Quote

Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates invention. It shocks us out of sheep-like passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving…conflict is a sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity.

John Dewey

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John Dewey
Age: 92 †
Born: 1859
Born: October 20
Died: 1952
Died: June 1
Aesthetician
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Professor
Psychologist
Sociologist
Teacher
Trade Unionist
Burlington
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Dewey
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Observation
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Invention
Shocks
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Contriving
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Sets
Gadflies

More quotes by John Dewey

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The religious is any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of its general and enduring value.
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Teachers are the agents through which knowledge and skills are communicated and rules of conduct enforced.
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Plato defined a slave as one who accepts from another the purposes which control his conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legal sense. It is found wherever men are engaged in activity which is socially serviceable, but whose service they do not understand and have no personal interest in.
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The central problem of an education based upon experience is to select the kind of present experience that live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences.
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Selection aims not only at simplifying but at weeding out what is undesirable.
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Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful.
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If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.
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In order to have a large number of values in common, all the members of the group must have an equable opportunity, to receive and to take from others. There must be a large variety of shared undertakings and experiences. Otherwise, the influences which educate some into masters, educates others into slaves.
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The phrase think for one's self is a pleonasm. Unless one does it for one's self, it isn't thinking.
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Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situations of experience its own full and unique meaning.
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Choice is the declaration by self that a certain ideal of self shall be realized.
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Every teacher should realize the dignity of his calling.
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A democracy is more than a form of government it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.
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All direction is but re-direction it shifts the activities already going on into another channel. Unless one is cognizant of the energies which are already in operation, one's attempts at direction will almost surely go amiss.
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A child may have to be snatched with roughness away from a fire so that he shall not be burnt.
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But the individual butterfly or earthquake remains just the unique existence which it is. We forget in explaining its occurrence that it is only the occurrence that is explained, not the thing itself.
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The future of religion is connected with the possibility of developing a faith in the possibilities of human experience and human relationships that will create a vital sense of the solidarity of human interests and inspire action to make that sense a reality.
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The reactionaries are in possession of force, in not only the army and police, but in the press and the schools
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How many students ... were rendered callous to ideas, and how many lost the impetus to learn because of the way in which learning was experienced by them?
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The first step in freeing men from external chains was to emancipate them from the internal chains of false beliefs and ideals.
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