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 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.
The reactionaries are in possession of force, in not only the army and police, but in the press and the schools
The worse a person is the less he feels it.
The past is always tense, the future perfect.
An interest in the brain requires no justification other than a curiosity to know why we are here, what we are doing here, and where we are going.
Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental.
A man is rational in proportion as his intelligence informs and controls his desires.
Society's preservation against the unlimited violence of scandals lies in the mimetic coalition against the single victim and its ensuing limited violence. The violent death of Jesus is, humanly speaking, an example of this strange process.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.