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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.

John Dewey

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John Dewey
Age: 92 †
Born: 1859
Born: October 20
Died: 1952
Died: June 1
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Dewey
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By object is meant some element in the complex whole that is defined in abstraction from the whole of which it is a distinction.
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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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Selection aims not only at simplifying but at weeding out what is undesirable.
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The teacher loses the position of external boss or dictator but takes on that of leader of group activities
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If we learn not humility, we learn nothing.
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The good society was, like the good self, a diverse yet harmonious, growing yet unified whole, a fully participatory democracy in which the powers and capacities of the individuals that comprised it were harmonized by their cooperative activities into a community that permitted the full and free expression of individuality.
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Old ideas give way slowly for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories. They are habits, predispositions, deeply ingrained attitudes of aversion and preference.
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Things gain meaning by being used in a shared experience or joint action.
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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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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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Human nature exists and operates in an environment. And it is not 'in' that environment as coins are in a box, but as a plant is in the sunlight and soil.
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Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking learning naturally results.
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Instruction is important.
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Teachers are the agents through which knowledge and skills are communicated and rules of conduct enforced.
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Creative thinking will improve as we relate the new fact to the old and all facts to each other.
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Even dogs and horses have their actions modified by association with human beings they form different habits because human beings are concerned with what they do.
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Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying at the time.
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It is obvious to any observer that in every western country the increase of importance of public schools has been at least coincident with the relaxation of older family ties.
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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 of education in a democratic society is to do away with ... dualism and to construct a course of studies which makes thought a guide of free practice for all and which makes leisure a reward of accepting responsibility for service, rather than a state of exemption from it.
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