Beyond the “Pragmatic Acquiescence” Controversy: Reconciling the Educational Thought of Lewis Mumford and John Dewey

This article provides a reconsideration of the intellectual altercation between John Dewey and Lewis Mumford in the 1920s, and a sketch of some educational implications that follow this reconsideration. Although past scholarship has tended to focus on ways in which the altercation obscured similarities in their thought, we consider whether important differences were also obscured, particularly regarding their outlook on science and technology, their potential place in society, and their ideas about the best means to positive social change. We also consider how these differences might play out in philosophy of education/educational practice, concluding that Mumford's commitment to regionalism can augment Dewey's philosophical vision while also helping deal with pressing contemporary social and educational needs.     

A MORE PRACTICAL PEDAGOGICAL IDEAL: SEARCHING FOR A CRITERION OF DEWEYAN GROWTH

When Dewey scholars and educational theorists appeal to the value of educative growth, what exactly do they mean? Is an individual's growth contingent on receiving a formal education? Is growth too abstract a goal for educators to pursue? Richard Rorty contended that the request for a “criterion of growth” is a mistake made by John Dewey's “conservative critics,” for it unnecessarily restricts the future “down to the size of the present.” Nonetheless, educational practitioners inspired by Dewey's educational writings may ask Dewey scholars and educational theorists, “How do I facilitate growth in my classroom?” Here Shane Ralston asserts, in spite of Rorty's argument, that searching for a more concrete standard of Deweyan growth is perfectly legitimate. In this essay, Ralston reviews four recent books on Dewey's educational philosophy—Naoko Saito's The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson, Stephen Fishman and Lucille McCarthy's John Dewey and the Philosophy and Practice of Hope, and James Scott Johnston's Inquiry and Education: John Dewey and the Quest for Democracy and Deweyan Inquiry: From Educational Theory to Practice—and through his analysis identifies some possible ways for Dewey‐inspired educators to make growth a more practical pedagogical ideal.     

Reconstructing Dewey: Habit,Embodiment and Health and Well-Being

This critical paper utilises selective education writings by John Dewey as the basis for considering how a strengths-based and personalised view of habit and embodiment could effectively thrive as part of an enhanced health and well-being focus in schools. The paper centres on Dewey’s belief that habits when allied to continuity and interaction could help children to integrate experiences in ways which enable them to constructively evaluate the contribution of health and well-being to their education. The paper concludes by reviewing how the connections between habit, embodiment and health and well-being could be pedagogically strengthened.     

Inoculation against Wonder: Finding an antidote in Camus,pragmatism and the community of inquiry

In this paper, we will explore how Albert Camus has much to offer philosophers of education. Although a number of educationalists have attempted to explicate the educational implications of Camus’ literary works, these analyses have not attempted to extrapolate pedagogical guidelines towards developing an educational framework for children’s philosophical practice in the way Matthew Lipman did from John Dewey’s philosophy of education, which informed his philosophy for children curriculum and pedagogy. We focus on the phenomenology of inquiry; that is, inquiry that begins with genuinely felt doubt, pointing to a problematic to which the inquirer seeks a solution or resolution. We argue that the central purpose of education is to develop lucid individuals. To this end, we concentrate on Dewey and the pragmatist tradition, starting from Peirce, leading to Lipman’s development of Dewey’s educational guidelines into classroom practice. We show where Camus and the pragmatists are congruent in their thinking, insofar as they can inform the educative process of the community of inquiry. What we conclude is that the role of the teacher is to develop lucid individuals facilitated in a classroom that is transformed into a community of inquiry embedded in contemporary historical moments.     

Living drawing: Aesthetic teaching for moral artists

With its inherent attributes such as qualitative immediacy, imaginativeness, and embodiment, John Dewey’s concept of aesthetic experience makes a difference in moral education, in the ways of empathetic moral perception, moral reasoning, and moral action. If it matters then how can we help students gain aesthetic experience? By analyzing teacher Ho-Chul Lee’s approach to teaching drawing, called living drawing, this question is examined in terms of aesthetic style of teacher and teaching, and the aesthetic educational environment. This article will provide insights into how living drawing as an approach promotes aesthetic experiences and how it influences students’ moral experiences.     

