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An idea is a method of evading, circumventing or surmounting through reflection, obstacles that otherwise would have to be attacked by brute force.

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
Vermont
Dewey
Reflection
Otherwise
Method
Surmounting
Imagination
Evading
Idea
Brute
Force
Brutes
Ideas
Attacked
Would
Obstacles

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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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For in spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an ‘ism becomes so involved in reaction against other ‘isms that it is unwittingly controlled by them. For it then forms its principles by reaction against them instead of by a comprehensive, constructive survey of actual needs, problems, and possibilities.
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The problem is to extract the desirable traits of forms of community life which actually exist, and employ them to criticize undesirable features and suggest improvement
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Just as a flower which seems beautiful and has color but no perfume, so are the fruitless words of the man who speaks them but does them not.
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Not only does social life demand teaching and learning for its own permanence, but the very process of living together educates. It enlarges and enlightens experience it stimulates and enriches imagination it creates responsibility for accuracy and vividness of statement and thought.
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Thought is impossible without words.
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Change as change is mere flux and lapse it insults intelligence. Genuinely to know is to grasp a permanent end that realizes itself through changes.
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If we learn not humility, we learn nothing.
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The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative.
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For one man who thanks God that he is not as other men there are a thousand to offer thanks that they are as other men, sufficiently as others are to escape attention.
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It science involves an intelligent and persistent endeavor to revise current beliefs so as to weed out what is erroneous, to add to their accuracy, and, above all, to give them such shape that the dependencies of the various facts upon one another may be as obvious as possible.
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That which distinguishes the Soviet system both from other national systems and from the progressive schools of other countries is the conscious control of every educational procedure by reference to a single and comprehensive social purpose.
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Education Proceeds ultimately from the patterns furnished by institutions, customs, and laws- If the patterns of institutions, customs, and laws are broken for this philosophy education should fix itself. There should be several different things taught instead of one Supreme Factor.
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That education is not an affair of telling and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a principle almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in theory. Is not this deplorable situation due to the fact that the doctrine is itself merely told? It is preached it is lectured it is written about.
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Cooperation called fraternity in the classic French formula is as much a part of the democratic ideal as is personal initiative. That cultural conditions were allowed to develop (markedly so in the economic phase) which subordinated cooperativeness to liberty and equality serves to explain the decline in the two latter.
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Any genuine teaching will result, if successful, in someone's knowing how to bring about a better condition of things than existed earlier.
John Dewey
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We have lost confidence in reason because we have learned that man is chiefly a creature of habit and emotion.
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To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience.
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The struggle for democracy has to be maintained on as many fronts as culture has aspects: political, economic, international, educational, scientific and artistic, religious.
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There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication.
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