In this article, we first suggest that contemporary school policies and practices represent a utopia-gone-wrong. In striving for an unattainable educational utopia--that is, all students will be proficient in math and reading by 2014--current polices and their resulting practices have brought a classic dystopian turn--the dehumanization of…

Today's social and political context is filled with environmental elements that both support and work against deep, participatory democracy. I argue that certain democratic habits should be nurtured through a supportive formative culture, especially in schools, in order to best achieve good democratic life in the present context. My aim here…

In his books "Public Opinion" and "The Phantom Public," Walter Lippmann argued that policy leaders should deny the public a significant role in policymaking. Public opinion, he argued, would inevitably be ill-informed, self-interested and readily manipulated. In "The Public and its Problems," Dewey countered Lippmann…

In its broadest sense, pragmatism could be said to be the philosophical orientation of all action research. Action research is characterized by research, action, and participation grounded in democratic principles and guided by the aim of social improvement. Furthermore, action research is an active process of inquiry that does not admit…

The paper tackles the fundamental question of whether democracy has by now been turned into a meaningless liturgy of a past religion and proposes a Deweyan answer which points to the need to fully realize modernity in order to bring into existence a genuine democracy. By deploying an archaeological reading of "The Public and Its…

Educators frequently fret over how to bridge the gap between theory and practice. In an important sense, it is a false problem. Theory is simply the thoughtful, reflective phase of good practice. We will approach Dewey's philosophy as one of continuous creation and re-creation or even more precisely, social co-creation, that requires making…

I explore Montessori's story in terms of her initial warm reception by America to her educational research, and her later cooling off, once Dewey's student, Kilpatrick, published The Montessori System Examined and declared her work to be based on psychological theory that was fifty years behind the times. I argue that there is a troubling gendered…

John Dewey was not a philosopher of education in the now-traditional sense of a doctor of philosophy who examines educational ends, means, and controversies through the disciplinary lenses of epistemology, ethics, and political theory, or of agenda-driven schools such as existentialism, feminism, and critical theory. Rather, Dewey was both an…

The revolution that Matthew Lipman inaugurated in educational theory and practice in his Philosophy for Children program has two dimensions. The first--introducing philosophy as a subject matter in the elementary school--is based on the assumption that childhood is an appropriate stage of life to read, think, and talk about philosophical issues…

Dewey's conception of scientific explanation, which has been neglected by both philosophers of science and philosophers of education, facilitates overcoming the seeming divide between teaching a highly technical and specialized subject matter and encouraging students to successfully engage in the experience of being philosopher-scientists. By…

In this paper, I argue that many recent interpretations of John Dewey's vision of democracy distort that vision by filtering it through the prism of contemporary deliberative democratic theories. An earlier attempt to defend Dewey's theory of moral deliberation is instructive for understanding the nature and function of this filter. In James…

In this theoretical essay, my primary task is to develop a methodology for engaging the conceptual normativity, or common sense ideas, at work in the popular discursive practices of modern society. To do so, I will draw upon theories associated with continental philosophy, Deweyan pragmatism, and sociological theory that trace their lineages to…

This paper is dedicated to the investigation of an important, but not particularly well known, connection between the work of Hegel and Dewey's early educational ideas. A brief exposition of Hegel's position in the "Philosophy of Right" is offered, with a particular focus on Hegel's idea of absolute freedom. This exposition is followed by an…

The fifty years since the 100th anniversary of John Dewey's birth have marked the emergence of new technologies that afford a wealth of previously unknown approaches to learning, making it not only possible but practicable for Dewey's educational vision of participatory learning to be realized on a mass scale. This article discusses these…

Cosmopolitanism in 2009 is arguably the philosophical and social counterpart of the progressivism of 1909. In this article, the author argues that John Dewey's pragmatism has (at least) two valuable lessons for the theory and practice of cosmopolitanism. After situating Dewey in the current discussion of cosmopolitanism and locating this…