John Dewey was one of the most influential pedagogues, psychologists, and educational reformers of the twentieth century. His ideas shaped what we now call progressive education. I have read a number of his works including Experience and Education, Democracy and Education, and The School and Society, all of which still speak directly to the questions teachers face in classrooms today.
Dewey believed that education was not about filling students with facts but about teaching them how to think, how to solve problems, and how to participate in a democratic society. He was born in Burlington, Vermont in 1859 and spent decades at the University of Chicago and Columbia University putting his ideas into practice. His Laboratory School, founded in 1896, became the testing ground for everything he wrote about.
John Dewey Quotes
Here are some of the most popular John Dewey quotes:
“We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.” ― John Dewey
“Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.” ― John Dewey
“Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” ― John Dewey
“The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education.” ― John Dewey
“The only freedom that is of enduring importance is the freedom of intelligence, that is to say, freedom of observation and of judgment, exercised in behalf of purposes that are intrinsically worth while. The commonest mistake made about freedom is, I think, to identify it with freedom of movement, or, with the external or physical side of activity.” ― John Dewey
“Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.”― John Dewey
“The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning.”― John Dewey
“The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.”― John Dewey
“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.”― John Dewey
“The lesson for progressive education is that it requires in an urgent degree, a degree more pressing than was incumbent upon former innovators, a philosophy of education based upon a philosophy of experience. I remarked incidentally that the philosophy in question is, to paraphrase the saying of Lincoln about democracy, one of education of, by and for experience. No one of these words, of, by, or for, names anything which is self-evident. Each of them is a challenge to discover and put into operation a principle of order and organization which follows from understanding what educative experience signifies.” ― John Dewey
“If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.”― John Dewey
“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.” ― John Dewey
“We only think when confronted with a problem.” ― John Dewey
“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.”― John Dewey
“Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked.” ― John Dewey
“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. For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.” ― John Dewey
“Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication.” ― John Dewey
“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 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.” ― John Dewey
“Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.” ― John Dewey
“The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs. ”― John Dewey
“A problem well put is half solved.” ― John Dewey
“The only way to abolish war is to make peace seem heroic.” ― John Dewey
“Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy.” ― John Dewey
“Interest in the subject at hand is the best stimulus for learning.”― John Dewey
“The ultimate function of literature is to appreciate the world, sometimes indignantly, sometimes sorrowfully, but best of all to praise when it is luckily possible.” ― John Dewey
“There’s all the difference in the world between having something to say, and having to say something.” ― John Dewey
“Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.” ― John Dewey
“On the other hand, if an experience arouses curiosity, strengthens initiative, and sets up desires and purposes that are sufficiently intense to carry a person over dead places in the future, continuity works in a very different way. Every experience is a moving force.”― John Dewey
“Like the soil, mind is fertilized while it lies fallow, until a new burst of bloom ensues.” ― John Dewey
“I feel the gods are pretty dead, though I suppose I ought to know that however, to be somewhat more philosophical in the matter, if atheism means simply not being a theist, then of course I’m an atheist. ― John Dewey
Final thoughts
I hope you found these John Dewey quotes as thought-provoking as I did. If you have not yet read some of Dewey’s work, I highly recommend starting with Experience and Education and Democracy and Education. You will see his ideas about learner-centered pedagogy firsthand and find practical ways to bring them into your own teaching.
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