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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
Vermont
Dewey
Thinking
Religion
Waited
Life
Nature
External
Power
Advance
Used
Powers
Work
Atheist
Good
Fully
Never
Responsible
Men
Upon

More quotes by John Dewey

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Education is not an affair of 'telling' and being told, but an active and constructive process.
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Continuity of life means continual readaptation of the environment to the needs of living organisms.
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Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying at the time.
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Change as change is mere flux and lapse it insults intelligence. Genuinely to know is to grasp a permanent end that realizes itself through changes.
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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.
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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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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.
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If a person cannot foresee the consequences of his act, and is not capable of understanding what he is told about its outcome by those with more experience, it is impossible for him to guide his act intelligently. In such a state, every act is alike to him.
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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.
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Education is not preparation for life education is life itself.
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Education is life itself.
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The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative.
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To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience.
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Without initiation into the scientific spirit one is not in possession of the best tools which humanity has so far devised for effectively directed reflection. One in that case not merely conducts inquiry and learning without the use of the best instruments, but fails to understand the full meaning of knowledge.
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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.
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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.
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Mere physical growing up, mere mastery of the bare necessities of subsistence will not suffice to reproduce the life of the group. Deliberate effort and the taking of thoughtful pains are required.
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The bare fact that language consists of sounds which are mutually intelligible is enough of itself to show that its meaning depends upon connection with a shared experience.
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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
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As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure.
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