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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.

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
Life
Vice
Vices
Activity
Understanding
Community
Common
Refers
Persons
Versa
Person
Shared

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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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Each generation is inclined to educate its young so as to get along in the present world instead of with a view to the proper end of education: the promotion of the best possible realization of humanity as humanity. Parents educate their children so that they may get on princes educate their subjects as instruments of their own purpose.
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Language exists only when it is listened to as well as spoken. The hearer is an indispensable partner.
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By various agencies, unintentional and designed, a society transforms uninitiated and seemingly alien beings into robust trustees of its own resources and ideals. Education is thus a fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating, process.
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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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The acquisition however perfectly of skills is not an end in itself. They are things to be put to use as a contribution to a common and shared life.
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Without the English, reason and philosophy would still be in the most despicable infancy in France.
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I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.
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A child might be made to bow every time he met a certain person by pressure on his neck muscles, and bowing would finally become automatic. It would not, however, be an act of recognition or deference on his part, till he did it with a certain end in view - as having a certain meaning.
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Plato defined a slave as one who accepts from another the purposes which control his conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legal sense. It is found wherever men are engaged in activity which is socially serviceable, but whose service they do not understand and have no personal interest in.
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Teaching may be compared to selling commodities. No one can sell unless somebody buys.
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Doctrine that eliminates or even obscures the function of choice of values and enlistment of desires and emotions in behalf of those chosen weakens personal responsibility for judgment and for action. It thus helps create the attitudes that welcome and support the totalitarian state.
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What's in a question, you ask? Everything. It is evoking stimulating response or stultifying inquiry. It is, in essence, the very core of teaching.
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The real process of education should be the process of learning to think through the application of real problems.
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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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Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates invention. It shocks us out of sheep-like passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving…conflict is a sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity.
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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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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.
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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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Everything which bars freedom and fullness of communication sets up barriers that divide human beings into sets and cliques, into antagonistic sects and factions, and thereby undermines the democratic way of life.
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