John Dewey (1859–1952) was an American philosopher, educationist, and social critic. The doyen of the progressive education movement, Dewey is arguably the most renowned and influential American philosopher of education.
Born in Burlington, Vermont, Dewey was educated at the University of Vermont. He worked at the universities of Michigan and Chicago before moving in 1904 to Columbia in New York, where he served as a professor of philosophy until his retirement in 1930. During the first half of the 20th century, he was America’s most famous exponent of a pragmatic philosophy that celebrated the traditional values of democracy and the efficacy of reason and universal education.
Working in the pragmatic tradition of William James and C. S. Peirce, he evolved the educational theory that children would train best by “learning by directed living,” which combined learning with concrete activity. His system convinced many American educationalists that it was necessary to develop less structured, less teacher-centered, and more practical schools.
Dewey presented his mature philosophical views in two late works, The Quest for Certainty (1929) and Experience and Nature (1935.)
Dewey was a prolific writer and published over 300 works including, Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics (1891,) Democracy and Education (1916,) Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920,) Art as Experience (1934,) and Freedom and Culture (1939.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by John Dewey
Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes. Genuine ignorance is profitable because it is likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open-mindedness; whereas ability to repeat catch-phrases, cant terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with varnish waterproof to new ideas.
—John Dewey
Topics: Mistakes, Failures, Failure, Ignorance, Success & Failure, Thinking
Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live.
—John Dewey
Topics: Goals
Search for a single, inclusive good is doomed to failure. Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situation of experience its own full and unique meaning.
—John Dewey
Topics: Happiness
For in spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an ‘ism becomes so involved in reaction against other ‘isms that it is unwittingly controlled by them. For it then forms its principles by reaction against them instead of by a comprehensive, constructive survey of actual needs, problems, and possibilities.
—John Dewey
Topics: Education
As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure
—John Dewey
Topics: Civilization
The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.
—John Dewey
Topics: Choice, Action
When men think and believe in one set of symbols and act in ways which are contrary to their professed and conscious ideas, confusion and insincerity are bound to result.
—John Dewey
Topics: Hypocrisy
The future of religion is connected with the possibility of developing a faith in the possibilities of human experience and human relationships that will create a vital sense of the solidarity of human interests and inspire action to make that sense a reality.
—John Dewey
Topics: Religion
Time and memory are true artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart’s desire.
—John Dewey
Topics: Reality
Luck, bad if not good, will always be with us. But it has a way of favoring the intelligent and showing its back to the stupid.
—John Dewey
Topics: Luck
A problem defined is half solved.
—John Dewey
Topics: Creativity
The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.
—John Dewey
Topics: Progress, Self-improvement
The devotion of democracy to education is a familiar fact. The superficial explanation is that a government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless those who elect and who obey their governors are educated. Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created only by education.
—John Dewey
Topics: Education
Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.
—John Dewey
Topics: Success, Goal, Change, Goals
The outstanding problem of the Public is discovery and identification of itself
—John Dewey
Topics: Problems
The religious is any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of its general and enduring value.
—John Dewey
Topics: Religion
Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is, not a preparation for life; education is life itself.
—John Dewey
Topics: Education
What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child that must the community want for all its children.
—John Dewey
Topics: Children
Since changes are going on anyway, the great thing is to learn enough about them so that we will be able to lay hold of them and turn them in the direction of our desires. Conditions and events are neither to be fled from nor passively acquiesced in; they are to be utilized and directed.
—John Dewey
Topics: Change
The good society was, like the good self, a diverse yet harmonious, growing yet unified whole, a fully participatory democracy in which the powers and capacities of the individuals that comprised it were harmonized by their cooperative activities into a community that permitted the full and free expression of individuality.
—John Dewey
Topics: Society
Modern life means democracy, democracy means freeing intelligence for independent effectivenessthe emancipation of mind as an individual organ to do its own work. We naturally associate democracy, to be sure, with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of thought behind it is only chaos.
—John Dewey
Creative thinking will improve as we relate the new fact to the old and all facts to each other.
—John Dewey
Topics: Facts
There is all the difference in the world between having something to say and having to say something.
—John Dewey
Topics: Communication
Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control environment.
—John Dewey
Topics: Nature
To the being of fully alive, the future is not ominous but a promise; it surrounds the present like a halo.
—John Dewey
Topics: Tomorrow, The Future
Confidence … is directness and courage in meeting the facts of life.
—John Dewey
Topics: Life, Courage, Confidence, Assurance
To me faith means not worrying.
—John Dewey
Topics: Belief, Worry, Faith
A person who is trained to consider his actions, to undertake them deliberately, is in so far forth disciplined. Add to this ability a power to endure in an intelligently chosen course in the face of distraction, confusion, and difficulty, and you have the essence of discipline.
—John Dewey
Topics: Discipline
The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs. Self-conceit often regards it as a sign of weakness to admit that a belief to which we have once committed ourselves is wrong. We get so identified with an idea that it is literally a “pet” notion and we rise to its defense and stop our eyes and ears to anything different.
—John Dewey
Topics: Habits, Choice
Faith was once almost universally thought to be acceptance of a definite body of intellectual propositions, acceptance being based upon authority—preferably that of revelation from on high. … Of late there has developed an other conception of faith. This is sug gested by the words of an American thinker: “Faith is tendency toward action.” According to such a view, faith is the matrix of formulated creeds and the inspiration of endeavor… . Faith in its newer sense signifies that experience itself is the sole ultimate authority.
—John Dewey
Topics: Religion
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
William James American Philosopher
Charles Sanders Peirce American Philosopher
Mortimer J. Adler American Philosopher, Educator
George Santayana Spanish-American Poet, Philosopher
Eric Hoffer American Philosopher
Carl Rogers American Psychologist
Nicholas Murray Butler American Philosopher
Will Durant American Historian
Jean-Jacques Rousseau French Philosopher
Robert Maynard Hutchins American Educator