Editor’s Note

Greetings and welcome to the latest edition of Education & Culture. You will find in this issue a healthy portion of instantly recognizable Deweyan themes, but in many instances with a new, sometimes surprising twist. Below I will highlight a few elements of these creative variations on the familiar.

Some of you might recall that our lead article, Jim Garrison’s “Making Meaning Together Beyond Theory and Practice,” had its first life as the 2012 Dewey Lecture. In this piece, Garrison examines the popular Deweyan theme of the relationship between theory and practice. Yet unlike many authors, who look to Dewey in arguing for the necessity somehow to bridge theory and practice, Garrison points out that Dewey in fact prompts us to see theory and practice (like many other seemingly ubiquitous dichotomies) as “subfunctions within the larger function of making meaning, knowledge, and value in our lives.” Thus the emphasis here is really on creation rather than construction, especially as the latter term is currently used in education to denote the process of artificially making engaging and useful something that is otherwise uninteresting and not useful.

Our next piece is Gary Bullert’s “The Committee for Cultural Freedom and the Roots of McCarthyism.” In this offering, Bullert situates the Committee for Cultural Freedom (CCF), of which Dewey was a founding member, within its historical-geographical milieu so as to revisit and scrutinize popular allegations that Dewey and his cohorts (namely, Sidney Hook) contributed to the red-scare hysteria and repressive anti-communism of the 1940s and 1950s, in part through efforts to expel communist party members from the teaching profession. After examining the issue in its many and complicated facets, Bullert concludes, among other things, that the CCF in fact “offered a responsible alternative to the excesses” of McCarthyism.

Traversing some allied ground, Cherilyn Keall, in “The Paradox of Freedom: John Dewey on Human Nature, Culture, and Education,” explores the meaning of Dewey’s provocative (and to many confusing) claim that human nature both does and does not change. Here we are provided with an opportunity to revisit another popular dichotomy and see what it looks like through a Deweyan lens. In doing so, Keall argues, we find that Dewey understands human nature to have two interrelated facets, one that changes, due to our embeddedness in diverse, ever-evolving cultures, and one that does not, resulting from the innate needs that we all share through our similar constitution as human beings. As a result, human freedom, an issue fundamental to the work of all manner of educators, must be conceived with an eye to the inexpugnable stability and precariousness of human nature.

This is followed by Victor Rodriguez’s intriguing look at what he calls “Radical Dewey: Deweyan Pedagogy in Mexico, 1915–1923.” Rodriguez chooses this particular time period because it predates the appropriation of Dewey’s ideas by Mexico’s revolutionary government, prior to which his writings were popular among socialists, radical pedagogues and progressive-minded teachers. Yet little scholarship to date has looked closely at or taken seriously this earlier, and at times very creative, application of Dewey’s work, focusing instead on the better known subsequent state project experiment with Deweyan schools in the mid-1920s. Rodriguez attempts to amend the record on this important topic.

The pressing issue of healthcare is then taken up in Danielle Lakes’ very topical piece “Engaging Deweyan Ethics in Healthcare: Leonard Fleck’s Rational Democratic Deliberation.” Here, Lake makes the case that a form of ”open dialogue between citizens,” developed and utilized by author Leonard Fleck, a close reader of Dewey and former member of the Hillary Rodham Clinton Task Force on Health Reform (1993), deserves serious attention as a vehicle for making possible meaningful healthcare reform. As Lake explains, “It is my hope that Fleck’s rational democratic deliberation could begin to build a foundation for further cooperation, for greater education about the various and complicated bioethical situations we must confront and, finally, for establishing working solutions that are amenable to adjustment.”

“Reconstructing Deweyan Growth: The Significance of James Baldwin’s Moral Psychology” is Jeff Frank’s thoughtful attempt to make Dewey’s...