John Dewey Quotes

There is something out of gear about graded schools and all that. Memory is developed at the expense of what in general we are pleased to call thought and character.

Education is not filling the mind with a lot of facts. Perfecting the instrument and getting complete mastery of my own mind [is the ideal of education].

The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life-by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past-and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.

When a child is thriving, there is no reason to spend time assessing intelligences. But when a child is NOT thriving - in school or at home - that is the time to apply the lens of multiple intelligences and see whether one can find ways to help the child thrive in different environments.

School doesn't teach you much. School teaches you how to follow directions, that's what school is for.

Education today is a process of filling the mind with the contents of books, emptying the contents in the examination hall and returning empty-headed.

Profound question is how do you measure the non-skills component of what goes on in schools: values, curiosity, critical thinking, and so on. That's very tough. Maybe everything worthwhile can't be measured.

The process of schooling does not give birth to human beings - as education should but never will so long as it springs from the collective consciousness of our culture - but instead it teaches us to value abstract rewards at the expense of our autonomy, curiosity, interior lives, and time.

Reducing children to a test score is the worst form of identity theft we could commit in schools.

The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.

School doesn't teach you much. School teaches you how to follow directions, that's what school is for. And in life, not necessarily following directions helps you get certain places - because you go to the right school you can learn the right things, and you go to the wrong school you can learn the wrong things, so it just all depends. But school doesn't really teach you how to interact with people properly, you learn that outside of school.

Instead of encouraging the student to devote himself to his studies for the sake of studying, instead of encouraging in him a real love for his subject and for inquiry, he is encouraged to study for the sake of his personal career; he is led to acquire only such knowledge as is serviceable in getting him over the hurdles which he must clear for the sake of his advancement.

It was at home I learned the little I know. Schools always appeared to me like a prison, and never could I make up my mind to stay there, not even for four hours a day, when the sunshine was inviting, the sea smooth, and when it was joy to run about the cliffs in the free air, or to paddle in the water.

The mission of a great school is not to cram you with facts so that you can regurgitate them...This gives many boys such a distaste for learning that they never read another book as long as they live. No, the mission is to inspire you with a taste for scholarship - a taste which will last you all your life.

The problem in our society and in our schools is to inclulcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere--to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside. (89)

we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.

Schools should be places to learn, not to teach.

How many more years will our educators continue to lecture us on the evils of whipping children until they bring home high grades? Year after year we listen to these fellows tell us that it is not the grade that counts but the development of the child's personality. After the lecture they go back to all the best schools and reject our children because they have C averages.

What we're learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We're learning technologies, we're getting information. There's a curious reluctance on the part of faculties to indicate the life values of their subjects.

We send our kids off to school to major in labeling and think the ones who do it best deserve the highest grades.

School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught.

In the future, how we educate our children may prove to be more important than how much we educate them.

The school system is constructed to praise you if you get high grades. And if you get straight A's, you're the one that everyone puts forward, and they prognosticate that the straight-A person is the one most likely to succeed, because that's the way the school system is constructed and conceived.

What is desired is that the teacher ceased being a lecturer, satisfied with transmitting ready-made solutions. His role should rather be that of a mentor stimulating initiative and research.

Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity; fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience.