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

John Dewey (1859–1952), the leading American pragmatist and a central figure in progressive education, argued that schooling should be rooted in experience, inquiry, and participation in democratic life. This line comes from his early statement of educational philosophy in *My Pedagogic Creed* (1897), written as he was developing ideas that would later shape his work at the University of Chicago Laboratory School (founded 1896). Dewey was reacting against late-19th-century models of education that treated children as passive recipients of information and viewed school chiefly as training for adult work. He instead framed education as an ongoing social process embedded in the child’s present life.

Dewey’s claim rejects the notion that childhood is merely a waiting room for adulthood. If education is “a process of living,” then learning must be meaningful in the present: students develop through active engagement with real problems, social cooperation, and reflective experience. The quote also implies that the aims of education are not external rewards (credentials, future employment) but the cultivation of habits of thought and action that constitute a good life now—curiosity, adaptability, and democratic participation. In Dewey’s pragmatism, knowledge is not inert content to be stored for later; it is a tool formed and tested in use. School, therefore, should resemble life—interactive, communal, and purposeful.