John Dewey
Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home.Collection: Environmental
To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.Collection: Happiness
Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situations of experience its own full and unique meaning.Collection: Happiness
The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.Collection: Good
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.Collection: Science
Time and memory are true artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart's desire.Collection: Time
Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.Collection: Future
Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.Collection: Motivational
Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.Collection: Life
To me faith means not worrying.Collection: Faith
Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.Collection: Failure
The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative.Collection: Experience
No man's credit is as good as his money.Collection: Money
Man is not logical and his intellectual history is a record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to what he can in his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical basis.Collection: History
The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.
Man lives in a world of surmise, of mystery, of uncertainties.
Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.
The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs.
Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy.
Just as a flower which seems beautiful and has color but no perfume, so are the fruitless words of the man who speaks them but does them not.
Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live.
We only think when we are confronted with problems.
Luck, bad if not good, will always be with us. But it has a way of favoring the intelligent and showing its back to the stupid.
By object is meant some element in the complex whole that is defined in abstraction from the whole of which it is a distinction.
One lives with so many bad deeds on one's conscience and some good intentions in one's heart.
Education is not an affair of 'telling' and being told, but an active and constructive process.Collection: Affair
Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.Collection: Education
We do not learn from experience...we learn from reflecting on experience.Collection: Mistake
You cannot teach today the same way you did yesterday to prepare students for tomorrow.Collection: Yesterday
A society with too few independent thinkers is vulnerable to control by disturbed and opportunistic leaders. A society which wants to create and maintain a free and democratic social system must create responsible independence of thought among its young.Collection: Independent
The real process of education should be the process of learning to think through the application of real problems.Collection: Real
The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning.Collection: Attitude
All genuine education comes about through experience.Collection: Genuine
If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.Collection: Teacher
The interaction of knowledge and skills with experience is key to learning.Collection: Keys
All learning begins when our comfortable ideas turn out to be inadequate.Collection: Teaching
I believe that the teacher's place and work in the school is to be interpreted from this same basis. The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences.Collection: Teacher
The school must be "a genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons".Collection: School
I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.Collection: Educational
The conception of education as a social process and function has no definite meaning until we define the kind of society we have in mind.Collection: Mind
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.Collection: Mean
Art is not the possession of the few who are recognized writers, painters, musicians; it is the authentic expression of any and all individuality.Collection: Art
How can the child learn to be a free and responsible citizen when the teacher is bound?Collection: Teacher
The need for growth, for development, for change, is fundamental to life.Collection: Growth
The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to feel important.Collection: Important
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.Collection: Teaching
There is no god and there is no soul. Hence, there is no need for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable truth is dead and buried. There is no room for fixed and natural law or permanent moral absolutes.Collection: Education
Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.Collection: Democracies Have
Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living. Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live. Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.Collection: Inspirational Life
Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes, of likes and dislikes, may be and often is much more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history that is learned.Collection: Attitude