John Dewey
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"John Dewey", Australian Academy of Science#Fellows/FAA was an American philosopher, psychologist, leading activist in the Georgism/Georgist movement, and school reform/educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey is one of the primary figures associated with the philosophy of pragmatism and is considered one of the founders of functional psychology. A well-known public intellectual, he was also a major voice of progressive education and Modern liberalism in the United States/liberalism. Although Dewey is known best for his publications about education, he also wrote about many other topics, including epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, art, logic, social theory, and ethics.

The overriding theme of Dewey's works was his profound belief in democracy, be it in politics, education or communication and journalism. As Dewey himself stated in 1888, while still at the University of Michigan, "Democracy and the one, ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity are to my mind synonymous."

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Education is life itself.

School is not preparation for life, but school is life.

Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.

We only think when we are confronted with a problem.

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

Every serious-minded person knows that a large part of the effort required in moral discipline consists in the courage needed to acknowledge the unpleasant consequences of one's past and present acts.

We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique.

Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

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.

Luck, bad if not good, will always be with us. But it has a way of favoring the intelligent and showing its back to the stupid.

There is no discipline in the world so severe as the discipline of experience subjected to the tests of intelligent development and direction.

Social engaged intellectuals must accept reality as they found it and shape it toward positive social goals, not stand aside in self-righteous isolation.

It is our American habit if we find the foundations of our educational structure unsatisfactory to add another story or wing. We find it easier to add a new study or course or kind of school than to recognize existing conditions so as to meet the need.

Intellectually, religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it.

Education is a social process; education is growth; education is not a preparation for life but is life itself.

We naturally associate democracy, to be sure, with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of thought behind it is only chaos.

We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts.

The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.