The reactionaries are in possession of force, in not only the army and police, but in the press and the schools
Interpretation
Dewey highlights how reactionary forces control various societal institutions, including the military, media, and education.
John Dewey's quote reflects on the significant influence that reactionary forces hold over vital societal institutions like the military, police, media, and educational systems. It suggests that these forces use their control not just to maintain order but to shape public perception and opinion, which can hinder progressive change and critical thinking in society. Dewey calls attention to the need for awareness about these dynamics to encourage a more informed and equitable public discourse.
In practice
In a panel discussion on media influence, this quote serves as a reminder of who shapes public narratives.
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.
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.
People start panicking because they think it's the end of everything. But the fact is, you know, books survived movies; books survived TV. Books are surviving manga and anime. Books will always be there in one form or another. You just have a larger palette of entertainment options.
I can find in my undergraduate classes, bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star.
Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
Studying entrepreneurshi p without doing it... is like studying the appreciation of music without listening to it.
For some students, school is the only place where they get a hot meal and a warm hug. Teachers are sometimes the only ones who tell our children they can go from an Indian reservation to the Ivy League, from the home of a struggling single mom to the White House.
When I was living in China, I learned to make things hyper-explicit because often they were being read by people whose command of English kept them from picking up what I thought were obvious signals.
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