The central problem of an education based upon experience is to select the kind of present experience that live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences.
Interpretation
Education should be based on experiences that positively influence future learning.
John Dewey emphasizes that the essence of education lies in choosing experiences that will not only enrich the present but will also foster growth and creativity in future experiences. This highlights the importance of meaningful learning that connects with a learner's life and fosters ongoing development.
In practice
In a classroom discussion about teaching methods, this quote can illustrate the importance of experiential learning.
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.
Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.
It science involves an intelligent and persistent endeavor to revise current beliefs so as to weed out what is erroneous, to add to their accuracy, and, above all, to give them such shape that the dependencies of the various facts upon one another may be as obvious as possible.
For in spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an βism becomes so involved in reaction against other βisms that it is unwittingly controlled by them. For it then forms its principles by reaction against them instead of by a comprehensive, constructive survey of actual needs, problems, and possibilities.
Any genuine teaching will result, if successful, in someone's knowing how to bring about a better condition of things than existed earlier.
The reactionaries are in possession of force, in not only the army and police, but in the press and the schools
Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.
In nine months, a group of children left alone with a computer in any language will reach the same standard as an office secretary in the West.
I feel very strongly indeed that a Cambridge education for our scientists should include some contact with the humanistic side. The gift of expression is important to them as scientists; the best research is wasted when it is extremely difficult to discover what it is all about ... It is even more important when scientists are called upon to play their part in the world of affairs, as is happening to an increasing extent.
All I ever wanted to do was to make food accessible to everyone; to show that you can make mistakes - I do all the time - but it doesn't matter.
I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless you identify the learning mechanisms. And these have some genetic basis.
There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.