John Dewey Quotes on Knowledge
Dewey's instrumentalism reframes knowledge not as the spectator's correspondence to a pre-given reality but as the active inquiry by which living organisms — including human beings — solve the practical problems thrown up by the disturbance of habitual interaction with their environment. The Quest for Certainty (1929), Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), and the broader Deweyan corpus develop the framework as an alternative to both classical empiricism and the rationalist tradition, with continuity (between mind and world, science and ordinary life, fact and value) as its principal constructive thesis. The democratic and educational writings — Democracy and Education, The Public and Its Problems — extend the same instrumentalism to the analysis of human social life.
Quotes
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Attributed to John Dewey:
“Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”
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Attributed to John Dewey:
“Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.”
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Attributed to John Dewey:
“We do not learn from experience; we learn from reflecting on experience.”
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Attributed to John Dewey:
“The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs.”
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“Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.”
The Need of an Industrial Education in an Industrial Democracy,” Manual Training and Vocational Education17 (1916); also Middle Works 10: 137-143. -
“Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.”
The Quest for Certainty (1929), Ch. XI -
“The Need of an Industrial Education in an Industrial Democracy,” Manual Training and Vocational Education17 (1916); also Middle Works 10: 137-143.”
It is no accident that all democracies have put a high estimate upon education; that schooling has been their first care and enduring charge. Only through education can equality of opportunity be anything more than a phrase. Accidental inequalities of birth, wealth, and learning are always tending to restrict the opportunities of some as compared with those of others. Only free and continued educa -
“The Quest for Certainty (1929), Ch. XI”
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. -
“Democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail.”
Democracy and Human Nature , Freedom and Culture (1939)