Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control environment.
Interpretation
Adapting completely to one's surroundings can lead to a loss of self. The quest for control over our environment is fundamental to how we respond to it.
This quote by John Dewey emphasizes the idea that total adaptation to one's environment is detrimental to personal growth and identity. Rather than losing ourselves in conformity, it is important to engage with and strive to control our surroundings, as this desire fuels our responses and shapes our experiences. The struggle for control reflects our individual agency and the intrinsic human need to influence and create meaningful interactions with the world.
In practice
During a motivational speech about personal growth, I might reference this quote to highlight the importance of maintaining one's identity.
Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth. In this way, the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer-in of the true Kingdom of God.
Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.
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.
For in spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an βism becomes so involved in reaction against other βisms 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.
Any genuine teaching will result, if successful, in someone's knowing how to bring about a better condition of things than existed earlier.
The reactionaries are in possession of force, in not only the army and police, but in the press and the schools
Being critical of the nation is a far cry from being unpatriotic or anti-American. In fact, most social criticism . . . is based on a love of America's ideals and a concern we're not living up to them.
It is easy to say that there are the rich and the poor, and so something should be done. But in history, there are always the rich and the poor. If the poor were not as poor, we would still call them the poor. I mean, whoever has less can be called the poor. You will always have the 10% that have less and the 10% that have the most.
Permanent good can never be the outcome of untruth and violence
Once you understand that Goliath is much weaker than you think he is, and David has superior technology, then you say: why do we tell the story the way we do? It becomes, actually, a far more meaningful and important story in its retelling than in the kind of unsophisticated way we've done it for, I think, too long.
Idleness, pleasure, what abysses! To do nothing is a dreary course to take, be sure of it. To live idle upon the substance of society! To be useless, that is to say, noxious! This leads straight to the lowest depth of misery.
I intend to leave after my death a large fund for the promotion of the peace idea, but I am skeptical as to its results.
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