To be interested is to be absorbed in, wrapped up in, carried away by, some object. To take an interest is to be on the alert, to care about, to be attentive.
Interpretation
Being interested involves deep engagement with a subject, while taking an interest requires active attention and care.
John Dewey's quote emphasizes the difference between mere curiosity and a meaningful engagement with a subject. To be truly interested means to immerse oneself in the material, losing oneself in exploration and discovery, while taking an interest signifies a proactive effort to pay attention and invest in understanding something deeply.
In practice
In a class discussion about literature, you might say, 'As John Dewey noted, to take an interest means to truly engage with the themes presented in the text.'
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
We have never been so rich in books. But there has never been a generation when there is so much twaddle in print for children.
I went out of my way to play games I didn't like or find interesting. Those ended up being a lot more informative for me. At home, I have literally thousands of games, and I think of them as pearls of wisdom from my predecessors.
It was mostly through pop culture, through hip-hop, through Dungeons & Dragons and comic books that I acquired much of my vocabulary.
You want to ensure people can do it right 99 percent of time. When we have to fire one of our surgical trainees, it is never because they don't have the physical skills but because they don't have the moral skills - to practise and admit failure.
We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading…is the search for a difficult pleasure.
Over the past five years, I've met several presidents, several secretaries of education ... and there is no plan. If you want to save your children, you're going to have to do it yourself. It's just us.
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