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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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John Dewey
Age: 92 †
Born: 1859
Born: October 20
Died: 1952
Died: June 1
Aesthetician
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Burlington
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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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Talk of democracy has little content when big business rules the life of the country through its control of the means of production, exchange, the press and other means of publicity, propaganda and communication.
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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.
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Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid it has been liquefied. it is actively moving in all the currents of society 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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While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing.
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I do not think that any thorough-going modification of college curriculum would be possible without a modification of the methods of instruction.
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No man's credit is as good as his money.
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Everything which bars freedom and fullness of communication sets up barriers that divide human beings into sets and cliques, into antagonistic sects and factions, and thereby undermines the democratic way of life.
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Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. What are now working conceptions, employed as a matter of course because they have withstood the tests of experiment and have emerged triumphant, were once speculative hypotheses.
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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.
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A child may have to be snatched with roughness away from a fire so that he shall not be burnt.
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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.
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Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy.
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When reality is sought for at large, it is without intellectual import at most the term carries the connotation of an agreeableemotional state.
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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.
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A child might be made to bow every time he met a certain person by pressure on his neck muscles, and bowing would finally become automatic. It would not, however, be an act of recognition or deference on his part, till he did it with a certain end in view - as having a certain meaning.
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The school has the function of coordinating within the disposition of each individual the diverse influences of the various social environments into which he enters.
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Communication is a process of sharing experience till it becomes a common possession. It modifies the disposition of both the parties who partake in it.
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The phrase think for one's self is a pleonasm. Unless one does it for one's self, it isn't thinking.
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