It is a familiar and significant saying that a problem well put is half-solved.
Everything depends on the quality of the experience which is had.
Thinking is the accurate and deliberate instituting of connections between what is done and its consequences.
The phrase “think for one’s self” is a pleonasm. Unless one does it for one’s self, it isn’t thinking.
I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child’s powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself.
Giving and taking of orders modifies actions and results, but does not of itself effect a sharing of purposes, a communication of interests.
Forty years spent in wandering in a wilderness like that of the present is not a sad fate – unless one attempts to make himself believe that the wilderness is after all itself the promised land.
Education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction.
Any experience, however, trivial in its first appearance, is capable of assuming an indefinite richness of significance by extending its range of perceived connections.
All education which develops power to share effectively in social life is moral.
A society with too few independent thinkers is vulnerable to control by disturbed and opportunistic leaders. A society which wants to create and maintain a free and democratic social system must create responsible independence of thought among its young.
A society which is mobile, which is full of channels for the distribution of a change occurring anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated to personal initiative and adaptability.
A large part of the art of instruction lies in making the difficulty of new problems large enough to challenge thought, and small enough so that, in addition to the confusion naturally attending the novel elements, there shall be luminous familiar spots from which helpful suggestions may spring.
To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience.
To “learn from experience” is to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequence.
There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication.
A moral principle is not a command to act or to forbear acting in a given way: it is a tool for analyzing a special situation, the right or wrong being determined by the situation in its entirety, not by the rule as such.
Science is a systematic means of gaining reliable knowledge.
The real process of education should be the process of learning to think through the application of real problems.
The conduct of schools, based upon a new order of conception, is so much more difficult than is the management of schools which walk the beaten path.