It's Time to Move on to the Next Level

Four mornings a week I exercise at a gym—excuse me, fitness center, in today’s lingo—where machines extract sweat and money from the customers.  The place also peddles one program after another for people who want to exercise the way someone else tells them to.  To keep people involved—that is, spending money—little blurbs of encouragement are posted here and there.  Here’s one:

Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.

If that is supposed to be a motto, it’s a lame one.

Sure, it could push you, when you’ve finished pumping thirty pounds of weight, to go back to the rack and move up to forty pounds.

But those words are nothing more than a truism, a description of the treadmill of life.  When you’ve finished eating breakfast, clear off the table and wash your dishes.  When you’ve finished cutting the grass, leave the lawnmower where you can find it when it’s time to cut the grass again.  If you quit this job, get another one.

And it’s a poorly wrought sentence, too.  It has no subject.  Who is doing the arriving?   To devout grammarians, that opening cluster of words—"Arriving at one goal”—is a dangling modifier.  It “dangles” because it’s not clear who or what is being modified (referred to).

I wondered who wrote it, for the gym did not name the perpetrator.  Ah, but Google knows.

John Dewey did it.  According to Wikipedia, Dewey (1859-1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer.  Wikipedia calls him a well-known public intellectual, and a major voice of progressive education and liberalism.  The quote that I dislike is one of his most famous.

Well, that settles that.  It’s time to move on to the next level.

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