John Dewey
All genuine learning comes through experience.Collection: Genuine
The first step in freeing men from external chains was to emancipate them from the internal chains of false beliefs and ideals.Collection: Men
To the being of fully alive, the future is not ominous but a promise; it surrounds the present like a halo.Collection: Future
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.Collection: Community
We have lost confidence in reason because we have learned that man is chiefly a creature of habit and emotion.Collection: Men
Just as the senses require sensible objects to stimulate them, so our powers of observation, recollection, and imagination do not work spontaneously, but are set in motion by the demands set up by current social occupations.Collection: Imagination
It is not truly realistic or scientific to take short views, to sacrifice the future to immediate pressure, to ignore facts and forces that are disagreeable and to magnify the enduring quality of whatever falls in with immediate desire. It is false that the evils of the situation arise from absence of ideals; they spring from wrong ideals.Collection: Spring
Man's home is nature; his purposes and aims are dependent for execution upon natural conditions. Separated from such conditions they become empty dreams and idle indulgences of fancy.Collection: Dream
With respect to the development of powers devoted to coping with specific scientific and economic problems we may say that the child should be growing in manhood. With respect to sympathetic curiosity, unbiased responsiveness, and openness of mind, we may say that the adult should be growing in childlikeness.Collection: Children
As we have seen there is some kind of continuity in any case since every experience affects for better or worse the attitudes which help decide the quality of further experiences, by setting up certain preference and aversion, and making it easier or harder to act for this or that end.Collection: Attitude
We are a people of many races, many faiths, creeds, and religions. I do not think that the men who made the Constitution forbade the establishment of a State church because they were opposed to religion. They knew that the introduction of religious differences into American life would undermine the democratic foundations of this country. What holds for adults holds even more for children, sensitive and conscious of differences. I certainly hope that the Board of Education will think very, very seriously before it introduces this division and antagonism in our public schools.Collection: Country
When the child sees the parent looking for something, it is as natural for it also to look for the object and to give it over when it finds it, as it was, under other circumstances, to receive it. Multiply such an instance by the thousand details of daily intercourse, and one has a picture of the most permanent and enduring method of giving direction to the activities of the young.Collection: Children
One code prevails in the family; another, on the street; a third, in the workshop or store; a fourth, in the religious association. As a person passes from one of the environments to another, he is subjected to antagonistic pulls, and is in danger of being split into a being having different standards of judgment and emotion for different occasions. This danger imposes upon the school a steadying and integrating office.Collection: Religious
The routine of custom tends to deaden even scientific inquiry; it stands in the way of discovery and of the active scientific worker. For discovery and inquiry are synonymous as an occupation. Science is a pursuit, not a coming into possession of the immutable; new theories as points of view are more prized than discoveries that quantitatively increase the store on hand.Collection: Thinking
While [Plato] affirmed with emphasis that the place of the individual in society should not be determined by birth or wealth or any conventional status, but by his own nature as discovered in the process of education, he had no perception of the uniqueness of individuals. For him they fall by nature into classes, and into a very small number of classes at that.Collection: Plato
Forty years spent in wandering in a wilderness like that of the present is not a sad fate - unless one attempts to make himself believe that the wilderness is after all itself the promised land.Collection: Believe
As believers in democracy we have not only the right but the duty to question existing mechanisms of, say, suffrage and to inquire whether some functional organization would not serve to formulate and manifest public opinion better than the existing methods. It is not irrelevant to the point that a score of passages could be cited in which Jefferson refers to the American Government as an experiment.Collection: Government
If all meanings could be adequately expressed by words, the arts of painting and music would not exist.Collection: Art
No government by experts in which the masses do not have the chance to inform the experts as to their needs can be anything but an oligarchy managed in the interest of the few. And the enlightenment must proceed in ways which force the administrative specialists to take account of the needs. The world has suffered more from leaders and authorities than from the masses. The essential need ... is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion. That is the problem of the public.Collection: Government
Teachers are the agents through which knowledge and skills are communicated and rules of conduct enforced.Collection: Teacher
Everything depends on the quality of the experience which is had.Collection: Quality
The mere absorption of facts and truths is so exclusively an individual affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat.Collection: Selfishness
