John Dewey’s Democracy and Education 100 years Anniversary
Democracy and Education: Reversing the Democratic Recession?
Wednesday 26th October 2016
Dewey’s Democracy and Education represented a turning point in the educational discourse,
initiating a radically new regime for educational theory which has deeply influenced the 20th
century’s educational discourse. But what may be the current relevance of John Dewey’s political
philosophy of education?
To mark the centennial anniversary of the publication of John Dewey’s Democracy and Education
(New York: Macmillan, 1916), the Humanities research group invites to an open seminar on Dewey’s
political philosophy of education. This seminar also celebrates the 70th anniversary of John Dewey’s
honorary doctorate at the University of Oslo. The 7th June 1946 Dewey was awarded a doctor
honoris causa from the University of Oslo on the grounds that he was “one of our time’s most
influential philosophers, playing a vital role in the work to hinder fascism and Nazism” (Vaage 2000, p.
24).
The seminar focuses on two corresponding themes:
The dissemination and reception of the book
The first thematic area concerns the global diffusion and reception of the book. The global
reception of Dewey’s political philosophy of education - from Japan to Turkey, Soviet Union
and the Nordic countries - were of different kinds: (a) responses coming from institutions and
ideologies, such as the Catholic Church and Soviet-oriented Communism; and (b) responses
from European educational practitioners and policy-makers. Some representatives of this
latter group of reformers were often openly in agreement with Dewey, and their ideas
contributed to a re-contextualization and culture-specific elaboration of Dewey’s thoughts.
Others, however, were completely contrary to the spirit of Democracy and Education. In this
view, the ways in which Democracy and Education have been traveling over the last century
may help to situate and conceptualize educational policies, theories and experiences
throughout the world. In this seminar, we will particularly throw lights on the Nordic
reception of the book.
The relevance of Dewey’s political philosophy today
The second thematic area to be explored is the relevance of Democracy and Education today.
Taking the current cosmopolitan condition, democratic recession and a Europe in transition,
it is pertinent to ask to what degree Dewey’s political philosophy of education may help to
promote global citizenship education and mutual understanding. What categories and
notions of Dewey’s pedagogy seem timely and relevant for transnational educational policies
and debates on “21st Century learning”? May Dewey’s political philosophy offer tools for the
criticism of those trends in European policies that seem more to be modeled according to the
demands of the global marketization than from ideas on democratization and citizenship
education? May Dewey offer fruitful educational tools and perspectives in our efforts to
integrate refugees?
Program
10.00 Coffee
10.15 – 12.00, Aud. 2
Opening session. Welcome and Key note I
Welcome
 prof. Torill Strand, Head of Humanities Studies in Education
 prof. Berit Karseth, Dean of the Faculty of Educational Sciences
 prof. Tone Kvernbekk, Deputy Head of Department of Education
Prof Hansjörg Hohr:
Introduction of the key note speaker prof. David Hansen, Teachers College, Columbia
University, New York
Key note I:
Rethinking the Ethical and Political Purposes of the School in the 21st Century
Prof David Hansen, Teachers College, Columbia University
Comments and questions
12.00 – 13.15 Luncheon
13.15 – 16.00 Parallel sessions
Session 1 (Room 233):
Dewey on ethical-political
education
Session 2 (Room 234):
Beyond Dewey’s political
thinking
Session 3 (Room U31):
Reversing the democratic
recession?
Chair: Assistant professor
Elin Rødahl Lie, University of
Oslo
Chair: Associate professor
Harald Jarning, University of
Oslo
Chair: Research fellow Kjetil
Horn Hogstad, University of
Oslo
13.15-14.00
13.15-14.00
13.15-14.00
Associate professor Merete
Wiberg, Aarhus University:
Prof Klas Roth, Stockholm
University:
Prof Torill Strand, University
of Oslo:
Moral Education and the
Idea of “Bildung” in the
Philosophy of Dewey
The Paradoxical Attributions
of Democratic Will
Formation
14.15-15.00
Is Dewey’s Ethics so
Different from Kant’s
Practical Philosophy, as he
claims?
14.15-15.00
Prof emeritus Lars Løvlie,
University of Oslo:
Prof Jørgen Huggler, Aarhus
University:
Prof Katariina Holma,
University of Eastern
Finland:
14.15-15.00
Dewey for our Time?
15.15-16.00
A Critical Examination of
John Dewey’s Use of Other
Philosophers of Education in
Democracy and Education.
