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Language fails not because thought fails, but because no verbal symbols can do justice to the fullness and richness of thought. Ifwe are to continue talking about data in any other sense than as reflective distinctions, the original datum is always such a qualitative whole.

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
Talking
Distinction
Datum
Language
Symbols
Qualitative
Sense
Originals
Reflective
Thought
Data
Distinctions
Whole
Original
Verbal
Always
Continue
Richness
Failing
Fullness
Justice
Fails

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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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Like the soil, mind is fertilized while it lies fallow, until a new burst of bloom ensues.
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Forty years spent in wandering in a wilderness like that of the present is not a sad fate - unless one attempts to make himself believe that the wilderness is after all itself the promised land.
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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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We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts.
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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.
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The young of human beings compare so poorly in original efficiency with the young of many of the lower animals, that even the powers needed for physical sustentation have to be acquired under tuition. How much more, then, is this the case with respect to all the technological, artistic, scientific, and moral achievements of humanity!
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Faith in the possibilities of continued and rigorous inquiry does not limit access to truth to any channel or scheme of things. It does not first say that truth is universal and then add there is but one road to it.
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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.
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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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The end justifies the means only when the means used are such as actually bring about the desired and desirable end.
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No system has ever as yet existed which did not in some form involve the exploitation of some human beings for the advantage of others.
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In brief, the function of knowledge is to make one experience freely available to other experiences.
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Mind is a verb not a noun.
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Within even the most social group there are many relations that are not as yet social.
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Of what use, educationally speaking, is it to be able to see the end in the beginning?
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As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future society. The school is its chief agency for the accomplishment of this end.
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The intellectual content of religions has always finally adapted itself to scientific and social conditions after they have become clear.... For this reason I do not think that those who are concerned about the future of a religious attitude should trouble themselves about the conflict of science with traditional doctrines.
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An education could be given which would sift individuals, discovering what they were good for, and supplying a method of assigning each to the work in life for which his nature fits him.
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Such words as society and community are likely to be misleading, for they have a tendency to make us think there is a single thing corresponding to the single word.
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