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The activity of the immature human being is simply played upon to secure habits which are useful. He is trained like an animal rather than educated like a human being. His instincts remain attached to their original objects of pain or pleasure. But to get happiness or to avoid the pain of failure he has to act in a way agreeable to others.

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
Pain
Habit
Educated
Immature
Others
Objects
Secure
Instincts
Human
Simply
Avoid
Attached
Humans
Animal
Instinct
Trained
Way
Pleasure
Remain
Habits
Like
Happiness
Played
Originals
Rather
Activity
Useful
Upon
Failure
Original
Agreeable

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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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How can the child learn to be a free and responsible citizen when the teacher is bound?
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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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Within even the most social group there are many relations that are not as yet social.
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Every subject at some phase of its development should possess, what is for the individual concerned with it, an aesthetic quality.
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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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As a matter of fact, a modern society is many societies more or less loosely connected. Each household with its immediate extension of friends makes a society the village or street group of playmates is a community each business group, each club, is another.
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Liberty is not just an idea, an abstract principle. It is power, effective power to do specific things. There is no such thing as liberty in general liberty, so to speak, at large.
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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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A good aim surveys the present state of experience of pupils, and forming a tentative plan of treatment, keeps the plan constantly in view and yet modifies it as conditions develop. The aim, in short, is experimental, and hence constantly growing as it is tested in action.
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If we learn not humility, we learn nothing.
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The outstanding problem of the Public is discovery and identification of itself
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All education which develops power to share effectively in social life is moral.
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When words do not enter as factors into a shared situation, either overtly or imaginatively, they operate as pure physical stimuli, not as having a meaning or intellectual value. They set activity running in a given groove, but there is no accompanying conscious purpose or meaning.
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Various epochs of the past have had their own characteristic struggles and interests. Each of these great epochs has left behind itself a kind of cultural deposit, like a geologic stratum. These deposits have found their way into educational institutions in the form of studies, distinct courses of study, distinct types of schools.
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We talk much more about individualism and liberty than our ancestors. But as so often happens, when anything becomes conscious, the consciousness is compensatory for absence in practice.
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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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The premium so often put in schools upon external discipline, and upon marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home.
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Teaching may be compared to selling commodities. No one can sell unless somebody buys.
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If a person cannot foresee the consequences of his act, and is not capable of understanding what he is told about its outcome by those with more experience, it is impossible for him to guide his act intelligently. In such a state, every act is alike to him.
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