Dewey,Interest, and Well-Being: Prospects for Improving the Educational Value of Physical Education

Despite the current policy prominence of physical education, there is still unease about the subject's educational contribution. In this respect, we are surprised by how seldom John Dewey's writings inform contemporary reviews of aims and values. We outline how his writings on connecting the child and the curriculum and schools with society are relevant to deliberations on how students could derive enhanced meaning from physical education. We address criticisms by Richard Peters of Dewey and discuss related issues on: interest and engagement, problem solving and criteria for personal growth. We discuss how the thinking of Dewey and Valerie Tiberius might inform the development of physical education curricular that are more deeply connected with the lives of students and which promote well-being. In particular, we argue there is a need for future curriculum to be designed in ways that invite students to cultivate informed and stable physical activity habits and values.     

Capability Through Participatory Democracy: Sen,Freire, and Dewey

This paper explores possible important relationships and sympathies between Amartya Sen’s Capabilities Approach framework for understanding the human condition and the educational ideas of John Dewey and Paolo Freire. All three focus on the importance of democratic values in a fair, well-functioning society, while Sen and Freire especially explore the difficulties and possibilities of oppressed populations. Sen suggests that all humans have a right to choice in determining their life trajectories and should be provided with the tools that allow them to flourish. Both education and democratic values play important roles in creating the types of context that allow individuals and communities to recognize a wide array of human capabilities. We suggest here that the theories of Dewey and Freire offer avenues through educational processes for developing these contexts for expanded human capability. Dewey suggests an educational approach that stresses democratic values and the ability and willingness of individuals to reach out towards new possibilities. Freire stresses the idea of praxis playing a central role in education—a focus on the cycle of everyday action, reflection, and re-creation of action that leads to productive changes in life trajectories. We argue that Sen, Dewey, and Freire together help to offer a new way of understanding education in the twenty-first century.     

Philosophy,Art or Pedagogy? How should children experience education?

Abstract

There are various programmes currently advocated for ways in which children might encounter philosophy as an explicit part of their education. An analysis of these reveals the ways in which they are predicated on views of what constitutes philosophy. In the sense in which they are inquiry based, purport to encourage the pursuit of puzzlement and contribute towards creating democratic citizens, these programmes either implicitly rest on the work of John Dewey or explicitly use his work as the main warrant for their approach. This article explores what might count as educational in the practice of children ‘doing’ philosophy, by reconsidering Dewey’s notion of ‘experience’. The educational desire to generate inquiry, thought and democracy is not lost, but a view that philosophy takes its impetus from wonder is introduced to help re-evaluate what might count as educational experience in a Deweyan sense.     

社会民主进程中的学校重建——杜威教育思想中的一个核心主题

社会民主与学校重建的关系是杜威教育思想中的一个核心主题。工业革命以及随之引起的在科技、交通、政治、经济、文化等社会诸领域的全面变革,对美国民主构成了严峻挑战。从哲学高度,深入反思学校如何重建和变革,以在美国社会的民主进程中扮演更为积极、有为的角色,成为一个重大而紧迫的时代课题。杜威从教育的角度,重构了民主概念,主张学校应超越旧个人主义的狭隘性,通过主动作业培养未来公民的民主意识和社会精神。20世纪20年代前后,杜威的教育思想发生转向,对制度化教育在社会民主进程中的功能的有限性的认识更为清晰,但终其一生,杜威都未曾放弃对学校重建问题的关心。杜威有关民主和学校重建关系问题的思想十分深刻,超越了杰斐逊和贺拉斯·曼等前人,影响了克伯屈和拉格等社会改造主义教育家。在美国教育史中,杜威是一位继往开来的大师。     

Hermeneutic Haunting: E. D. Hirsch,Jr. and the Ghost of Interpretive Validity

This article applies criteria for validity in interpretation to Eric Donald Hirsch, Jr.'s interpretations of John Dewey. Specifically, three criteria that Hirsch, himself, established in his earlier work are used to evaluate Hirsch's interpretation of John Dewey as a member of a class (romantics) who embraced a naive naturalism (trait) more often than not (instances within a class) to the great detriment of other salient aspects of education. Hirsch calls his K–8 Core Knowledge sequence revolutionary. His revolution's justification rests, in part, on his rejection of an educational tradition that he attributes to John Dewey and his disciples. Hirsch uses his interpretation of Dewey to portray those who continue to take Dewey's ideas seriously as naive, dogmatic obstructionists who are blocking positive educational reform. Because Hirsch falls short of his own standards for validity in his interpretation of John Dewey, this article suggests that professors of education who continue to rework Dewey's ideas may be sources of potential insight in addressing educational challenges rather than intransigent obstructionists.     

