dewey's concept of democracy and education

Here, democracy and education come together in a much more fundamental sense as expressions of life. John Dewey, (born October 20, 1859, Burlington, Vermont, U.S. Democratic society is peculiarly dependent for its maintenance upon the use in forming a course of study of. As such they provide us with new ways of conceptualizing the structure of schools and the nature of learning. Publisher description: John Dewey (1859-1952) believed that learning was active and schooling unnecessarily long and restrictive. Democracy and Education 1916, by John Dewey.

An existential consideration of occupations enables just that, wherein occupations define the functional unities of life, the character of social groupings, the ways in which growth is arranged. What we need, he argued, is a sense of education ‘pure and simple’ with ‘no qualifying adjectives prefixed’. In both cases we are simply appending an adjective to education, which Dewey found problematic. In this regard he sought to develop strategies and methods for training students through learning and discipline to become socially responsible adults. As with democracy and education, the educational import of occupations cannot be captured with a mere combination of terms as in ‘vocational education’. In this article I illuminate some of the further riches Dewey offered to understanding democracy and education, central to which is his theorization of ‘occupations’ as this aligns with his attempts to articulate a ‘coherent theory of experience’. Evidence for this greater depth can be seen in Dewey’s choice of subtitle for his text: an introduction to the philosophy of education. But there is significantly more to Dewey’s connection between democracy and education than ‘democratic education’ suggests. At first glance the connection may appear quite simple, with the two terms commonly combined today as ‘democratic education’.

Of enduring interest to philosophers of education is the intimate connection Dewey draws between Democracy and Education in this now century-old seminal work.

Dewey's concept of democracy and education