(1916)
15.15-16.00
Associate Professor David
Östlund, Södertörn
University:
Research fellow Claudia
Schumann, Stockholm
University:
Dewey and the Social
Settlement Ethos: Making
Democracy Real
Saying ’we’: Navigating
Differences, Cultivating
Solidarity
John Dewey’s Theory of
Growth and Citizenship in
Tanzania and Uganda
15.15-16.00
Prof Hansjörg Hohr
University of Oslo:
John Dewey’s Concept of
Democracy and
Consequences for the
School
16.00 Refreshments
16.15-18.00, Auditorium 2
Closing session: Key note II and panel discussion
Prof Torill Strand:
Introduction of the key note speaker prof. Marianna Papastephanou, Department of
Education, University of Cyprus
Key note II:
Dewey, the Colonial Traveller
Prof Marianna Papastephanou, Department of Education, University of Cyprus
Panel:
Marianna Papastephanou, David Hansen, Lars Løvlie, Katariina Holma, David Östlund
18.00 Reception
Abstracts
The Key notes
10.15 – 12.00 Key note I:
Rethinking the Ethical and Political Purposes of the School in the 21st Century
David T. Hansen, Teachers College, Columbia University
ABSTRACT: John Dewey’s Democracy and Education remains a provocative source of ideas
for rethinking the ethical and political purposes of the school in our current century. In this
presentation, I will review his vision of the school as he pictured it in 1916. I will comment on
how he conceived the concepts ‘democracy’ and ‘education’, since Dewey believed the two
should ‘merge’ in the everyday life of the school. Finally, I will address Dewey’s own critique
of his vision, showing that the questions he raised about its viability remain with us in 2016.
There are no panaceas for resolving our confused and conflicted times, riven as they are by
misinformation, misunderstanding, dogmatism, fear, and intolerance. But Dewey points the
way to a constructive ethical and political response to these conditions through ideas for
what schools could be (and in many case are) doing in the world today.
16.15-18.00 Key note II:
Dewey, the Colonial Traveller
Marianna Papastephanou, Department of Education, University of Cyprus
ABSTRACT: Setting out from Dewey’s utopian writings this article explores colonial and
developmentalist elements in his pragmatism. It reveals how multiple utopianizations of
childhood, piecemeal change and ‘traveling libraries’ operate in one of Dewey’s educational
policy writings and in his related travel narratives. Based on an ethical-political reading of
the relevant sources, the article weaves various questions into a theoretical standpoint of
‘learning by undoing’ to obtain a heightened view on the stakes and challenges of old and
current progressive pedagogies.
Session 1: Dewey on ethical-political education
13.15-14.00
Moral education and the idea of ‘Bildung’ in the philosophy of Dewey
Merete Wiberg, School of Education, Aarhus University
ABSTRACT: According to Dewey becoming a moral person encompasses the capacity to see
the perspective of the other and being able to understand how the acts of the individual
influence the welfare of others and the social group as a whole. In this sense, Dewey’s view
on moral education is political in its essence because he understood the work of morality in
school as integrated training for citizenship with the purpose of contributing to the
refinement of the social order. Educating moral principles must according to Dewey have
democracy and freedom, including the abilities to moral reflection, social imagination, and
intelligence, as guiding and moving ideas. Moral education is according to Dewey neither a
separate activity or a means for transmitting absolute values which conform to a certain
mission such as the task of a culture or a government. Therefore, Dewey argues for the social
and political role of the school while he at the same time argues for the autonomy of the
school. Dewey’s view on (moral) education has many similarities with the classical German
idea of ‘Bildung’ which has freedom, self-determination, democracy and humanity amongst
its core values. Furthermore, Dewey and ‘the concept of Bildung’ share the understanding
that the process of mediating between individual and society functions as a cornerstone in
the formation of character. These similarities with the concept of Bildung may be the reasons
why John Dewey's overall view on education became popular in the Scandinavian countries.
The paper investigates how moral teaching in the philosophy of Dewey plays a political role
and how Dewey’s view on moral education has similarities with the idea of Bildung.
14.15-15.00
Dewey for our time?
Lars Løvlie, Department of Education, University of Oslo
ABSTRACT: A recent discussion in the philosophy of education has invoked two powerful
metaphors, the first harking back to Hegel and the second inspired by Michael Oakeshott.
(See JOPE Issue 1 February 2016, and Bakhurst and Fairfield’s book Education and
Conversation 2016). The first metaphor describes formation or Bildung as the transformation
of a child's "first nature" into a "second nature" and introduces two ontologically distinct
orders: that of man’s instinctual animal nature, and that of civilized human nature or Bildung.
Education is to bring the child to reason or Bildung by eliminating the first and instill the
second. The second is of education as initiation, as expressed by Richard Peters and
portraying children as “barbarians outside the gates to be brought “inside the citadel of
civilization”. To my sense both metaphors get education wrong not only in their portrayal of
children but also in underwriting a paternalist point of view. The most striking feature is that
children are in fact shut out of the philosophical discourse. Apart from the odd and
illuminating anecdote from the opposition, there are no children in the equation. This part
only as an introduction and foil to the Deweyian alternatives I propose.
