John Dewey Teacher Quotations

If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.

I believe that the teacher's place and work in the school is to be interpreted from this same basis. The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences.

How can the child learn to be a free and responsible citizen when the teacher is bound?

The origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion or doubt.

One can think effectively only when one is willing to endure suspense and to undergo the trouble of searching.

One might as well say he has sold when no one has bought as to say he has taught when no one has learned.

That education is not an affair of "telling" and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a principle almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in theory. Is not this deplorable situation due to the fact that the doctrine is itself merely told? It is preached; it is lectured; it is written about.

Teaching can be compared to selling commodities. No one can sell unless someone buys ... yet there are teachers who think they have done a good day's teaching irrespective of what the pupils have learned.

I believe that in this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.

Teachers are the agents through which knowledge and skills are communicated and rules of conduct enforced.

Every teacher should realize the dignity of his calling.

The development occurs through reciprocal give-and-take, the teacher taking but not being afraid also to give.

Too rarely is the individual teacher so free from the dictation of authoritative supervisor, textbook on methods, prescribed course of study, etc., that he can let his mind come to close quarters with the pupil's mind and the subject matter.

Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth. In this way, the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer-in of the true Kingdom of God.

The teacher loses the position of external boss or dictator but takes on that of leader of group activities

Any genuine teaching will result, if successful, in someone's knowing how to bring about a better condition of things than existed earlier.

One of the saddest things about US education is that the wisdom of our most successful teachers is lost to the profession when they retire.