John Dewey Quotes

The things taught in schools & colleges are not an education but the means of education.

There is no better way to learn than to teach.

… after some hundreds of years of experience we think that we have learned … how to teach what is known. But now with the undeniable upsurge of scientific research, we cannot continue to rely on the mere fact that we have learned how to teach what is known. We must learn to teach the best attitude to what is not yet known.

As one who has taught mathematics at all levels of university instruction, I am well aware of the negative attitude of so many students toward the subject. There are many reasons for this, one of them no doubt being the esoteric, dry way in which we teach the subject. We tend to overwhelm our students with formulas, definitions, theorems, and proofs, but we seldom mention the historical evolution of these facts, leaving the impression that these facts were handed to us, like the Ten Commandments, by some divine authority.

Teachers may think they are stuffing minds, but all they are ever affecting is the memory. Nothing can ever be forced into anyone's mind except by brainwashing, which is the very opposite of genuine teaching.

We worship education but hate learning.

Why is it that when we had rotary phones, when we were having folks being crippled by polio, that we were teaching the same way then that we're doing right now?

People have now a-days got a strange opinion that every thing should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do as much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken.

Never mind the cream; it will always rise to the top. It's the skim milk that needs good teachers.

It is clearly absurd to limit the term 'education' to a person's formal schooling.

The problem with education is school.

The boy's got a lot to learn and I've got a lot to teach.

A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species.

Education is only second to nature.

As human beings, we are always torn between individual freedom and the ability of choose our actions, and the need for at least enough social structure so that anarchy, chaos, and warlordery - or the war of all against all - can be avoided.

If you see a child with autistic-like behaviors at age two and three, the worst thing you can do is just let them sit and watch TV all day. That's just the worst thing you can do. You need to have a teacher working with that child, working on teaching language, working on social interaction, working on getting them interested in different things, and keeping their brain connected to the world.

I began to understand with a terrible sureness that we teach what we need to learn and write what we need to know.

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't. It's knowing where to go to find out what you need to know, and it's knowing how to use the information once you get it.

The very concept of universal formal education is a product (and a relatively late product) of the capitalist world-economy.

By instructing students how to learn, unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education.

To teach is part of the very fabric of learning.

Teaching is only demonstrating that it is possible. Learning is making it possible for yourself.

All teaching and all intellectual learning come about from already existing knowledge.

The regular course of studies, the years of academical and professional education, have not yielded me better facts than some idle books under the bench at the Latin School.

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.