John Dewey Quotes

Education is the key. But it's the kind of education that we teach that is the key. We don't have it.

One of the tragedies of our educational system is that we've taken this incredibly interesting subject - how the universe works - and made it boring.

The role of the educator is one of tranquil possession of certitude in regard to the teaching of not only contents but also of 'correct thinking.'

I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals.

There is an attempt to deskill teaches by removing matters of conception from implementation. Teachers are no longer asked to be creative, to think critically, or to be creative. On the contrary, they have been reduced to the keeper of methods, implementers of an audit culture, and removed from assuming autonomy in their classrooms.

As we strive to teach others we must have the humility to acknowledge that we too still have much to learn.

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

[The error in the teaching of mathematics is that] mathematics is expected either to be immediately attractive to students on its own merits or to be accepted by students solely on the basis of the teacher's assurance that it will be helpful in later life. [And yet,] mathematlcs is the key to understanding and mastering our physical, social and biological worlds.

The most effective teachers embody the teaching they give out.

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.

What we need is a gigantic, messy community conversation about what is teaching and learning for the 21st century. We need to engage communities.

When someone is taught the joy of learning, it becomes a life-long process that never stops, a process that creates a logical individual. That is the challenge and joy of teaching.

My teaching exists in a different part of my brain. However, I am lucky enough to teach very smart graduate students.

Repetition is the mother of pedagogy

When you teach, you learn.

Are our ways of teaching students to ask some questions always correlative with our ways of teaching them not to ask - indeed, to be unconscious of - others? Does the educational system exist in order to promulgate knowledge, or is its main function rather to universalize a society’s tacit agreement about what it has decided it does not and cannot know?

If I'm teaching deep things, then I view it as important to make people feel like they're learning deep things, because otherwise, they will still have a hole in their mind for "deep truths" that needs filling, and they will go off and fill their heads with complete nonsense that has been written in a more satisfying style.

It is better to teach a few things perfectly than many things indifferently...

Nothing is better for my playing than teaching because when you teach, you have to think and you have to listen what other people do. And then all of a sudden, you play yourself and then you say, my goodness, I don't need a teacher. I'm my own teacher. Then I can react to what I'm doing immediately. It really improves.

You can lead a boy to college, but you cannot make him think.

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

Education is preeminently a matter of quality, not amount.

As all born teachers, he was primarily a student.

Teaching is not the mere imparting of information but the cultivation of an inquiring mind which will penetrate into the question of what is religion and not merely accept the established religions, churches, and rituals.

A teacher is never too smart to learn from his pupils.