The bare fact that language consists of sounds which are mutually intelligible is enough of itself to show that its meaning depends upon connection with a shared experience.Collection: Sound
Even in a savage tribe, the achievements of adults are far beyond what the immature members would be capable of if left to themselves. With the growth of civilization, the gap between the original capacities of the immature and the standards and customs of the elders increases.Collection: Civilization
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.Collection: Butterfly
Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril.Collection: World
The young of human beings compare so poorly in original efficiency with the young of many of the lower animals, that even the powers needed for physical sustentation have to be acquired under tuition. How much more, then, is this the case with respect to all the technological, artistic, scientific, and moral achievements of humanity!Collection: Animal
To pull at a rope at which others happen to be pulling is not a shared or conjoint activity, unless the pulling is done with knowledge that others are pulling and for the sake of either helping or hindering what they are doing.Collection: Sake
What, after all, is the public under present conditions? What are the reasons for its eclipse? What hinders it from finding and identifying itself? By what means shall its inchoate and amorphous estate be organized into effective political action relevant to present social needs and opportunities? What has happened to the public in the century and a half since the theory of political democracy was urged with such assurance and hope?Collection: Mean
A moral principle is not a command to act or to forbear acting in a given way: it is a tool for analyzing a special situation, the right or wrong being determined by the situation in its entirety, not by the rule as such.Collection: Special
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.Collection: Running
Faith in the possibilities of continued and rigorous inquiry does not limit access to truth to any channel or scheme of things. It does not first say that truth is universal and then add there is but one road to it.Collection: Doe
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.Collection: Mean
The method of democracy is to bring conflicts out into the open where their special claims can be seen and appraised, where they can be discussed and judged.Collection: Democracy
What accumulated knowledge exists in low grade societies is at least put into practice; it is transmuted into character; it exists with the depth of meaning that attaches to its coming within urgent daily interests.Collection: Character
I know that there are many persons to whom it seems derogatory to link a body of philosophic ideas to the social life and cultureof their epoch. They seem to accept a dogma of immaculate conception of philosophical systems.Collection: Philosophical
The aim of education is growth: the aim of growth is more growthCollection: Education
Intellectually religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it.Collection: Religious
Education as growth or maturity should be an ever-present process.Collection: Maturity
Any education given by a group tends to socialize its members, but the quality and the value of the socialization depends upon the habits and aims of the group. Hence, once more, the need of a measure for the worth of any given mode of social life.Collection: Quality
Mere physical growing up, mere mastery of the bare necessities of subsistence will not suffice to reproduce the life of the group. Deliberate effort and the taking of thoughtful pains are required.Collection: Growing Up
Beings who are born not only unaware of, but quite indifferent to, the aims and habits of the social group have to be rendered cognizant of them and actively interested. Education, and education alone, spans the gap.Collection: Groups
Even when a person is frightened by threats into doing something, the threats work only because the person has an instinct of fear. If he has not, or if, though having it, it is under his own control, the threat has no more influence upon him than light has in causing a person to see who has no eyes.Collection: Eye
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. Self-conceit often regards it as a sign of weakness to admit that a belief to which we have once committed ourselves is wrong. We get so identified with an idea that it is literally a pet notion and we rise to its defense and stop our eyes and ears to anything different.Collection: Inspirational
Social engaged intellectuals must accept reality as they found it and shape it toward positive social goals, not stand aside in self-righteous isolation.Collection: Reality
As a matter of fact, a modern society is many societies more or less loosely connected. Each household with its immediate extension of friends makes a society; the village or street group of playmates is a community; each business group, each club, is another.Collection: Community
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.Collection: Acting
A being whose activities are associated with others has a social environment. What he does and what he can do depend upon the expectations, demands, approvals, and condemnations of others.Collection: Expectations
Cooperation called fraternity in the classic French formula is as much a part of the democratic ideal as is personal initiative. That cultural conditions were allowed to develop (markedly so in the economic phase) which subordinated cooperativeness to liberty and equality serves to explain the decline in the two latter.Collection: Democratic Ideals