This essay draws from a pragmatic feminist approach. It outlines the importance of relational ethics and Deweyan democracy to educational practices using the exploitative situation of emergency remote learning and women teachers to show the impact of systems that were in place before the COVID-19 pandemic, but which have become more concerning…

This essay examines contemporary digital educational assessment and argues that there are underlying problematic values and consequences entailed by the datafication of education as coupled with assessment practices. By applying Dewey's work concerning curriculum, aims, growth, and the conception of democracy through education to current methods,…

In "Democracy and Education," John Dewey argued that teachers should have control over their own work. He was, though, not only concerned about workplace democracy for teachers. He also argued against the philosophical underpinnings of educational policies that reproduced social hierarchies in the workplace. The main arguments of Dewey's…

Dewey's idea of the secondary school emerged during the first thirty years of his academic career as he responded to historical realities and contemporary changes in secondary education in the United States. His advocacy of applying subject matter to the life of the student and to the life of society, integrating subject matter, an expanded…

In light of decades of formal denouncement of Deweyan ideas in China and the increasingly authoritarian practices under its current leadership, the recent revival of engagement with Dewey's work among Chinese educators and intellectuals appears extraordinary as well as paradoxical. How is it possible that a project as ardently democratic as…

This article explores the contours of the Indian pragmatist Bhimrao Ambedkar and his reconstruction of Buddhism in the 1950s. As a student of John Dewey at Columbia University, young Ambedkar was heavily influenced by the pragmatist ideas of democracy and reconstruction. Throughout his life he would continue to evoke Dewey's words and ideas in his…

This essay applies lessons from John Dewey's theory of democracy and democratic education to the modern development of information communications technologies and the assertion that the development of such technologies will lead to a more open, more democratic society. Given the continuity of the technology and its applications with structures of…

This article presents a novel account of a key concept in John Dewey's reconstructionist theory specifically related to the nucleus underlying his idea of democracy: intersubjective communication, what Dewey called the "democratic criterion." Many theorists relate democracy to a form of rule. Consequently, discussions of democracy tend…

In this article I aim to establish a relevant connection between John Dewey's educational philosophy and the hippie communes of the United States during the nineteen sixties and seventies. After an assessment of Dewey's philosophy against the background of the countercultural sixties, I summarize and organize Dewey's philosophical thought around…

John Dewey acknowledges that nationalism contributed not only to the establishment of the modern nation of the United States and its national unity, but also to the independence of other colonized countries in the twentieth century. At the same time, he is also concerned with the detrimental effects of nationalism on individual agency and…

This paper explores the significance of Dewey's "Democracy and Education" for "21st-century education," a term used by proponents of curricular standardization and digital ubiquity in classrooms. Though these domains have distinct advocacy groups, they often share similar assumptions about the primary purposes of schooling as…

In this paper, we explore the degree to which the Buddhist mindfulness practice and the habits of democratic citizenship can be reconstructed in light of each other. We ask what mindfulness is, seeking to first understand it in its Buddhist context. Then we turn to the work of John Dewey in order to seek possibilities for mutual reconstruction.…

This essay explores with the help of the discipline of philosophy of education the educational implications of the practice of canceling individuals or ideas. In particular, it investigates what gets lost or undermined when we cancel various opinions, words, and practices. To advance my argument, I first introduce some basic definitions while…

In recent years, opposition to Communism has emerged as Sidney Hook's central philosophical legacy in the eyes of scholars and historians, who tend to ignore all of Hook's pre-Cold War philosophical contributions. Furthermore, critics who treat Hook's anti-Communism often accuse him of abandoning pragmatism for dogmatism in his later career. In…

Educational politics in the United States is entangled in the notion that the foremost mission of education is, in the infamous words of Gov. Scott Walker's proposed revision of the University of Wisconsin's mission, "to develop human resources to meet the state's workforce needs." This general outlook is not an outlier. It is typical of…