PASSAGE 1
“We are first cast into the world as embodied beings trying to understand. From particular situated locations, we open ourselves to fields of perception. Doing so, we begin to inhabit varied and always incomplete multiverses of forms, contours, structures, colors, and shadows. We become present to them as consciousnesses in the midst of them, not as outside observers; and so we see aspects and profiles but never totalities. We reach out into the world—touching, listening, watching what presents itself to us from our prereflective landscapes, primordial landscapes. We strain toward horizons: horizons of what might be, horizons of what was. Because we have the capacity to configure what lies around us, we bring patterns and structures into existence in the landscape. Before we enter into the life of language, before we thematize and know, we have already begun to organize our lived experiences perceptually and imaginatively. We inform our encounters by means of activities later obscured by the sediments of rationality.”
[Greene, “Shapes of Childhood Recalled,” 73.]

PASSAGE 2
“This fundamental opposition of child and curriculum set up by these two modes of doctrine can be duplicated in a series of other terms. ‘Discipline’ is the watchword of those who magnify the course of study; ‘interest’ that of those who blazon ‘The Child’ upon their banner. The standpoint of the former is logical; that of the latter psychological. The first emphasizes the necessity of adequate traiing and scholarship on the part of the teacher; the latter that of need of sympathy with the child, and knowledge of his natural instincts. ‘Guidance and control’ are the catchwords of one school; ‘freedom and initiative’ of the other. Law is asserted here; spontaneity proclaimed there. The old, the conservation of what has been achieved in the pain and toil of the ages. Is dear to the one; the new, change, progress, wins the affection of the other. Inertness and routine, chaos and anarchism, are accusations bandied back and forth. Neglect of the sacred authority of duty is charged by one side, only to be met by counter-charges of suppression of individuality through tyrannical despotism.
“Such oppositions are rarely carried to their logical conclusion. Common sense recoils at the extreme character of these results. They are left to theorists, while common sense vibrates back and forward in a maze of inconsistent compromise. The need of getting theory and practical common sense into closer connection suggests a return to our original thesis: that we have here conditions which are necessarily related to each other in the educative process, since this is precisely one of interaction and adjustment.
“What, then, is the problem? It is just to get rid of the prejudicial notion that there is some gap in kind (as distinct from degree) between the child’s experience and the various forms of subject-matter that make up the course of study. From the side of the child, it is a question of seeing how his experience already contains within itself elements—facts and truths—of just the same sort as those entering into the formulated study; and, what is of more importance, of how it contains within itself the attitudes, the motives, and the interests which have operated in developing and organizing the subject-matter to the plane which it now occupies. From the side of the studies, it is a question of interpreting them as outgrowths of forces operating in the child’s life, and of discovering the steps that intervene between the child’s present experience and their richer maturity.”
[Dewey, “Child and Curriculum,” pp. 3-4]