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
In true dialogue, both sides are willing to change.
In any situation that calls for you to persuade, convince or manage someone or a group of people to do something, the ability to tell a purposeful story will be your secret sauce. Telling to win through purposeful stories is situation, industry, gender, demographic, and psychographic-agnostic. It's an all-purpose, everyone wins tool.
Talking with a Martian is like talking with an echo. You don't get argument but you don't get results.
Few things concentrate the mind more efficiently than the necessity of saying what you mean. It brings you face to face with what you are talking about, what you are actually proposing. It gets you away from the catch phrases that not merely substitute for thought but preclude it.
It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.
I speak and speak, [...] but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. [...] It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
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