Quote

While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing.

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
May
Less
Pieces
Smaller
Mean
Force
Higher
Tries
Thing
Living
Loses
Superior
Trying
Energy
Turn
Superiors
Life
Means
Least
Forms
Energies
Cannot
Existence
Easily
Split
Form
Turns
None
Crushed
Doe
Upon
Identity
Splits

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All communication is like art. It may fairly be said, therefore, that any social arrangement that remains vitally social, or vitally shared, is educative to those who participate in it. Only when it becomes cast in a mold and runs in a routine way does it lose its educative power.
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There is no common understanding, and no community life. But in a shared activity, each person refers what he is doing to what the other is doing and vice-versa.
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As a child lives today, he will live tomorrow.
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Intelligence is in constant process of forming, and its retention requires constant alertness in observing consequences, an open-minded will to learn, and courage in readjustment.
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Traveling is a constant arriving, while arrival that precludes further traveling is most easily attained by going to sleep or dying.
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Any education given by a group tends to socialize its members, but the quality and the value of the socialization depends upon the habits and aims of the group. Hence, once more, the need of a measure for the worth of any given mode of social life.
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To avoid a split between what men consciously know because they are aware of having learned it by a specific job of learning, and what they unconsciously know because they have absorbed it in the formation of their characters by intercourse with others, becomes an increasingly delicate task with every development of special schooling.
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Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living. Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live. Education is not preparation for life education is life itself.
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What holds for adults holds even more for children, sensitive and conscious of differences. I certainly hope that the Board of Education will think very, very seriously before it introduces this division and antagonism in our public schools.
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The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation.
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A being connected with other beings cannot perform his own activities without taking the activities of others into account. For they are the indispensable conditions of the realization of his tendencies. When he moves he stirs them and reciprocally.
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Legislation is a matter of more or less intelligent improvisation aiming at palliating conditions by means of patchwork policies.
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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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I should venture to assert that the most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinking goes back to neglect of context.
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Teaching may be compared to selling commodities. No one can sell unless somebody buys.
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Criticism of the commitment of religion to the supernatural is thus positive in import.
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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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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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Intellectually religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it.
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Art is not the possession of the few who are recognized writers, painters, musicians it is the authentic expression of any and all individuality.
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