The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied.
John Dewey: “The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best…”
Editor's note · Context
Dewey emphasizes the importance of personal experience in understanding problems, suggesting that those affected are best suited to identify their needs.
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But this conclusion is an obvious invitation to trial of forces to see where superior force lies.
The easiest way out was to go back to the naked individual, to sweep away all associations as foreign to his nature and rights save as they proceeded from his own voluntary choice, and guaranteed his own private ends.
There are those who speak as if ability to choose between two tickets were a high exercise of individual freedom.
That the state should be to some a deity and to others a devil is another evidence of the defects of the premises from which discussion sets out.