about a sensing of the meaning of what is going on. In effect, if not in name, they are dramatizations.
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Instruction is important.
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Democracy is a form of government only because it is a form of moral and spiritual association.
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Like the soil, mind is fertilized while it lies fallow, until a new burst of bloom ensues.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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No man's credit is as good as his money.
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All direction is but re-direction it shifts the activities already going on into another channel. Unless one is cognizant of the energies which are already in operation, one's attempts at direction will almost surely go amiss.
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I should venture to assert that the most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinking goes back to neglect of context.
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Every subject at some phase of its development should possess, what is for the individual concerned with it, an aesthetic quality.
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The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.
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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.
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All communication is like art. It may fairly be said, therefore, that any social arrangement that remains vitally social, or vitally shared, is educative to those who participate in it. Only when it becomes cast in a mold and runs in a routine way does it lose its educative power.
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Art is not the possession of the few who are recognized writers, painters, musicians it is the authentic expression of any and all individuality.
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We rarely recognize the extent in which our conscious estimates of what is worth while and what is not, are due to standards of which we are not conscious at all.
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The teacher loses the position of external boss or dictator but takes on that of leader of group activities
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Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth. In this way, the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer-in of the true Kingdom of God.
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All education which develops power to share effectively in social life is moral.
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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.
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