Democracy and Education

Democracy and Education
Author	John Dewey
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Non-fiction
Publisher	Macmillan
Publication date	1916
Media type	Print
Pages	434 pp
OCLC	177710

Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education is a 1916 book by John Dewey. Dewey's philosophical anthropology, unlike Egan, Vico, Ernst Cassirer, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Nietzsche, does not account for the origin of thought of the modern mind in the aesthetic, more precisely the myth, but instead in the original occupations and industries of ancient people, and eventually in the history of science.^[1] A criticism of this approach is that it does not account for the origin of cultural institutions, which can be accounted for by the aesthetic. Language and its development, in Dewey's philosophical anthropology, have not a central role but are instead a consequence of the cognitive capacity.^[1]

Synopsis

Dewey sought to at once synthesize, criticize, and expand upon the democratic (or proto-democratic) educational philosophies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Plato.^{[citation needed]} He saw Rousseau's philosophy as overemphasizing the individual and Plato's philosophy as overemphasizing the society in which the individual lived. For Dewey, this distinction was largely a false one; like Vygotsky, he viewed the mind and its formation as a communal process. Thus the individual is only a meaningful concept when regarded as an inextricable part of his or her society, and the society has no meaning apart from its realization in the lives of its individual members. As evidenced in his later Experience and Nature (1925), this practical element—learning by doing—arose from his subscription to the philosophical school of Pragmatism.

Reception

Dewey's ideas were never broadly and deeply integrated into the practices of American public schools, though some of his values and terms were widespread.^[2] Progressive education (both as espoused by Dewey, and in the more popular and inept forms of which Dewey was critical) was essentially scrapped during the Cold War, when the dominant concern in education was creating and sustaining a scientific and technological elite for military purposes.^{[citation needed]} In the post-Cold War period, however, progressive education had reemerged in many school reform and education theory circles as a thriving field of inquiry learning and inquiry-based science.

Legacy

While Dewey's educational theories have enjoyed a broad popularity during his lifetime and after, they have a troubled history of implementation.^[2] Dewey's writings can also be difficult to read, and his tendency to reuse commonplace words and phrases to express extremely complex reinterpretations of them makes him susceptible to misunderstanding. So while he held the role of a leading public intellectual, he was often misinterpreted, even by fellow academics. Many enthusiastically embraced what they mistook for Dewey's philosophy, but which in fact bore little or a distorted resemblance to it.^{[citation needed]}

Dewey tried, on occasion, to correct such misguided enthusiasm, but with little success.^{[citation needed]} Simultaneously, other progressive educational theories, often influenced by Dewey but not directly derived from him, were also becoming popular, such as Educational perennialism which is teacher-centered as opposed to student-centered. The term 'progressive education' grew to encompass numerous contradictory theories and practices, as documented by historians like Herbert Kliebard.

Several versions of progressive education succeeded in transforming the educational landscape: the utter ubiquity of guidance counseling, to name but one example, springs from the progressive period. Radical variations of educational progressivism were troubled and short-lived, a fact that supports some understandings of the notion of failure.^{[citation needed]} But they were perhaps too rare and ill-funded to constitute a thorough test.

See also

• List of publications by John Dewey

References