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1 Creative Democracy and Teacher Education: The Task Before Us1 Mark LaCelle-Peterson & Phillip J. VanFossen The present state of the world is more than a reminder that we have now to put forth every energy of our own to prove worthy of our heritage....[T]he task can be accomplished only by inventive effort and creative activity... because the depth of the present crisis is due in considerable part to the fact that for a long period we acted as if our democracy were something that perpetuated itself automatically. [T]he heart and final guarantee of democracy is in the free gathering of neighbors on the street corner to discuss... uncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends...to converse freely with one another.... [Everything which bars freedom and fullness of communication sets up barriers that divide human beings into...antagonistic...factions, and thereby undermines the democratic way of life. (John Dewey, 1940, pp. 221-222 & 225) Introduction Democracy is hard work—no getting around it. John Dewey argued that democrats could not avoid the hard, collaborative work of creating new, or at the very least creatively adapting existing, political and social structures and practices to the needs of their day. In the waning days of World War II, in an essay entitled 'The Democratic Faith and Education,' Dewey (1944) argued that the crises endured by the US and the warring world resulted from the avoidance of such effort, from trusting too blithely in what he called drift or what others, with unwarranted optimism, called progress. Contrary to expectations, laissezfaire policies pursued in the progressive era had yielded war in place of peace, totalitarianism in place of increasing personal freedom, increased government intervention in place of the withering away of the state, and severe economic hardship in place of the elimination of poverty. Concerted collective effort, not mere faith in progress, he argued, was needed to re-create and extend democratic society. And in Dewey's view, such concerted efforts would always need to be forward looking; there was, he held, no golden past to evoke as model or guide (see, for example, American Education and Culture' written fifteen years earlier). Creation of a truly democratic culture—one that could meet the criteria, posed in Democracy and Education (Dewey, 1916), of maximizing the variety and extent of consciously shared interests within the society and the 'ullness and interplay with other societies—would require that a uniquely democratic set of personal beliefs be widely held. On the occasion of his eightieth birthday, Dewey delivered a condensed synthesis of his 'democratic faith' in which he enumerated those personal beliefs and commitments. Embedded in that essay, 'Creative Democracy— the Task Before Us' (Dewey, 1940), are three core beliefs that can guide teachers and teacher educators as we face the creative democratic task before us: 1) belief in the right of each individual to develop his or her capacities; 2) confidence that people, working together, can make intelligent judgments and take worthy action; and 3) a personal commitment to co-operative action rooted in the conviction that consideration of conflicting claims and views is both right and enriching. This essay is organized around three issues. First, through a comparison of the current social situation with that of the 1930's and early 1940's, we show why we believe that, current apparent economic prosperity notwithstanding, the 'creative imperative' of democracy must be re-asserted to counter clear and evident threats to democracy. Second, drawing on 'Creative Democracy,' we outline a vision of democratic individualism that focuses on personal beliefs and characteristics that are, we argue, 'teachable' in the sense that teachers and teacher educators can—and should—view them as requisite outcomes of their educational endeavors. Finally, we draw out implications for teacher education, suggesting criteria by which we might evaluate current teacher education practices and creatively adapt them for the task before us. Democracy in Troubled Times Democracy is under siege in the U.S. from an increasing isolation of racial, ethnic, and economic communities and the increasing tendency to deny the existence of extensive common interests across internal and international social boundaries. The view of democracy we put forward is...

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