John Dewey Quotes

When the child goes out, it is the world itself that offers itself to him. Let us take the child out to show him real things instead of making objects which represent ideas and closing them up in cupboards.

Upon our children-how they are taught-rests the fate-or fortune-of tomorrow's world.

I do not believe there is a method better than Montessori for making children sensitive to the beauties of the world and awakening their curiosity regarding the secrets of life.

The first duty of the educator, whether he is involved with the newborn infant or the older child, is to recognize the human personality of the young being and respect it.

We do not believe in the educative power of words and commands alone, but seek cautiously, and almost without the child's knowing it, to guide his natural activity.

I hope that schools have changed since I was a little girl. My memory of the teaching of the public schools is that it showed the brutal incomprehension of children.

The teacher's task is not to talk, but to prepare and arrange a series of motives for cultural activity in a special environment made for the child.

I wanted to become a kindergarten teacher like my mother.

Teachers and parents who incline toward the authoritarian attitude are scornful of “frills.” They consider lecturing, memorization, recitation, and grading to be the basics, as they remember them from their own school days. They believe in withholding promotion form children who have not satisfactorily completed the year’s work in all subjects, despite the evidence that when children are made to repeat a grade, they do not do as well in the following years as similar children who were promoted. To authoritarians, education is not a means to help each child to mature but a series of hurdles over which everyone, of no matter what capability, must jump. A policy of withholding promotion means ignoring the fundamental and complex question of why the children failed and what needs to be done to correct that problem.

I really feel strongly that we don't need to dumb things down for children.

Education cannot be effective unless it helps a child to open up himself to life.

My contention is, first, that we should want more from our educational efforts than adequate academic achievement and, second, that we will not achieve even that meager success unless our children believe that they themselves are cared for and learn to care for others.

My father taught in the wise way which unfolds what lies in the child

The real world is where I get to educate and entertain myself. I go and touch the real world and touch real people. That's my way into movies.

I do think, where would kids be if it weren't for you and for the good pediatricians, and for the good parents? I passionately believe in sitting a child on your lap and tracing the lines of the book with your finger, and they can read before they know they can, if you bother enough. I did it with my kids, and they're doing it with their kids now.

Is not education the art of drawing out full manhood of the children under training?

Our children ... are not treated with sufficient respect as human beings, and yet from the moment they are born they have this right to respect. We keep them children for too long, their world separate from the real world of life.

The traditional educational theory is to the effect that the way to bring up children is to keep them innocent (i.e., believing in biological, political, and socioeconomic fairy tales) as long as possible ... that students should be given the best possible maps of the territories of experience in order that they may be prepared for life, is not as popular as might be assumed.

It is sentimentalism to assume that the teaching of life can always be fitted to the child's interests, just as it is empty formalism to force the child to parrot the formulas of adult society. Interests can be created and stimulated.

Knowing what we must do is neither fundamental nor difficult, but to comprehend which presumptions and vain prejudices we must rid ourselves of in order to be able to educate our children is most difficult.

Real education has to draw out the best from the boys and girls to be educated.

We must believe the things We teach our children

Home is a child's first and most important classroom.

I believe that the teacher's place and work in the school is to be interpreted from this same basis. The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences.

Ideal for the child and society in the best of times, Rudolf Steiner's brilliant process of education is critically needed and profoundly relevant now at this time of childhood crisis and educational breakdown. Waldorf Education nurtures the intellectual, psychological and spiritual unfolding of the child. The concerned parent and teacher will find a multitude of problems clearly addressed in this practical, artistic approach.