Democracy+and+Education+Quotes+by+topic


 * Aim** “Aim means foresight in advance of the end or possible termination” (102).

“An aim implies an orderly and ordered activity, one in which the order consists in the progressive completing of a process.” P102

“The aim as a foreseen end gives direction to the activity; it is not an ideal view of a mere spectator, but influences the steps taken to reach the end. “ p102

The net conclusion is that acting with an aim is all one with acting intelligently. To foresee a terminus of an act is to have a basis upon which to observe, to select, and to order objects and our own capacities. P103

To do these things means to have a mind—for mind is precisely intentional purposeful activity controlled by perception of facts and their relationships to one another. To have a mind to do a thing is to foresee a future possibility; it is to have a plan for its accomplishment” p103

“It is well to remind ourselves that education as such has not aims. Only persons, parents, and teachers, etc. have aims, not an abstract idea like education. “ p107

“Mind is capacity to refer present conditions to future results, and future consequences to present condition. And these traits are just what is meant by having an aim or a purpose. “ p103

Mind appears in experience as ability to respond to present stimuli on the basis of anticipation of future possible consequences, and with a view to controlling the kind of consequences that are to take place. P130

This foresight and this survey with reference to what is foreseen constitute mind. P131


 * Community:** “Men live in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common. What they must have in common in order to form a community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge—a common understanding—likemindedness as the sociologists say” p4

To have the same ideas about thi9ngs which others have, to be like-minded with them, and thus to be really members of a social group, is therefore to attach the same meanings to things and to acts which others attach. Otherwise, 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. That is the activity of each is placed in the same inclusive situation. P30


 * Control:** “Adequate control means that the successive acts are brought into a continuous order; each act not only meets its immediate stimulus but helps the acts which follow. “ p25


 * Democracy:** A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of assocated living, of conjoint communicated experience. The extension in space of the number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men from perceiving the full import of their activity. P87


 * Discipline**:Discipline means power at command; mastery of the resources available for carrying through the action undertaken. To know what one is to do and to move to do it promptly and by use of the requisite means is to be disciplined, whether we are thinking of an army or a mind. P129

Discipline is positive. To cow the spirit, to subdue inclination, to compel obedience, to mortify the flesh, to make a subordinate perform an uncongenial task--these things are or are not disciplinary according as they do or do not tend to the development of power to recognize what one is about and to persistence in accomplishment. P129


 * Education:** “ We thus reach a technical definition of education: It is that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience.” P76

That education is literally and all the time its own reward means that no alleged study or discipline is educative unless it is worth while in its own immediate having. P109


 * Environment:** “The things with which a man varies are his genuine environment. Thus the activities of the astronomer vary with the stars at which he gazes or about which he calculates. Of his immediate surroundings, his telescope is most intimately his environment.” P11

“In brief, the environment consists of those conditions that promote or hinder, stimulate or inhibit, the characteristic activities of a living being. “ p11

“We never educate directly, but indirectly, by means of the environment” p19


 * Experience:** “it may be said without exaggeration, that the measure of the worth of any social institution, economic, domestic, political, legal, religious, is its effect in enlarging and improving experience” p6

The nature of experience can be understood only by noting that it includes an active and a passive element peculiarly combined. On the active hand, experience is trying—a meaning which is made explicit in the connected term experiment. On the passive, it is undergoing. P139


 * Growth**: “Power to grow depends upon need for others and plasticity” p52

“Normal child and normal adult alike, in other words, are engaged in growing. The difference between them is not the difference between growth and no growth, but between the modes of growth appropriate to different condition. “ p50

“Growth is not something done to them; it is something they do. The positive and constructive aspect of possibility gives the key to understanding the two chief traits of immaturity, dependence and plasticity.” P42

“If education is growth, it must progressively realize present possibilities, and thus make individuals better fitted to cope with later requirements. Growing is not something which is completed in odd moments; it is a contiuous leading into the future.” P57


 * Habit:** “A habit means an ability to use natural conditions as means to ends. It is an active control of the environment through control of the organs of actions. ..To be able to walk is to have certain properties of nature at our disposal—and so with all other habits.” P47

“Habits reduce themselves to routine ways of acting, or degenerate into ways of action to which we are enslaved just in the degree in which intelligence is disconnected from them. “ p49


 * Interest:** Interest, concern, mean that self and world are engaged with each other in a developing situation.” P126

“ to be interested is to be absorbed in, wrapped up in, carried away by, some object. To take an interest is to be on the alert, to care about, to be attentive” p126

“Interest and discipline are correlative aspects of activity having an aim. Interest means that one is identified with the objects which define the activity and which furnish the means and obstacles to its realiszation.” P137

Interest measures--or rather is--the depth of the grip which the foreseen end has upon one in moving one to act for its realization. P130

Interest represents the moving force of objects--whether perceived or presented in imagination--in any experience having a purpose. P130


 * Meaning:** When things have a meaning for us, we mean (intend, propose) what we do: when they do not, we act blindly, unconsciously, unintelligently” p29


 * Mind:** Mind as a concrete thing is precisely the power to understand things in terms of the use made of them p33


 * Multi-culturalism:** The intermingling in the school of youth of different races, differing religions, and unlike customs creates for all a new and broader environment. Common subject matter accustoms all to a unity of outlook upon a broader horizon than is visible to the members of any group while it is isolated. “p21


 * Response/reaction** “in the merely blind response, direction is also blind. There may be training, but there is no education. Repeated responses to recurrent stimuli may fix a habit of acting in a certain way. All of us have many habits of whose import we are quite unaware, since they were formed without our knowing what we were about. P29


 * Schools:** “ Roughly speaking, they come into existence when social traditions are so complex that a considerable part of the social store is committed to writing and transmitted through written symbols” p19


 * Situation** “Suppose that some one rolls a ball to a child; he catches it and rolls it back, and the game goes on. Here the stimulus is not just the sight of the ball, or the sight of the other rolling it. It is the situation—the game which is playing. The response is not merely rolling the ball back’ it is rolling it back so that the other one may catch and return it,--that the game may continue. P35


 * Subject matter:** “[separation of activities and capacities from subject matter is bad] There is no such thing as an ability to see or hear or remember in general; there is only the ability to see or hear or remember something.” P65

Subject matter is then regarded as something complete in itself; it is just something to be learned or known, either by the voluntary application of mind to it or through the impressions it makes on mind.” P130

“Subject matter of learning is identical with all the objects, ideas, and principles which enter as resources or obstacles into the continuous intentional pursuit of a course of action.” P138


 * Thinking:** “Thinking includes all of these steps,--the sense of a problem, the observation of condition,s the formation and rational elaboration of a suggested conclusion, and the active experiemental testing. P151


 * Value:** The criterion of the value of school education is the extent in which it creates a desire for continued growth and supplies means for making the desire effective in fact.” P53