All learning begins when our comfortable ideas turn out to be inadequate.
Interpretation
Learning occurs when we challenge our existing beliefs and realize they are not sufficient.
This quote by John Dewey emphasizes that true learning begins at the moment we question our preconceived notions and discover that they do not fully explain our experiences or the world around us. It suggests that discomfort and challenge are essential for growth, as they push us to seek deeper understanding and knowledge.
In practice
In a classroom discussion about education philosophies.
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
I always tell people there's only one trick to writing: You have to write something that people are willing to pay money to read. It doesn't have to be very good, necessarily, but somebody, somewhere, has got to be willing to pay money for it.
A Brahmin is not so much in need of education as a Chandala. If the son of a Brahmin needs one teacher, that of a Chandala needs ten.
Learn the Arabic language; it will sharpen your wisdom.
For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.
A book is valuable not only for what it says but for what it makes you think, or causes you to remember. No matter what you wish to do or become there are books to teach you, help you, guide you.
You can never learn less; you can only learn more.
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