Sublime

...one of the movement’s greatest champions, John Dewey himself , publicly objected to the practices being designed and promoted in the name of his ideas.

For one, Dewey declined membership in the Progressive Education Association from its outset. (He did accept an honorary presidency after the death of Charles Eliot, but this appears to have been

to participate in the great decisions of government. There was, Lippmann brooded, no “intrinsic moral and intellectual virtue to majority rule.” Lippmann’s disenchantment with democracy anticipated the mood of today’s elites. From the top, the public, and the swings of public opinion, appeared irrational and uninformed. The human material out of wh

misleads the penetration of genius itself? The people has neither the time nor the means which are essential to the prosecution of an investigation of this kind: its conclusions are hastily formed from a superficial inspection of the more prominent features of a question.

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

But do not let us forget that tradition is one of the true virtues of democracy. Do not let us forget that curiosity and innovation, the appetite for anything new, are among the vices of aristocracy.