Intolerance, abuse, calling of names because of differences of opinion about religion or politics or business, as well as because of differences of race, color, wealth or degree of culture are treason to the democratic way of life. For everything which bars freedom and fullness of communication sets up barriers that divide human beings into sets and cliques, into antagonistic sects and factions, and thereby undermines the democratic way of life. Merely legal guarantees of the civil liberties of free belief, free expression, free assembly are of little avail if in daily life freedom of communication, the give and take of ideas, facts, experiences, is choked by mutual suspicion, by abuse, by fear and hatred. These things destroy the essential condition of the democratic way of living even more effectually than open coercion which- as the example of totalitarian states proves-is effective only when it succeeds in breeding hate, suspicion, intolerance in the minds of individual human beings.
All ends and values that are cut off from the ongoing process become arrests, fixations. They
strive to fixate what has been gained instead of using it to open the road and point the way to new and
better experiences.
Conservatives call this indoctrination. — Fooloso4
The unchanging truth is not their doctrine? — unenlightened
Someone should let them know that indoctrination with the unchanging truth is what education is supposed to be; its the transmission of culture, and so the conservation of conservatism. — unenlightened
Indoctrination with unchanging truth is not what education is supposed to be according to Dewey. — Fooloso4
Put differently, what is it we wish to conserve? — Fooloso4
But it is what conservatives accuse him of, and what they favour themselves, but presumably call by another name. — unenlightened
We were told in school that the US is a classless society, — Fooloso4
That's indoctrination! — unenlightened
In any case we can escape from this external way of thinking only as we realize in thought and act that democracy is a personal way of individual life; that it signifies the possession and continual use of certain attitudes, forming personal character and determining desire and purpose in all the relations of life. Instead of thinking of our own dispositions and habits as accommodated to certain institutions we have to learn to think of the latter as expressions, projections and extensions of habitually dominant personal attitudes.
the idea that need and desire can be separated from knowledge of things as they are has been questioned. — Joshs
If desire co-constitutes things as they seem to be , then things as they ‘are’ cannot be a basis of consensus without also being the basis of marginalization and repression. There will always be those left out of the conversation of mankind. — Joshs
And yes education for Dewey is a term for something special, so something merely additional to the necessary and inevitable indoctrination with the ways of our lives (their criteria and judgments Wittgenstein will call it) — Antony Nickles
Our duty is to find our actual disagreement, if any truly exists, by learning about the other's interests and needs (as Wittgenstein searches for our "real need" in #108). Instead of arguing about an abstract right, we are learning about what matters to each other. In doing so, we have the possibility to truly understand each other, and, if we do still disagree, we at least do so rationally, having preserved our community, our union. — Antony Nickles
Unfortunately, there is no escape from the politics — unenlightened
I make much of the use of the word 'indoctrination' because it is used as a term of abuse projected by those who would abuse onto those who want to prevent that abuse. This practice, which has infected the US and the world, destroys the language and society with it. — unenlightened
are there necessarily situations where we cannot even agree to disagree? This is what Lyotard refers to as the paralogical situation, where the very terms of the conversation exclude participants, so that neither agreement not disagreement is possible. — Joshs
there is no habitable place outside of every culture, and so Dewey, as you say, starts in the house we have, but his fight is not between progress and stasis, but between the cultural and the personal. — Antony Nickles
It remains the claim that democracy is the duty to put yourself in the others' shoes and investigate the desires and needs involved in the dispute at hand. — Antony Nickles
It seems obvious to say yes; sometimes when we are intransigent, others where we do not have common-enough interests to make disagreement possible. But both of these seem peripheral… It seems to come back to the old panic that, because we may not come to agreement in an ethical discussion, there must not be any rationality. — Antony Nickles
.This does not deny rationality, it makes rational agreement a local and imperfect achievement. — Joshs
Tyranny? What about Socrates' philosopher kings and Buddhism's wisdom kings? Mythical, like dragons? — Agent Smith
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