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Just because life signifies not bare passive existence (supposing there is such a thing), but a way of acting, environment or medium signifies what enters into this activity as a sustaining or frustrating condition.

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
Thing
Medium
Way
Mediums
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Life
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Conditions
Enters
Environment
Bare
Existence
Frustrating
Acting
Passive

More quotes by John Dewey

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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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Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid it has been liquefied. it is actively moving in all the currents of society itself
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It has been petrified into a slavery of thought and sentiment, as intolerant superiority on the part of the few and an intolerable burden on the part of the many.
John Dewey
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Nature as a whole is a progressive realization of purpose strictly comparable to the realization of purpose in any single plant or animal.
John Dewey
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[T]he schools, through reliance upon the spur of competition and the bestowing of special honors and prizes, only build up and strengthen the disposition that makes an individual when he leaves school employ his special talents and superior skill to outwit his fellow without respect for the welfare of others
John Dewey
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There is no such thing as educational value in the abstract. The notion that some subjects and methods and that acquaintance with certain facts and truths possess educational value in and of themselves is the reason why traditional education reduced the material of education so largely to a diet of predigested materials.
John Dewey
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There is not, in fact, any such thing as the direct influence of one human being on another apart from use of the physical environment as an intermediary. A smile, a frown, a rebuke, a word of warning or encouragement, all involve some physical change. Otherwise, the attitude of one would not get over to alter the attitude of another.
John Dewey
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Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.
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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.
John Dewey
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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.
John Dewey
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Teaching may be compared to selling commodities. No one can sell unless somebody buys.
John Dewey
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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.
John Dewey
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As we have seen there is some kind of continuity in any case since every experience affects for better or worse the attitudes which help decide the quality of further experiences, by setting up certain preference and aversion, and making it easier or harder to act for this or that end.
John Dewey
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A society with too few independent thinkers is vulnerable to control by disturbed and opportunistic leaders. A society which wants to create and maintain a free and democratic social system must create responsible independence of thought among its young.
John Dewey
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Etymologically, the word education means just a process of leading or bringing up.
John Dewey
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It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs.
John Dewey
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Within even the most social group there are many relations that are not as yet social.
John Dewey
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The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning.
John Dewey
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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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Education, in its broadest sense, is the means of this social continuity of life.
John Dewey