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

John Dewey

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John Dewey
Age: 92 †
Born: 1859
Born: October 20
Died: 1952
Died: June 1
Aesthetician
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Philosopher
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Psychologist
Sociologist
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Trade Unionist
Burlington
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Dewey
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Educational
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Fundamentals

More quotes by 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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Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.
John Dewey
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Like the soil, mind is fertilized while it lies fallow, until a new burst of bloom ensues.
John Dewey
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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
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Modern life means democracy, democracy means freeing intelligence for independent effectivenessthe emancipation of mind as an individual organ to do its own work. We naturally associate democracy, to be sure, with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of thought behind it is only chaos.
John Dewey
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The educational process has no end beyond itself it is its own end.
John Dewey
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Even dogs and horses have their actions modified by association with human beings they form different habits because human beings are concerned with what they do.
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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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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Selection aims not only at simplifying but at weeding out what is undesirable.
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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That education is not an affair of telling and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a principle almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in theory. Is not this deplorable situation due to the fact that the doctrine is itself merely told? It is preached it is lectured it is written about.
John Dewey
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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
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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
John Dewey
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The devotion of democracy to education is a familiar fact. . . . [A] government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless those who elect . . . their governors are educated.
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.
John Dewey
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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?
John Dewey
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By various agencies, unintentional and designed, a society transforms uninitiated and seemingly alien beings into robust trustees of its own resources and ideals. Education is thus a fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating, process.
John Dewey
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But the individual butterfly or earthquake remains just the unique existence which it is. We forget in explaining its occurrence that it is only the occurrence that is explained, not the thing itself.
John Dewey
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Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy.
John Dewey