教育为何需要“指导”?——杜威“教育即指导”命题的教育学意义

"教育即指导"是杜威教育思想的重要组成部分,也是杜威在透析教育本质的基础上提出的方法论。"指导"是对"疏导"的方向性帮助和对"控制"的调节,"教育即指导"是儿童在解放教育生活的过程中来实现自我。有意义的教育指导需要教育者理智地思考儿童所处的环境和习惯,在教育沟通中进行,帮助他们树立民主生活的信念。"教育即指导"是杜威用来缝合教育与生活之间断裂、辨析教育目的与判断教育价值、透析教育与民主的关系和深化教育主体认识的新尝试。     

杜威“教育即生活”对素质教育的启示

杜威“教育即生活”的观点具有相当广泛的国际影响,这体现在他把教育与生活的关系紧密地联系起来,在生活中实施教育活动,把教育活动生活化;特别是他对于儿童价值的认识与重视,为现代教育注入了新的活力。挖掘和分析西方教育理论,找出其精华所在,对我国的素质 教育具有一定的启发意义。     

美国近二十年杜威教育思想研究新进展

注重基本文献的收集、整理和编纂是美国学者从事杜威研究的传统特色。近二十年,美国杜威研究界在基本文献的整理和杜威教育思想的深入研究两方面均取得了重要进展,出版了四卷《杜威书信集》光盘,以及《杜威与美国民主》《杜威:宗教信仰与民主人本主义》和《杜威与爱欲:教育艺术中的智慧和欲望》等一批优秀的研究著作。近二十年美国学术界对杜威教育思想研究的重点有以下几个方面:民主教育思想、实用主义教育思想的现代性内涵、杜威的美学理论与教育思想的关系、杜威的宗教理论与教育思想的关系等。近二十年美国的研究成果对杜威教育思想以正面评价为主。这些新进展反映了20世纪80年代以来国际政治意识形态对立趋缓后,人类面对高度现代性社会的共同挑战,开始公正地、全面地研究杜威教育思想的世界性趋势。     

John Dewey,William Wirt and the Gary Schools Plan: a centennial reappraisal

A century on from the height of John Dewey’s educational writings and the reputation of the Gary Schools Plan as a model of progressive education, the paper reappraises two key matters: the relationship between John Dewey and William Wirt, the first superintendent of the Gary Schools in Gary Indiana, and the coherence between John Dewey’s progressive pedagogies and the early years of the Gary Schools Plan. Through drawing on a range of primary and secondary sources of information, the paper analyses the connections between John Dewey, William Wirt and the Gary Schools Plan in their shared quest to extend progressive education into new urban and industrial schooling contexts. The paper highlights areas where existing assumptions require review and the extent to which the relationship and connections between Dewey and Wirt’s work were mutually beneficial. The paper ends by calling for further related research based on the archival material available.     

Dewey's Participatory Educational Democracy

In this essay, Emil Višňovský and Štefan Zolcer outline John Dewey's contribution to democratic theory as presented in his 1916 classic Democracy and Education. The authors begin with a review of the general context of Dewey's conception of democracy, and then focus on particular democratic ideas and concepts as presented in Democracy and Education. This analysis emphasizes not so much the technical elaboration of these ideas and concepts as their philosophical framework and the meanings of democracy for education and education for democracy elaborated by Dewey. Apart from other aspects of Deweyan educational democracy, Višňovský and Zolcer focus on participation as one of its key characteristics, ultimately claiming that the notion of educational democracy Dewey developed in this work is participatory.     

Running in Circles: Chasing Dewey

This paper explores the impact of John Dewey on the field of educational psychology. Dewey raised issues and ideas, such as the role of context and the reapproximation of knowledge, that would come to haunt education and psychology for the next century. And yet soon after the turn of the twentieth century, Dewey abandoned psychology and redefined his role in education. This paper traces some of the reasons behind the schism between Dewey and his ideas and the fields of education and psychology. The demand for a methodological purity, pushed by G.S. Hall and his students into the mainstream of both fields, elbowed Dewey's ideas out to the distant margins and Dewey himself out altogether. I argue that because the ideas and issues Dewey raised were never resolved, they keep reemerging in different theoretical forms. In the second part of this paper I examine four theoretical models that, in many ways, mirror Dewey's early ideas: Piagetianism/constructivism, sociocultural theory, cultural historical activity theory, and postmodernism.     

