Sublime

This emphasis on criticality is crucial: it’s the nub of Dewey’s philosophy of education. Like Locke in the 17th century, Dewey was stressing the need for the cultivation of critical thinking for the making of a fair, open-minded citizenry—one which is able to think independently to contest bad ideas and question leaders. And it is raised again and

One of Dewey’s principal concerns was for the relationship between education and democracy. He made the point that democracy is not just a form of government—it is, rather, ‘a mode of associated living, a conjoint communicated experience’ (1916: 101). A good society was for Dewey an open society where people related on equal terms and all benefited

At the end of the nineteenth century, John Dewey, the American philosopher and educator, had pioneered the concept of the experimental, or laboratory, school. For most of his career, Dewey had no special interest in China, but in the spring of 1919 he was invited to deliver a series of lectures in Japan. When Dewey was in Tokyo, a delegation of Chi

Dewey’s disciple and successor in that post, William Kilpatrick, continued the tradition. Dewey’s protégé noted that schools should produce ‘better citizens, alert, able to think and act, too intelligently critical to be easily hoodwinked either by politicians or patent-medicines, self-reliant, ready of adaptation to the new social conditions that

Learning to think is all about what another 20th-century philosopher, Karl Popper, came later to call ‘conjectures and refutations’. Everyday problem solving, suggested Dewey (and Popper), comprises a process a bit like going into a coconut shy: you put ideas up and you do your best to knock them down again; you shouldn’t just accept the first idea

John Dewey and Paulo Freire in articulating the interrelation of politics and education.

Critical education theorist bell hooks, echoing Paulo Freire, calls this a “banking” model of education: we treat human learners as if they are safe-deposit boxes for knowledge and ideas, mere intellectual receptacles for beliefs. We then think of action as a kind of “withdrawal” from this bank of knowledge, as if our action and behavior were alway

In one of his later works, Experience and Education, Dewey regretted the slipping into camps that had come out of the vituperative discussion of progressive versus formal education. He said that we ‘should think in terms of Education itself rather than in terms of some ’ism about education, even such an ’ism as “progressivism” ’ (p. 6). Allegiance

John Dewey argued that every political project needs to create the public that can be its author.8 In the same way, every utopia has to call into existence the public necessary for its creation, a public that can champion and own it.