Top 280 John Dewey Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”

— John Dewey

2. “All genuine learning comes through experience.”

— John Dewey

3. “The interaction of knowledge and skills with experience is key to learning.”

— John Dewey

4. “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

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5. “You cannot teach today the same way you did yesterday to prepare students for tomorrow.”

— John Dewey

6. “A problem well-defined is a problem half solved.”

— John Dewey

7. “The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning.”

— John Dewey

8. “Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.”

— John Dewey

9. “The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to feel important.”

— John Dewey

10. “I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.”

— John Dewey

11. “Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.”

— John Dewey

12. “The goal of education is to enable individuals to continue their education.”

— John Dewey

13. “To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.”

— John Dewey

14. “The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.”

— John Dewey

15. “Education is not an affair of ‘telling’ and being told, but an active and constructive process.”

— John Dewey

16. “The aim of education is growth: the aim of growth is more growth.”

— John Dewey

17. “All learning begins when our comfortable ideas turn out to be inadequate.”

— John Dewey

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

— John Dewey

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

— John Dewey

20. “The school must be “a genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons”.”

— John Dewey

21. “What’s in a question, you ask? Everything. It is evoking stimulating response or stultifying inquiry. It is, in essence, the very core of teaching.”

— John Dewey

22. “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that that must community want for all it’s children.”

— John Dewey

23. “The real process of education should be the process of learning to think through the application of real problems.”

— John Dewey

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

— John Dewey

25. “Inference is always an invasion of the unknown, a leap from the known.”

— John Dewey

26. “It is a familiar and significant saying that a problem well put is half-solved.”

— John Dewey

27. “Always make the other person feel important.”

— John Dewey

28. “Every teacher should realize the dignity of his calling.”

— John Dewey

29. “Art is not the possession of the few who are recognized writers, painters, musicians; it is the authentic expression of any and all individuality.”

— John Dewey

30. “The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.”

— John Dewey

31. “The origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion or doubt.”

— John Dewey

32. “Creative thinking will improve as we relate the new fact to the old and all facts to each other.”

— John Dewey

33. “Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining is the aim of living.”

— John Dewey

34. “Balance is balancing.”

— John Dewey

35. “We only think when we are confronted with problems.”

— John Dewey

36. “Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful.”

— John Dewey

37. “Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live.”

— John Dewey

38. “Art is the most effective mode of communications that exists.”

— John Dewey

39. “One might as well say he has sold when no one has bought as to say he has taught when no one has learned.”

— John Dewey

40. “Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.”

— John Dewey

41. “One can think effectively only when one is willing to endure suspense and to undergo the trouble of searching.”

— John Dewey

42. “There is no god and there is no soul. Hence, there is no need for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable truth is dead and buried. There is no room for fixed and natural law or permanent moral absolutes.”

— John Dewey

43. “There’s all the difference in the world between having something to say, and having to say something.”

— John Dewey

44. “Vocational training is the training of animals or slaves. It fits them to become cogs in the industrial machine. Free men need liberal education to prepare them to make a good use of their freedom.”

— John Dewey

45. “The conception of education as a social process and function has no definite meaning until we define the kind of society we have in mind.”

— John Dewey

46. “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.”

— John Dewey

47. “Education, in its broadest sense, is the means of this social continuity of life.”

— John Dewey

48. “Things gain meaning by being used in a shared experience or joint action.”

— John Dewey

49. “The spontaneous power of the child, his demand for self-expression, can not by any possibility be suppressed.”

— John Dewey

50. “Teachers are the agents through which knowledge and skills are communicated and rules of conduct enforced.”

— John Dewey