John Dewey as administrator: the inglorious end of the Laboratory School in Chicago

The Laboratory School of the University of Chicago founded by John Dewey in 1896 is considered as one of the most innovative schools of progressive education. Its history, and specifically its sudden end, is still of general interest. In sympathy with Dewey, most historians tend to put the main blame for the tragedy on University President William R. Harper who—by refusing financial and organizational support—seemingly harassed Dewey out of office. A new look at archival sources reveals a different picture. The main point of contention was not bureaucratic matters between Dewey and Harper but irreconcilable differences between Dewey’s wife Alice and the faculty of the school who complained bitterly about her social and administrative incompetence as principal pushing the school on to the brink of disaster. Because of the extreme pressure exerted by trustees, colleagues and faculties, Harper could not help but ask Alice Dewey for her resignation. Given his own inability to manage business affairs, Dewey quit his job, too, in April 1904. Without his wife as principal, he saw no chance of realizing his educational ideas and left Chicago with a sigh of relief, freeing him forever from the unloved burden of administrative duties.     

杜威“儿童中心论”的再认识

“儿童中心论”是杜威教育思想的重要内容,由于历史的原因,建国后我国对杜威的教育理论一直持否定的态度,不少人斥责他过于强调儿童的兴趣和需要,放纵了学生的自由,降低了教师威信、否定社会的作用。实际上,杜威强调儿童是教育活动的出发点,强调教育要尊重儿童的天性,促进儿童发展,同时杜威反对二元对立的思维方式。所以应从教育、社会、儿童的基本关系来理解杜威的“儿童中心论”。     

EXPLORING FEAR: ROUSSEAU,DEWEY, AND FREIRE ON FEAR AND LEARNING

Fear is not the first feature of educational experience associated with the best‐known progressive educational theorists—Jean‐Jacques Rousseau, John Dewey, and Paolo Freire. But each of these important thinkers did, in fact, have something substantive to say about how fear functions in the processes of learning and growth. Andrea English and Barbara Stengel juxtapose the ideas of these thinkers in this essay for three purposes: (1) to demonstrate that there is a progressive tradition that accounts for negative emotion in learning; (2) to explore doubt, discomfort, and difficulty as pedagogically useful, with links to fear as both a prompt for and an impediment to growth; and (3) to suggest that teachers take negative affect into account in their pedagogical practice. In doing so, English and Stengel join with contemporary theorists in and out of education to recognize that affect cannot be left out of social theory and that understanding the play of emotion is an integral part of creating truly educational contexts and experiences. The authors' focus here is on fear in processes of learning.     

Dewey in His Skivvies: The Trouble with Reconstruction

In this essay, Robbie McClintock argues that educational theorists have inflated John Dewey's deserved reputation beyond what the quality of his work can sustain. He briefly recounts how Dewey developed a program for reconstruction in philosophy, education, and social life with the aim of overcoming chronic dislocations in social life. McClintock sees two parts to Dewey's reconstruction: a negative program, in which Dewey rejects the metaphysical heritage that had induced these social dislocations; and a positive program, in which he advances scientifically grounded instrumentalities for a more humane conduct of life. McClintock hypothesizes that Dewey's negative reconstruction, based on facile historical reasoning, dismissed historical resources that could have strengthened his positive program to develop a naturalistic humanism, one more instrumental in the art of living. To explain his hypothesis, McClintock selectively shows how, in numerous works, Dewey rejected prior thinking unnecessarily as a means to advance his ideas, focusing in particular on Dewey's dismissive assessment of Immanuel Kant's and G. W. F. Hegel's work. McClintock criticizes Dewey's historical views to encourage present‐day educational thinkers to avoid emulating them and to make full, creative use of the philosophical tradition instead. He closes the essay by suggesting how historical reason can anticipate future possibilities and thus inform present action, and by calling on all to use it in humanizing the lifeworld we share.