John Dewey and Our Educational Prospect
A Critical Engagement with Dewey's Democracy and Education
Publication Year: 2006
Published by: State University of New York Press
Cover
Frontmatter
Title
Preface
This book features a set of critical responses to John Dewey’s greatest educational work, Democracy and Education. The contributors address Dewey’s claim that education is not a preparation for life, but constitutes a fundamental aspect of the very experience of living. Dewey criticizes the cultural bias of...
1. Introduction: Reading Democracy and Education
What is John Dewey’s Democracy and Education? In a literal sense, it is a study of education and its relation to the individual and society. Moreover, Dewey tells us, it is a philosophical rather than historical, sociological, or political inquiry. His original title for the work was...
2. “Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful": The Communicative Turn in Dewey’s Democracy and Education
Democracy and Education is not a book that gives itself easily to its readers. I have to confess that when I first read the book as an undergraduate, I found it quite boring. In its attempt to cover almost everything there was to say about education past and present, the book didn’t stand out...
3. Curriculum Matters
Suppose you are interested, as I am, in the curriculum in U.S. schools today—would there be any value in your consulting John Dewey’s Democracy and Education? After all, the title does not mention curriculum, and the book was published almost eighty years ago, at a quite different point in American and world history...
4. Socialization, Social Efficiency,and Social Control: Putting Pragmatism to Work
Given the assaults on public education that are currently being waged by the Bush administration, it is highly appropriate that we should revisit a key text of one of public education’s greatest champions: John Dewey’s Democracy and Education. For the purposes of this chapter I have selected three central terms from...
5. Growth and Perfectionism? Dewey after Emerson and Cavell
In contemporary education, the notion of growth, an idea so central to Dewey, has become increasingly unsteady. On the one hand, in the global market economy, growth is associated with free choice, competitive power, and success, often with the image of a differentiated self—an identity developed and extended...
6. Rediscovering the Student in Democracy and Education
Consideration of the student has all but disappeared from a good deal of the contemporary discussion about education. It is true that the student remains the object of this discussion, but he or she is left out of it nonetheless. I do not mean by this claim that students are not consulted, although they certainly are not...
7. Dewey’s Reconstruction of the Curriculum: From Occupation to Disciplined Knowledge
With the publication of Democracy and Education in 1916, John Dewey brought to near fruition his long-standing inquiry into the deceptively simply question: what should we teach? That question was brought into Dewey’s consciousness with a certain urgency once he had undertaken to found and run the...
8. A Teacher Educator Looks at Democracy and Education
I have always taken quiet pleasure in the fact that I studied at three of the universities where John Dewey taught,1 that I began my teaching career at the University of Chicago Laboratory School that he founded, and that I started my career as a teacher educator in the Department of Education at Chicago...
9. Dewey’s Philosophy of Life
Democracy is once again being claimed as value and virtue not solely for a form of governance, but as a way of life. That way of life is once again being taken as cause for which to die, and as justification to kill. Surely this calls us, as it did John Dewey in his times (1859–1952), to reflect on democracy’s relation to life...
10. Dewey’s Book of the Moral Self
Dewey closes Democracy and Education with this penultimate statement: “Interest in learning from all the contacts of life is the essential moral interest” (p. 3701). The fact that Dewey bookends the sentence with the term “interest” symbolizes its dynamic place in his wide-ranging inquiry...
E-ISBN-13: 9780791480946
Print-ISBN-13: 9780791469217
Print-ISBN-10: 0791469212
Page Count: 205
Illustrations: 1 table
Publication Year: 2006
OCLC Number: 78211833
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