There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication.... Try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it be somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude toward your experience changing.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the deep connection between community and effective communication, suggesting that sharing experiences can alter our perspectives.
John Dewey highlights the intrinsic relationship between the concepts of commonality, community, and communication. He suggests that when we endeavor to communicate our experiences—particularly complex ones—we not only share our thoughts but also undergo a transformation in our understanding. This process illustrates how communication can strengthen community ties and shape our attitudes toward our experiences, thereby enriching both ourselves and those with whom we interact.
In practice
During a workshop, a facilitator might use this quote to emphasize the importance of communicating personal experiences for group bonding.
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
A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn't mean anything else.
Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.
In communications, familiarity breeds apathy.
The only thing that guarantees an open-ended collaboration among human beings, the only thing that guarantees that this project is truly open-ended, is a willingness to have our beliefs and behaviors modified by the power of conversation.
So much of what passes for conversation today is degraded. It's either about one-upmanship, or dreary trivia. Even the cut and thrust of wit and bons mots is a form of bedazzlement designed to stop conversations dead rather than broaden them.
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