John Dewey
Democracy and Education is a work authored by John Dewey, one of several books through which he engaged with questions of education, society, and public life.
Dewey was born on October 20, 1859, in Burlington, Vermont. He attended Burlington High School there before going on to the University of Vermont, and he later pursued graduate study at Johns Hopkins University. Those years of formal education shaped a thinker who worked across several fields at once. He was a philosopher, psychologist, sociologist, aesthetician, and pedagogue, and he put those overlapping roles to work as a professor, teacher, and writer throughout his life. He was also a trade unionist and a citizen of the United States who wrote in English.
His output reflected that range of interests. Alongside Democracy and Education, he authored The School and Society, Experience and Education, The Public and Its Problems, and Art as Experience — a body of written work that moved across education, social questions, and aesthetics. The reach of that work drew recognition from institutions outside the United States as well: Dewey received an honorary doctorate from the University of Paris and another from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in addition to the Carus Lectures award.
Dewey died on June 1, 1952, in New York City, at the age of ninety-two. Among the works he left behind, Art as Experience stands as one of the titles that carried his engagement with aesthetics into book form, a concrete marker of how far his writing ranged beyond any single discipline.
Quotes by John Dewey
John Dewey's insights on:
Genuine ignorance is profitable because it is likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open-mindedness.
For the highest task of intelligence is to grasp and recognize genuine opportunity, possibility.
The chief intellectual characteristic of the present age is its despair of any constructive philosophy.
Recreation, as the word indicates, is recuperation of energy. No demand of human nature is more urgent or less to be escaped.
Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates to invention. It shocks us out of sheeplike passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving.
The theory of the method of knowing which is advanced in these pages may be termed pragmatic... Only that which has been organized into our disposition so as to enable us to adapt the environment to our needs and adapt our aims and desires to the situation in which we live is really knowledge.
Skeptics are generally ready to believe anything, provided is it only sufficiently improbable; it is at matters of fact that such people stumble.
