The principle of learning by practice underlies every major feature of a Bennington education: the master-apprentice model of teaching and learning; the requirement that students direct the course of their own education; the winter Field Work Term, which gives students work experience and connects them to the greater community. The College's commitment to learning across the disciplines extends to the faculty, who teach what is uppermost in their minds, exploring new pursuits as well as ongoing areas of study and work. Bennington is grounded in the conviction that as a college education develops students' professional capacities, it should also prepare them to be deeply thoughtful and actively engaged citizens of the world.

A Bennington education—and Bennington College itself—holds several principles in creative tension: freedom and responsibility; individuality and community; independence and collaboration; reflection and action; rigor and expression; excellence, resilience, and an impulse toward meaning and truth. These elements are the constants at an institution that seeks, through ongoing inquiry, to always sustain and exercise its capacity for renewal.

"To 'learn from experience' is to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequence. Under such conditions, doing becomes a trying; an experiment with the world to find out what it is like; the undergoing becomes instruction—discovery of the connection of things." —John Dewey, from Democracy and Education

"Bennington regards education as a sensual and ethical, no less than an intellectual, process. It seeks to liberate and nurture the individuality, the creative intelligence, and the ethical and aesthetic sensibility of its students, to the end that their richly varied natural endowments will be directed toward self-fulfillment and toward constructive social purposes. We believe that these educational goals are best served by demanding of our students active participation in the planning of their own programs, and in the regulation of their own lives on campus. Student freedom is not the absence of restraint, however; it is rather the fullest possible substitution of habits of self-restraint for restraint imposed by others." —Traditional Bennington College commencement statement, read at every graduation since 1936