Introduction: Revisiting The Public and Its Problems

The 2013 Past President’s Panel at the Dewey Society annual meeting invited scholars to revisit the classic political text, The Public and Its Problems (1927). Four exceptional papers were presented at the session and are now gathered here to gain the wider audience they deserve.

Dewey’s most comprehensive work of political theory and democratic politics, The Public and Its Problems was a response to the deeply embedded skepticism about participatory democracy and public life expressed by democratic realists of the era, most famously, Walter Lippmann in his The Phantom Public (1925). In response to Lippmann, Dewey offered a thorough analysis of early 20th century democracy and some of his best thinking on both the challenges of, and hopes for, public life in democratic societies. The book remains a key text for pragmatists, particularly those working in education, as the challenges and threats to the ideals of democracy in education—as they relate to curriculum, pedagogy, policy, and politics, for example—abound today as never before. Indeed, we live in an era in which at times it seems the language of public ideals, public purposes, and public education itself seems naïve and hopelessly outdated. It thus seemed an appropriate time for educators to revisit this key text in Dewey’s corpus, one of his most important statements on democratic ideals, processes, and problems.

Each of these articles takes up the challenges of transactional communication in a diverse, pluralistic, mediated and stubbornly unequal society. Each explores a relevant historical and contextual arc, analyzing connections between past and present contexts as these scholars model pragmatist inquiry that is non-foundational, historicist, and connected to cultural realities. Finally, each piece questions what it means to develop communicative, reflective, deliberative publics that can solve shared problems effectively without relying solely on so-called experts, and without the violence that can take many literal and symbolic forms in the world today. As Amy Shuffelton summarizes this theme, which resounds across the articles, the role of the official expert in educational policy-making must be brought into proper perspective to make way for reflective inquiry and social intelligence. She writes, “The knowledge a democracy needs is a social possession, which arises through inquiry and communication around problems perceived to be relevant to the collective. Furthermore, as regards the knowledge that ought to inform public policy, technical expertise needs to be connected with practical reason.” The role of the official, the role of the teacher, the role of the parent, and the role of the curriculum are all subject to critical analysis in this collection of articles.

Stefano Oliverio, in “The Democratic Public To Be Brought into Existence and Education as Secularization,” traces the historical development of dominant Christian discourses of community and officialdom in an effort to understand the meaning of an official in a democratic context, which celebrates the citizen as a participant in governance. Oliverio begins his analysis with a revealing line by Dewey: “since the public forms a state only by and through officials and their acts, and since holding official position does not work a miracle of transubstantiation, there is nothing perplexing nor even discouraging in the spectacle of the stupidities and errors of political behaviour.” Throughout the pre-modern eras, priests and monarchs ruled by virtue of religious and magical powers, but in the era of democratic politics, the role of officials must be transformed to gain authority to govern through different means. As Oliverio explains, “If officials, unlike clerics, do not work a miracle of transubstantiation to have the power of their office, what are officials in a democratic society of Deweyan imagination? Quite simply, [they are made] through the transactional ideal of communication.” Replacing the certainty of the metaphysical world of knowledge, argues Oliverio, is “participation through communication . . . and with the practical engagement with the conditions of common human experience, in order to manage them.”

Next, Leonard Waks, in “Literary Art in the Formation of the Great Community,” explores the way literary art selects, abstracts, and creates unifying experiences out of those common human experiences and problems. Art is a form of communication...