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A famous quote that John Dewey said is “Learning is doing.” This is a quote that Dewey thinks describes education. He believes that education is done by actively living your life out. Another way to say this is in another one of John Dewey’s quotes: “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”

If I look deeper into these quotes, I think that Dewey is trying to say that education happens in everyday life. Education is another way of saying that you are learning and since we are constantly learning, we are constantly being educated, even though we are not in a classroom or at school. I think that you could look at this quote in a whole new way and think: if education is life itself, then our everyday lives are being educated in a classroom; which could mean that the world is just one big classroom. I think that this means a school is just a smaller classroom within the world, which is just a larger classroom built for learning. We will all go through different stages in our lives where we are educated, which could even be in different parts of the world, but this could be seen as just another classroom in our school. The big picture is that the world is just one big classroom and there are many different classrooms and places that we will learn in over our lifetimes. Therefore, we are not simply preparing for life when we learn things, we are simply living our lives, since living is learning and learning happens by living or doing.

Overall, Dewey’s two quotes make learning a “hands on”, practical learning experience for students. Dewey is saying that learning is doing and being educated, therefore, education is life because we learn and do new things in our everyday lives. These quotes explain that education is not used as a tool to prepare for something else that may show up in our lives, but it is life itself. These quotes can seem to be very closed off to the idea that education can be used to prepare one’s self for another stage in their lives, but that depends if you choose to look at it in that way. In Dewey’s two quotes, he basically says that the teachers help their students to learn by helping them “do”, “act out”, or “practice” what they are focusing on in class, therefore the teachers act and serve as guides to their students’ learning. He is also saying that the teachers do not help the students prepare for life, but that they help them live it by “doing”. The student on the other hand is the one who is learning from the teacher as they guide them to live their lives by “doing”. I can relate Dewey’s quotes to my own life because I am a kinesthetic learner and kinesthetic learners learn by doing things that involve using their bodies or hands. I can also relate these quotes to the curriculum in school because some of the outcomes that students have to reach deal with the students having to be able to concretely show how something is done. Examples of how a student could show their kinesthetic learning would be through building a model, acting it out, or presenting information in a way that involves physical activities. Overall, Dewey has an understanding that learning is done by “acting it out” in the classroom and for one to do that, all they have to do is “live it”.