John Dewey
Fundamental modes of speech, the bulk of the vocabulary, are formed in the ordinary intercourse of life, carried on not as a set means of instruction but as a social necessity.Collection: Mean
Society exists through a process of transmission quite as much as biological life. This transmission occurs by means of communication of habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the older to the younger.Collection: Education
But progress in knowledge has made us aware of the superficiality of Plato's lumping of individuals and their original powers into a few sharply marked-off classes; it has taught us that original capacities are indefinitely numerous and variable. It is but the other side of this fact to say that in the degree in which society has become democratic, social organization means utilization of the specific and variable qualities of individuals, not stratification by classes.Collection: Plato
Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication.Collection: Communication
Some things which are remote in space and time from a living creature, especially a human creature, may form his environment even more truly than some of the things close to him.Collection: Space
That the great majority of those who leave school should have some idea of the kind of evidence required to substantiate given types of belief does not seem unreasonable. Nor is it absurd to expect that they should go forth with a lively interest in the ways in which knowledge is improved and a marked distaste for all conclusions reached in disharmony with the methods of scientific inquiry.Collection: School
Personality must be educated, and personality cannot be educated by confining its operations to technical and specialized things, or to the less important relationships of life. Full education comes only when there is a responsible share on the part of each person, in proportion to capacity, in shaping the aims and policies of the social groups to which he belongs.Collection: Important Relationships
Those engaged in directing the actions of others are always in danger of overlooking the importance of the sequential development of those they direct.Collection: Development
Communication of science as subject-matter has so far outrun in education the construction of a scientific habit of mind that to some extent the natural common sense of mankind has been interfered with to its detriment.Collection: Education
To have an idea of a thing is not just to get certain sensations from it. It is to be able to respond to the thing in view of its place in an inclusive scheme of action; it is to foresee the drift and probable consequence of the action of the thing upon us and of our action upon it.Collection: Views
While every social arrangement is educative in effect, the educative effect first becomes an important part of the purpose of the association in connection with the association of the older with the younger.Collection: Important
The Professor took the old practices and studied them, worked out their mechanical principles and then devised a graded scientific set of tricks, but is based on the elementary laws of mechanics, a study of the equilibrium of the human body, the ways in which it is disturbed, how to recover your own and take advantage of the shifting of the center of gravity of the other person. The first thing that is taught is how to fall down without being hurt, that alone is worth the price of admission and ought to be taught in all our gyms.Collection: Hurt
The first office of the social organ we call the school is to provide a simplified environment. It selects the features which are fairly fundamental and capable of being responded to by the young. Then it establishes a progressive order, using the factors first acquired as means of gaining insight into what is more complicated.Collection: School
Not only does social life demand teaching and learning for its own permanence, but the very process of living together educates. It enlarges and enlightens experience; it stimulates and enriches imagination; it creates responsibility for accuracy and vividness of statement and thought.Collection: Teaching
Schools should take part in the great work of construction and organization that will have to be done.Collection: Education
Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining is the aim of living.Collection: Goal
It has been petrified into a slavery of thought and sentiment, as intolerant superiority on the part of the few and an intolerable burden on the part of the many.Collection: Atheism
There is nothing left worth preserving in the notions of unseen powers, controlling human destiny, to which obedience and worship are due.Collection: Destiny
We sometimes talk as if "original research" were a peculiar prerogative of scientists or at least of advanced students. But all thinking is research, and all research is native, original, with him who carries it on, even if everybody else in the world already is sure of what he is still looking for.Collection: Thinking
Every living being needs continually renewed, and education is simply the chief process by which renewal occurs.Collection: Needs
Expertness of taste is at once the result and reward of constant exercise of thinking.Collection: Exercise
There is, I think, no point in the philosophy of progressive education which is sounder than its emphasis upon the importance of the participation of the learner in the formation of the purposes which direct his [sic] activities in the learning process, just as there is no defect in traditional education greater than its failure to secure the active cooperation of the pupil in construction of the purposes involved in his studying.Collection: Philosophy
The origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion or doubt.Collection: Education
The spontaneous power of the child, his demand for self-expression, can not by any possibility be suppressed.Collection: Children
Without initiation into the scientific spirit one is not in possession of the best tools which humanity has so far devised for effectively directed reflection. One in that case not merely conducts inquiry and learning without the use of the best instruments, but fails to understand the full meaning of knowledge.Collection: Knowledge
Democracy is a form of government only because it is a form of moral and spiritual association.Collection: Spiritual
I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child's powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Thinking
I believe that the school must represent present life - life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the play-ground.Collection: Children
As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure.Collection: Art
In undeveloped social groups, we find very little formal teaching and training. Savage groups mainly rely for instilling needed dispositions into the young upon the same sort of association which keeps adults loyal to their group. They have no special devices, material, or institutions for teaching save in connection with initiation ceremonies by which the youth are inducted into full social membership. For the most part, they depend upon children learning the customs of the adults, acquiring their emotional set and stock of ideas, by sharing in what the elders are doing.Collection: Children
Adults are naturally most conscious of directing the conduct of others when they are immediately aiming so to do. As a rule, they have such an aim consciously when they find themselves resisted; when others are doing things they do not wish them to do. But the more permanent and influential modes of control are those which operate from moment to moment continuously without such deliberate intention on our part.Collection: Wish
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.Collection: Weed
What nutrition and reproduction are to physiological life, education is to social life.Collection: Nutrition
Without the English, reason and philosophy would still be in the most despicable infancy in France.Collection: Philosophy
A book or a letter may institute a more intimate association between human beings separated thousands of miles from each other than exists between dwellers under the same roof.Collection: Book
In order to have a large number of values in common, all the members of the group must have an equable opportunity, to receive and to take from others. There must be a large variety of shared undertakings and experiences. Otherwise, the influences which educate some into masters, educates others into slaves.Collection: Opportunity
Education has no more serious responsibility than the making of adequate provision for enjoyment of recreative leisure not only for the sake of immediate health, but for the sake of its lasting effect upon the habits of the mind.Collection: Responsibility
It is difficult to connect general principles with such thoroughly concrete things as children.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Knowledge
Selection aims not only at simplifying but at weeding out what is undesirable.Collection: Weed
Continuity of life means continual readaptation of the environment to the needs of living organisms.Collection: Mean
The real purveyors of the news are artists, for artists are the ones who infuse fact with perception, emotion, and appreciation...We are beginning to realize that emotions and imagination are more potent in shaping public sentiment and opinion than information and reason.Collection: Appreciation
The importance of language in gaining knowledge is doubtless the chief cause of the common notion that knowledge may be passed directly from one to another. It almost seems as if all we have to do to convey an idea into the mind of another is to convey a sound into his ear. Thus imparting knowledge gets assimilated to a purely physical process.Collection: Ideas
As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.Collection: Long
In general, every stimulus directs activity. It does not simply excite it or stir it up, but directs it toward an object.Collection: Doe
It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs.Collection: Belief
When men think and believe in one set of symbols and act in ways which are contrary to their professed and conscious ideas, confusion and insincerity are bound to result.Collection: Believe
We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future.Collection: Prepared