Toward Inclusion and Human Unity: Rethinking Dewey’s Democratic Community

I come from a community-based culture that emphasizes the achievements of the collective, family, class, school, district, department, city, or nation, for instance, over that of the individual. The collective embraces the ideas of mutual help, support, and supervision within the community and the value of solidarity. People are not encouraged to be anyone special or to make themselves stand out. Keeping a low profile is recommended for those who are extraordinary in work or in life. Understandably, I grew up in an environment where sometimes I was a little overwhelmed by people who surrounded me offering their opinions, although I knew most of them meant well. I felt I needed some room to myself and some privacy, a concept that was never brought up in our public language until the 1980s, when Chinese youth were increasingly exposed to Euro-western ideology and American popular culture in particular, which encourages a strong sense of individualism. The young generation started to look at the world from a different perspective.

I still remember that my parents teased me when I first mentioned the word privacy to them, for they thought it was a fun word and I just followed the fashion, using it without knowing what it was. Later, when I started my career in Chinese language education at a public middle school, I found the students, unlike the ones from my generation, came to form a sense of individual differences and preferred working alone instead of in a group, which was deemed a drag on their own progress. While I understood that we should value individual differences and be aware of different learning styles in our pedagogy, I could not help but wonder if we really had to abandon others or the group to achieve individual development.

As a Chinese living in the United States, my feelings about this country keep changing as I am more exposed to its culture. Upon my arrival, I felt freed from those judgmental eyes and caring words that were everywhere in my life before. I thought I was finally independent, doing my own thinking, choosing what I would like to do, and dressing in the way I like. The key is that people here do not really pay attention to each other unless the other is close to them or relevant. Everyone takes care of their own business. The practice of “being yourself” is prevalent in popular culture and what I witness in my American friends and classmates. However, the enjoyment of this freedom did not last long. I found Americans cared so much about their privacy and the values of autonomy and competition that they kept themselves apart from one another. I started to miss my mother culture where I felt a sense of belonging and togetherness; I made phone calls often to my best friend from elementary school who also studied in a U.S. graduate school to renew the feeling of being close and supported.

What troubles me at a deeper level is the individualistic focus the students— future teachers—take in my class. Every year that I teach the foundations course, “Teachers, Schools, and Society,” I can see the strong influence individualism holds on the way my American students deal with their classmates. Some of them show complete indifference in group discussions, while some do not feel comfortable at all working with their fellow students on group projects. In their statements of teaching philosophy, they talk about the aim of education in terms of self-actualization and reaching their full potential and their methods of instruction in terms of individual differences and meeting individual needs. I could not help but wonder when my American students are so attracted to autonomy, whether they feel isolated from the larger group of shared meanings and values where they actually come from. Is the community or others really a hindrance that slows down individuals’ development? Can we think of community in terms of friendship, mutual support, and solidarity with our fellow human beings? After traveling a long distance from the eastern hemisphere to the western hemisphere, I find...