Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.
The goal of education is to enable individuals to continue their education.
Faith in the possibilities of continued and rigorous inquiry does not limit access to truth to any channel or scheme of things. It does not first say that truth is universal and then add there is but one road to it.
Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.
To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.
Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked.
A single course of studies for all progressive schools is out of the question it would mean abandoning the fundamental principle of connection with life-experiences.
Strait-jacket and chain-gang procedures had to be done away with if there was to a chance for growth of individuals in the intellectual springs of freedom without which there is no assurance of genuine and continued normal growth.
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry.
Like the soil, mind is fertilized while it lies fallow, until a new burst of bloom ensues.
Nothing is more tragic than failure to discover one’s true business in life, or to find that one has drifted or been forced by circumstance into an uncongenial calling.
I feel the gods are pretty dead, though I suppose I ought to know that however, to be somewhat more philosophical in the matter, if atheism means simply not being a theist, then of course I’m an atheist.[Letter to Max Otto]
Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes, of likes and dislikes, may be and often is much more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history that is learned.
The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning.
As long as politics is the shadow of big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.
We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.
Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful.
The two limits of every unit of thinking are a perplexed, troubled, or confused situation at the beginning, and a cleared up, unified, resolved situation at the close.
We only think when we are confronted with a problem.
Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.
Confidence … is directness and courage in meeting the facts of life.
Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.
To find out what one is fitted to do and to secure an opportunity to do it is the key to happiness.
To find out what one is fitted to do and to secure an opportunity to do it is the key to happiness.
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
Confidence … is directness and courage in meeting the facts of life.
Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.
To the being of fully alive the future is not ominous but a promise it surrounds the present like a halo.
We only think when we are confronted with a problem.
To find out what one is fitted to do and to secure an opportunity to do it is the key to happiness.
Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home.
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situations of experience its own full and unique meaning.
Time and memory are true artists they remould reality nearer to the heart’s desire.
Man is not logical and his intellectual history is a record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to what he can in his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical basis.
The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative.
Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.
Education is not preparation for life education is life itself.
Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.