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We never educate directly, but indirectly by means of the environment. Whether we permit chance environments to do the work, or whether we design environments for the purpose makes a great difference.

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
Professor
Psychologist
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Burlington
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Dewey
Great
Environment
Work
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Indirectly
Never
Chance
Environments
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Permit
Whether
Educate
Means
Directly
Makes
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Mean
Design

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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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A person who is trained to consider his actions, to undertake them deliberately, is in so far forth disciplined. Add to this ability a power to endure in an intelligently chosen course in the face of distraction, confusion, and difficulty, and you have the essence of discipline.
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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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It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs.
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As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future society. The school is its chief agency for the accomplishment of this end.
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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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Like the soil, mind is fertilized while it lies fallow, until a new burst of bloom ensues.
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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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It science involves an intelligent and persistent endeavor to revise current beliefs so as to weed out what is erroneous, to add to their accuracy, and, above all, to give them such shape that the dependencies of the various facts upon one another may be as obvious as possible.
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We talk much more about individualism and liberty than our ancestors. But as so often happens, when anything becomes conscious, the consciousness is compensatory for absence in practice.
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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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For in spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an ‘ism becomes so involved in reaction against other ‘isms that it is unwittingly controlled by them. For it then forms its principles by reaction against them instead of by a comprehensive, constructive survey of actual needs, problems, and possibilities.
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What's in a question, you ask? Everything. It is evoking stimulating response or stultifying inquiry. It is, in essence, the very core of teaching.
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Choice is the declaration by self that a certain ideal of self shall be realized.
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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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Continuity of life means continual readaptation of the environment to the needs of living organisms.
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Only in education, never in the life of farmer, sailor, merchant, physician, or laboratory experimenter, does knowledge mean primarily a store of information aloof from doing.
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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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Experience alone cannot deliver to us necessary truths truths completely demonstrated by reason. Its conclusions are particular, not universal.
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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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