Editor’s Note

Welcome, everyone, to another exciting issue of Education & Culture. As readers have come to expect, we have in this edition a diverse set of articles that highlight and explore several major themes in Dewey's work. This includes topics addressing the aims of education (in this case, higher education), Dewey's influence on educational reform in Turkey, the teaching of logic in a Deweyan vein, the aesthetics of science and science education, and the anaesthetics of dystopian education.

As with the last issue, our lead article originated as a Dewey Lecture at AERA. This time, we present David Labaree's 2013 offering entitled “College—What Good is it For?” In this provocative piece, Labaree argues that the aspects of the American university that are most prized by people who work within them, like free speech, are in fact propitious side effects of an institutional structure that in fact arose for other purposes. Ironically, then, “[this] institution—an intellectual haven in a heartless utilitarian world—depends on attributes that we would publicly deplore: opacity, chaotic complexity, and hypocrisy.” This is followed by Raşit Çelik's article “Unity vs. Uniformity: The Influence of Ziya Gökalp and John Dewey on the Education System of the Republic of Turkey.” Here, Çelik argues that efforts to create and sustain a democratic nation-state in the Republic of Turkey depended heavily on establishing a new education system. Dewey's work was explicitly called upon for this purpose. However, Çelik maintains that, in the process, Turkish officials failed to pay sufficient attention to Dewey's views on several issues crucial to democracy concerning centralization and uniformity. This is followed by Seth Vannatta's “Teaching to the Test: A Pragmatic Approach to Teaching Logic.” Vannatta's chief concern here is the role logic plays, or might play, as a vehicle for teaching critical thinking. To do this effectively however, he observes, there must be sufficient continuity between students' experiences and the curriculum. Vannatta finds Dewey's unorthodox, naturalistic approach to logic well-suited to this task. Interestingly, too, the approach that emerges includes methods that recognize and utilize the role of the body in learning and reasoning.

Our final two articles draw on Dewey's work in aesthetics, stressing its continued relevance to teaching and learning. In “Science Sublime: The Philosophy of the Sublime, Dewey's Aesthetics, and Science Education,” Shane Cavanaugh foregrounds the feelings of “awe, wonder and [aesthetic] appreciation” often accompanying experiences with science, but that are frequently ignored in popular conceptions of science and science education. To remedy this, Cavanaugh offers the idea of the “scientific sublime,” drawing on Dewey's aesthetics and the philosophy of the sublime, and shows how science education might better teach for the scientific sublime, as well as the possible benefits of doing so. Finally, Jessica Heybach and Eric Sheffield deftly reveal the other side of this experiential coin in “Dystopian Schools: Recovering Dewey's Radical Aesthetics in an Age of Utopia-Gone-Wrong.” Again utilizing Dewey's aesthetics, Heybach and Sheffield show how contemporary school policies and practices seemingly aimed at creating a kind of educational utopia, where all students achieve high scores on high-stakes, standardized tests, ironically proffers a distinctly anaesthetic, dystopian schooling experience for both teachers and their students. As they explain, “In utilizing Dewey’s aesthetic theory as a lens of analysis, we argue that this turn toward dystopia is resulting in an increasingly numbing, anaesthetic educational experience at best; and a dehumanizing, violent educational experience at worst.” The article then closes with a discussion of a potential antidote to this increasingly-acute dystopian malaise.

Until next time, happy reading.