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
Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.
Emotions are a critical source of information for learning.
Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape.
Think! Think and wonder. Wonder and think. How much water can 55 elephants drink?
In America, the professor talks to the mechanic. They are in the same category.
If you only think of me during Black History Month, I must be failing as an educator and as an astrophysicist.
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