Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that intellectual questioning and new ideas can disrupt the status quo.
John Dewey's quote highlights the inherent risk that comes with innovative thinking and critical analysis. When thinkers challenge conventional beliefs or propose new perspectives, they inevitably create some level of instability in the existing world. This disruption, while often uncomfortable, is essential for growth and progress in society, as it allows for a reevaluation of norms and the potential for meaningful change.
In practice
In a debate about educational reform, I might quote Dewey to emphasize the need for challenging established practices.
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
Funk is the unending cycle of life. It's the ultimate concept—wherever your imagination will take it.
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
Mercy but murders, pardoning those that kill.
The true test of liberty is the right to test it, the right to question it, the right to speak to my neighbors, to grab them by the shoulders and look into their eyes and ask, “Are we free?” I have thought that if we are free, the answer cannot hurt us. And if we are not free, must we not hear the answer?
We must challenge this statement and this sentiment that the news media is the enemy of the American people. This sentiment may be the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime.
Animals are sentient, intelligent, perceptive, funny and entertaining. We owe them a duty of care as we do to children.
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