John Dewey, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Education is the deliberate practice of democracy as a way of life. The school is not a job-training facility, not a subject-transmission factory, not a sorting mechanism for industrial labor markets.1 It is the social-laboratory in which the next generation forms the habits of cooperative experimental intelligence that participatory democracy requires. Democracy and Education (1916) names this clearly: education is the reconstruction of experience that increases the capacity to direct subsequent experience.
The child is not a passive vessel and not raw material for industrial inputs; the child is a developing agent whose engagement with genuine problems — under conditions of real cooperation with peers and skilled guidance from teachers — is the condition of intellectual, moral, and political growth. Schools that train workers for capitalist production reproduce the stunted, underdeveloped, 'lost' individuals capitalism needs; schools that practice democracy form citizens.2
The ordinary worker in the factory is of course under too immediate economic pressure to have a chance to produce a knowledge like that of the worker in the laboratory. But in schools, association with machines and industrial processes may be had under conditions where the chief conscious concern of the students is insight.The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899-1924. Volume 9: 1916, Democracy and Education, pp. 324–325
For modern psychology emphasizes the radical importance of primitive unlearned instincts of exploring, experimentation, and "trying on." It reveals that learning is not the work of something ready-made called mind, but that mind itself is an organization of original capacities into activities having significance. As we have already seen (p.The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899-1924. Volume 9: 1916, Democracy and Education, pp. 325–326
Genuinely held from The School and Society (1899) through Experience and Education (1938). The Lab School at Chicago (1896-1904) was the institutional expression. Westbrook is correct that my actual influence on American schools was quite limited and that what was called progressive education was often a caricature of what I argued for: child-centeredness without intellectual substance, freedom without the discipline of inquiry, expression without the cooperation in shared problems that gives expression its meaning. The 1938 Experience and Education was written explicitly to correct these caricatures. The position remains what it was: education is the practice of democracy in the conditions of growth.