Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.
Interpretation
Democracy requires continual renewal, and education plays a crucial role in this process.
This quote by John Dewey highlights the idea that democracy is not a permanent state but something that must be actively nurtured and developed in each generation. Education is portrayed as the essential tool that facilitates this renewal, emphasizing the importance of teaching and learning in sustaining democratic values and practices.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of civic engagement, a speaker might reference this quote to highlight the role of education in sustaining democracy.
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.
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 ‘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.
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
Communication of science as subject-matter has so far outrun in education the construction of a scientific habit of mind that to some extent the natural common sense of mankind has been interfered with to its detriment.
No matter how long you play the guitar, there's always something else to learn.
...the source of all great mathematics is the special case, the concrete example. It is frequent in mathematics that every instance of a concept of seemingly generality is, in essence, the same as a small and concrete special case.
Sure, it's simple, writing for kids... Just as simple as bringing them up.
We know that when people are civically engaged, when they understand what their rights are, when they understand that in a democracy you can challenge governments, you can challenge policymakers, and you can... actually shape and form future policy, I think it changes the perception that a lot of young people have about where power is.
Most organizations see young people as problems to be solved. We see young people as problem-solvers.
When my son, James, was doing homework for school, he would have five or six windows open on his computer, Instant Messenger was flashing continuously, his cell phone was constantly ringing, and he was downloading music and watching the TV over his shoulder. I don’t know if he was doing any homework, but he was running an empire as far as I could see, so I didn’t really care.
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