Janet Lawrence

“Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational.”
― John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education

“While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing. As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. To say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by the return it gets: it grows.”
― John Dewey, Democracy and Education

“Since language represents the physical conditions that have been subjected to the maximum transformation in the interests of social life—physical things which have lost their original quality in becoming social tools—it is appropriate that language should play a large part compared with other appliances.”
― John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education

“In a sense the mind of savage peoples is an effect, rather than a cause, of their backward institutions.”
― John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education