This document examines the origins of a frequently quoted John Dewey maxim: "We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience." While widely attributed to Dewey, the author finds that this quotation does not appear in any of Dewey's published works. It likely began as a paraphrase of Dewey's views that became mistaken as a direct quote over time. Though no single passage matches the quote precisely, Dewey did write about the importance of reflection on experience for learning. The author concludes the maxim should be used as a paraphrase, not a direct quotation, of Dewey's philosophy.

1. A SPURIOUS JOHN DEWEY QUOTATION ON REFLECTION
Robert C. Lagueux
Berklee College of Music
© 2014
Among the most frequently quoted maxims of John Dewey is his observation that
“We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.” A recent Google
search for the apothegm turns up almost 77,000 results across a wide variety of sites. It
appears on pedagogy blogs, corporate webpages, personal Facebook pages, and in online
quotation collections, and for good reason: it concisely encapsulates Dewey’s approach to
reflective practice and its relationship to learning. In Dewey’s view, reflective thought—
”Active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in
the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends” (italics
original)—serves as a way to “train” thinking to make it a “better way of thinking.”1
True
reflective thinking requires the continuous re-evaluation of ambiguous or unsettled situations
as beliefs, assumptions, and hypotheses shift. As the quotation suggests, revisiting experience
may bring provisional closure to uncertainty, but it also opens up the possibility of scrutiny
and change.
This particular quotation, however, appears nowhere in Dewey’s published works.
Much scholarly literature repeats the maxim, occasionally with minor variants (e.g.,
“by reflecting” or “from reflection” rather than “from reflecting”), and citing different
sources. It sometimes appears without attribution, often as an epigram.2
Some sources cite
How We Think (1933) generally,3
while others offer a specific page: 78.4
Other sources cite
Experience and Education (1938), again either without a specific page or, oddly enough,
citing the same page—78.5
One source offers a slightly different quotation, again without
page citation, replacing “reflecting on the experience” with the un-Dewey-esque “processing
the experience.”6
Among the few authors who tacitly acknowledge both the dubious provenance and
the ubiquity of this quotation is Lee Shulman, who presents it in its usual form as part of a
discussion of Dewey’s notion of reflective inquiry.7
It is marked as neither a direct quotation
nor a paraphrase of Dewey, however. Shulman is writing for an audience that surely knows
the quotation and its purported source, and his use of the maxim functions almost in the same
way as a medieval author makes a biblical allusion: the power of the reference is not in
verbatim quotation but in invoking that which only an audience in the know will understand.
The absence of any overt reference to Dewey is also a wry commentary on the quotation’s
murky origins.
It is difficult to determine the original source of the aphorism. The Collected Works
of John Dewey, easily searchable via its electronic edition, contains only seven total instances
in which Dewey uses the phrase “learn from experience”; none of these appears in How We
Think or Experience and Education, and none in a context similar to the quotation.8
The
Collected Works likewise contain no occurrences of the phrase “reflecting on experience.”
Nor does searching for slight variations (e.g., “learning from experience,” “reflection upon
experience”) turn up anything similar to the quoted aphorism.
Given the variations in its presentation and the similarity of the two putative citations,
it seems likely that what began as a concise, paraphrased summary of Dewey’s views on
reflective thought at some point was heard or read as a verbatim statement, a quotation rather

2. Lagueux—Dewey Quote p. 2
2
than a gloss, to which were then added work and page citations that acquired authority
through repetition.
For example, How We Think does contain the observation that understanding “means
that the various parts of the information acquired are grasped in their relation to one
another—a result that is attained only when acquisition is accompanied by constant reflection
upon the meaning of what is studied”; the first half of this passage does in fact begin on
p. 78.9
Dewey here is speaking specifically of what he calls “education upon its intellectual
side,” not “experience” per se, but one can imagine how this passage might be casually
summarized as “We do not learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience.”
That the passage appears near (if not exactly on) p. 78 in one of the two oft-cited references
makes it likely that it is the original source.
There are of course many passages in Dewey’s published work that do discuss
experience and reflection explicitly. To cite just one instance, Democracy and Education
(1916) contains the observation that “When we reflect upon an experience instead of just
having it, we inevitably distinguish between our own attitude and the objects toward which
we sustain the attitude… Such reflection upon experience gives rise to a distinction of what
we experience (the experienced) and the experiencing—the how.”10
This is not nearly as
pithy as the spurious maxim, however; indeed, one would be hard pressed to find an
authentic Dewey quotation quite as succinct.
Careful authors, then, will be sure to use this observation as paraphrase, not as direct
quotation.
NOTES
1. Dewey, How We Think, 3.
2. E.g., Rolheiser-Bennett, Bower, and Stevahn, The Portfolio Organizer, 31; Burris
and Garrity, Detracking for Excellence and Equity, 161; Bain and Zimmerman,
“Understanding Great Teaching,” 12; Johnson, Mims-Cox, and Doyle-Nichols, Developing
Portfolios in Education, 57; Folgueiras and Luna, “How Service Learning Is Understood,” 5.
3. E.g., Miller, Reading in the Wild, 18; Petersen, “Voices,” 93.
4. E.g., Chitpin, “Use of Reflective Journal Keeping,” 74; Doel, “Fostering Student
Reflection, 164; Erasmus, “Developing Reflective Practice Skills,” 57; Beard and Wilson,
Experiential Learning, 28.
5. Chitpin and Simon, “’Even If No-One Looked at It’,” 279; Espey and Brindle,
“Pre-Service & First Year Teacher Perception,” 3551.
6. Kolis, Rethinking Teaching, 19.
7. Shulman, Wisdom of Practice, 474.
8. Dewey, Collected Works.
9. Dewey, How We Think, 78–9.
10. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 173.
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3. Lagueux—Dewey Quote p. 3
3
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