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To savages it would seem preposterous to seek out a place where nothing but learning was going on in order that one might learn.

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
Going
Seem
Would
Learning
Learn
Order
Place
Seems
Preposterous
Might
Savages
Nothing
Seek

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Just because life signifies not bare passive existence (supposing there is such a thing), but a way of acting, environment or medium signifies what enters into this activity as a sustaining or frustrating condition.
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Intelligence is in constant process of forming, and its retention requires constant alertness in observing consequences, an open-minded will to learn, and courage in readjustment.
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Without the English, reason and philosophy would still be in the most despicable infancy in France.
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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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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.
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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.
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It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs.
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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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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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The acquisition however perfectly of skills is not an end in itself. They are things to be put to use as a contribution to a common and shared life.
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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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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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Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy.
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By reading the characteristic features of any man's castles in the air you can make a shrewd guess as to his underlying desires which are frustrated.
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The central problem of an education based upon experience is to select the kind of present experience that live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences.
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The intimation never wholly deserts us that there is, in the unformed activities of childhood and youth, the possibilities of a better life for the community as well as for individuals here and there. This dim sense is the ground of our abiding idealization of childhood.
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The reactionaries are in possession of force, in not only the army and police, but in the press and the schools
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It is obvious to any observer that in every western country the increase of importance of public schools has been at least coincident with the relaxation of older family ties.
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Old ideas give way slowly for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories. They are habits, predispositions, deeply ingrained attitudes of aversion and preference.
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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.
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