Every serious-minded person knows that a large part of the effort required in moral discipline consists in the courage needed to acknowledge the unpleasant consequences of one's past and present acts.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of courage in recognizing and taking responsibility for one's actions and their consequences.
John Dewey highlights that moral discipline is not just about adhering to a set of ethical standards, but also about possessing the courage to face the often uncomfortable realities that come with our past and present decisions. It suggests that true growth and understanding in one's moral character require acknowledging our mistakes and the resultant implications, which is a challenging yet essential aspect of personal development.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about ethical leadership during a workshop.
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 ‘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
The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.
A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which.
When the world is itself draped in the mantle of night, the mirror of the mind is like the sky in which thoughts twinkle like stars.
I do not want to convince Christians to work for the abolition of war, but rather I want us to live recognizing that in the cross of Christ, war has been abolished.
The study of law is sublime, and its practice vulgar.
As a human being, one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists.
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