John Dewey
We have already noticed the difference in the attitude of a spectator and of an agent or participant. The former is indifferent to what is going on; one result is just as good as another, since each is just something to look at. The latter is bound up with what is going on; its outcome makes a difference to him.Collection: Attitude
Creative thinking will improve as we relate the new fact to the old and all facts to each other.Collection: Thinking
Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates invention. It shocks us out of sheep-like passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving…conflict is a sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity.Collection: Memories
The educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end.Collection: Educational
Democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail.Collection: Mean
The phrase "think for one's self" is a pleonasm. Unless one does it for one's self, it isn't thinking.Collection: Thinking
Every serious-minded person knows that a large part of the effort required in moral discipline consists in the courage needed to acknowledge the unpleasant consequences of one's past and present acts.Collection: Past
Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying at the time.Collection: Study
Any genuine teaching will result, if successful, in someone's knowing how to bring about a better condition of things than existed earlier.Collection: Teacher
Hunger not to have, but to beCollection: Hunger
Schools should take an active part in directing social change, and share in the construction of a new social orderCollection: Education
The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education — or that the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth.Collection: Democracies Have
Each generation is inclined to educate its young so as to get along in the present world instead of with a view to the proper end of education: the promotion of the best possible realization of humanity as humanity. Parents educate their children so that they may get on; princes educate their subjects as instruments of their own purpose.Collection: Children
In brief, the function of knowledge is to make one experience freely available to other experiences.Collection: Function
In a world that has so largely engaged in a mad and often brutally harsh race for material gain by means of ruthless competition, it behooves the school to make ceaseless and intelligently organized effort to develop above all else the will for co-operation and the spirit which sees in every other individual one who has an equal right to share in the cultural and material fruits of collective human invention, industry, skill and knowledgeCollection: School
Confidence is directness and courage in meeting the facts of life.Collection: Life
The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education ... (and) the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth. Now this idea cannot be applied to all the members of a society except where intercourse of man with man is mutual, and except where there is adequate provision for the reconstruction of social habits and institutions by means of wide stimulation arising from equitably distributed interests. And this means a democratic society.Collection: Change
One of the saddest things about US education is that the wisdom of our most successful teachers is lost to the profession when they retire.Collection: Teacher
Schools have ignored the value of experience and chosen to teach by pouring in.Collection: School
Human nature exists and operates in an environment. And it is not 'in' that environment as coins are in a box, but as a plant is in the sunlight and soil.Collection: Coins
The result of the educative process is capacity for further education.Collection: Education
Purposeful action is thus the goal of all that is truly educative.Collection: Goal
The bad man is the man who no matter how good he has been is beginning to deteriorate, to grow less good. The good man is the man who no matter how morally unworthy he has been is moving to become better. Such a conception makes one severe in judging himself and humane in judging others.Collection: Honesty
Understanding one another means that objects, including sounds, have the same value for both with respect to carrying on a common pursuit.Collection: Mean
A narrow and moralistic view of morals is responsible for the failure to recognize that all the aims and values which are desirable in education are themselves moral. Discipline, natural development, culture, social efficiency, are moral traits - marks of a person who is a worthy member of that society which it is the business of education to further.Collection: Views
Unless our laboratory results are to give us artificialities, mere scientific curiosities, they must be subjected to interpretation by gradual re-approximation to conditions of life.Collection: Science
We rarely recognize the extent in which our conscious estimates of what is worth while and what is not, are due to standards of which we are not conscious at all.Collection: Conscious
The theory of the method of knowing which is advanced in these pages may be termed pragmatic. ... Only that which has been organized into our disposition so as to enable us to adapt the environment to our needs and adapt our aims and desires to the situation in which we live is really knowledge.Collection: Knowledge
An inanimate being is, of course, continuous with its surroundings; but the environing circumstances do not, save metaphorically, constitute an environment. For the inorganic being is not concerned in the influences which affect it.Collection: Influence
Plato defined a slave as one who accepts from another the purposes which control his conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legal sense. It is found wherever men are engaged in activity which is socially serviceable, but whose service they do not understand and have no personal interest in.Collection: Plato
The breakdown of Plato's philosophy is made apparent in the fact that he could not trust to gradual improvements in education to bring about a better society which should then improve education, and so on indefinitely. Correct education could not come into existence until an ideal state existed, and after that education would be devoted simply to its conservation. For the existence of this state he was obliged to trust to some happy accident by which philosophic wisdom should happen to coincide with possession of ruling power in the state.Collection: Plato
Since education is not a means to living, but is identical with the operation of living a life which is fruitful and inherently significant, the only ultimate value which can be set up is just the process of living itself. And this is not an end to which studies and activities are subordinate means; it is the whole of which they are ingredients.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Alertness
The scientific-religious conflict ultimately is a conflict between allegiance to this method and allegiance to even an irreducible minimum of belief so fixed in advance that it can never be modified.Collection: Religious
As some species die out, forms better adapted to utilize the obstacles against which they struggled in vain come into being.Collection: Obstacles
Religions have been universal in the sense that all the people we know anything about have had a religion. But the differences among them are so great and so shocking that any common element that can be extracted is meaningless.... The older apologists for Christianity seem to have been better advised than some modern ones in condemning every religion but one as an impostor, as at bottom some kind of demon worship or at any rate a superstitious figment.Collection: Differences
You can teach students to develop the ability to think reflectively, and you can help them understand what this means, but if they are not inclined to do so they never will.Collection: Mean
No system has ever as yet existed which did not in some form involve the exploitation of some human beings for the advantage of others.Collection: Nihilism
For one man who thanks God that he is not as other men there are a thousand to offer thanks that they are as other men, sufficiently as others are to escape attention.Collection: Men
The demand for liberty is a demand for power, either for possession of powers of action not already possessed or for retention and expansion of powers already possessed.Collection: Wisdom
Democracy is a way of life controlled by a working faith in the possibilities of human nature. . . . This faith may be enacted in statutes, but it is only on paper unless it is put in force in the attitudes which human beings display to one another in all the incidents and relations of daily life.Collection: Attitude
The primary ineluctable facts of the birth and death of each one of the constituent members in a social group determine the necessity of education.Collection: Facts
Traveling is a constant arriving, while arrival that precludes further traveling is most easily attained by going to sleep or dying.Collection: Sleep
If the eyes are open and there is light, seeing occurs; the stimulus is but a condition of the fulfillment of the proper function of the organ, not an outside interruption. To some extent, then, all direction or control is a guiding of activity to its own end; it is an assistance in doing fully what some organ is already tending to do.Collection: Eye
We cannot set up, out of our heads, something we regard as an ideal society.Collection: Ideal Society
If the members who compose a society lived on continuously, they might educate the new-born members, but it would be a task directed by personal interest rather than social need. Now it is a work of necessity.Collection: Tasks
When physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, contribute to the detection of concrete human woes and to the development of plans for remedying them and relieving the human estate, they become moral; they become part of the apparatus of moral inquiry or science? When the consciousness of science is fully impregnated with the consciousness of human value, the greatest dualism which now weighs humanity down, the split between the material, the mechanical and the scientific and the moral and ideal will be destroyed.Collection: Medicine
Historically the great movements for human liberation have always been movements to change institutions and not to preserve them intact. It follows from what has been said that there have been movements to bring about a changed distribution of power to do - and power to think and to express thought is a power to do- so that there would be a more balanced, a more equal, even, and equitable system of human liberties.Collection: Wisdom
We cannot think of ourselves save as to some extent social being. Hence, we cannot separate the idea of ourselves and our own good from our idea of others and their good.Collection: Thinking