John Dewey

Education is not preparation for life education is life itself.

— John Dewey

Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

— John Dewey

Every art communicates because it expresses. It enables us to share vividly and deeply in meanings… For communication is not announcing things… Communication is the process of creating participation, of making common what had been isolated and singular… the conveyance of meaning gives body and definiteness to the experience of the one who utters as well as to that of those who listen.

— John Dewey

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

— John Dewey

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

— John Dewey

Every one has experienced how learning an appropriate name for what was dim and vague cleared up and crystallized the whole matter. Some meaning seems distinct almost within reach, but is elusive; it refuses to condense into definite form; the attaching of a word somehow (just how, it is almost impossible to say) puts limits around the meaning, draws it out from the void, makes it stand out as an entity on its own account.

— John Dewey

Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.

— John Dewey

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.

— John Dewey

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.

— 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