But even the most shrewd and successful man does not in any analytic and systematic way--in a way worthy to compare with the knowledge which he has won in lesser affairs by means of the stress of experience--know the system within which he…
John Dewey
The Public Record
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century.
gutenberg.org
They cannot manage them, though some are fortunate enough--what is commonly called good fortune--to be able to exploit some phase of the process for their own personal profit.
Not understanding its “how,” they cannot use and control its manifestations.
They do not understand how the change has gone on nor how it affects their conduct.
Meanwhile the technological application of the complex apparatus which is science has revolutionized the conditions under which associated life goes on.
Even now, popular psychology is a mass of cant, of slush and of superstition worthy of the most flourishing days of the medicine man.
For them, electricity is known by means of the telephones, bells and lights they use, by the generators and magnetos in the automobiles they drive, by the trolley cars in which they ride.
They are fortunate who get as far as a sympathetic appreciation of the methods which give pattern to the complicated apparatus: methods of analytic, experimental observation, mathematical formulation and deduction, constant and elaborate…
For most men, save the scientific workers, science is a mystery in the hands of initiates, who have become adepts in virtue of following ritualistic ceremonies from which the profane herd is excluded.
It is an artificial language, not in the sense of being factitious, but in that of being a work of intricate art, devoted to a particular purpose and not capable of being acquired nor understood in the way in which the mother tongue is…
Science, in other words, is a highly specialized language, more difficult to learn than any natural language.
This apparatus is so highly specialized that it requires more labor to acquire ability to use and understand it than to get skill in any other instrumentalities possessed by man.