I have, as you may gather, misgivings about both metaphors and want to turn to John
Dewey’s philosophy in Democracy and Education (DE) for the presentation of views that
were formulated by him as early as around 1900, views that go counter to both metaphors.
As for the first I would hold “experience” as the continuous reconstruction of life and
civilization as against the idea of fixed stages and the idea of transformation as elimination of
children’s basic human capacities. As for the second I would suggest Dewey’s “mind” as the
range of activities that takes place in a world that contains brains and bodies and their
extensions, that is, tools like smart phones and the world-wide-web. He preferred the term
intelligence for the term reason, and was therefore open to defer “reason” to neonates as
well as to adults.
We may with Dewey think in terms of two (or maybe three) dimensions: time,
described in terms of the continuous experience, growth and reconstruction of the organism
in its world; and space, as the range of possible experiences that are not conceptually and
institutionally restricted; and place, as the particular interactive situations that are the a
priori condition for education in the first place. Philosophy of education can and should be
discussed within the broad scope of education, as presented in DE.
My main concern is, however, childhood and the child and our ways of description
within and without the confines of current school management and practices, which,
incidentally, tends to spurn the child perspective that for 200 years did inspire educational
reform. Dewey’s great contribution in the wake of Hegel’s dialectic was to see the child and
the school as interactive, that is, not as separate intellectual and practical objects, but as
participants in processes of learning not hampered by classifications and diagnoses. Most
important is that the child figures in DE and his earlier texts as this particular child: “The
concrete for the teacher is the mind of the child, not mind in general, but a particular mind, a
particular spirit in the individual child”, he writes in 1902.
This brings me to the theme of Dewey and science. He endorsed the empirical
sciences as the motor of intelligent social action. We are in fact invited to extend upon and
enrich Dewey’s view of children with the findings of child psychologists over the very last
generation, knowledge culled both from cognitive and psychodynamic theory, and from
neuroscience. My hunch is that there is continuity between Dewey’s psychological views 100
years ago and what we now find in the research conducted by people like Daniel Stern, Alison
Gopnik and Shaun Gallagher, just to mention a few relevant sources.
15.15 – 16.00
“Dewey and the social settlement ethos: making democracy real”
David Östlund, Södertörn University
ABSTRACT: This presentation stresses Dewey’s involvement in the social settlement
movement as a contextual key to understanding his educational thought. In particular his
active role at Hull House in Chicago, and his close intellectual exchange with Jane Addams, its
leader, had a formative role in his way of turning the problem of education into an
experimental field for his philosophical and political ideas. The settlement movement is
identified with a certain thought style (in Ludwik Fleck’s sense), viz. “the ideal of mutuality”.
This mode of perceiving social realities challenged social elites’ paternalistic claims to having
access to some superior or “absolute” point of view. It stressed the importance of
interchange between perspectives shaped by different experiences (“cultures” Addams and
Dewey would say). Such dialogues on equal terms were identified with true democracy. By
establishing concrete arenas of everyday interaction and exchange of knowledge, social
settlements attempted to bridge cultural rifts, in particular between social classes. In the
American case this also counted for borders between ethnicities and “races”, while the
dominant role of women linked the antipaternalist stance to feminism. The close parallels
between the settlement movement and “progressive” educational reform have been
observed since the 1960s within a discussion in American historiography concerning “the
Progressive Era” and the ambiguities of “the progressive movement”. Such ambiguities
should neither be exaggerated nor neglected with regard to Dewey, and a test case is his
attitudes to African Americans’ position and educational prospects during the era of federally
sanctioned racist segregation 1896-1954.
Session 2: Beyond Dewey’s political thinking
13.15-14.00
Is Dewey’s Ethics so different from Kant’s Practical Philosophy, as he claims?
Klas Roth, Department of Education, Stockholm University
ABSTRACT: The American philosopher John Dewey developed his pragmatism, and in
particular his instrumentalism or experimentalism with regard to a critique of German
philosophy in general and Immanuel Kant’s in particular. He does this in, inter alia, his
German Philosophy and Politics and his Ethics, in which he repeats a critique of Kant’s
practical philosophy, namely that the, according to him, pedantic duty that Kant expresses is
nothing else but empty and formal, and that it therefore does not pay enough or any
attention to particular situations, nor the consequences of action and hence cannot inform
people about what they ought to do, which Dewey argues an intelligent ethics should be able
to do. I will argue that Dewey criticizes a caricature of Kant’s practical philosophy, and that
his position is not radically different from Kant’s.
14.15-15.00
A critical examination of John Dewey's use of other philosophers of education in
Democracy and Education (1916)
Jørgen Huggler, DPU, Aarhus University
ABSTRACT: In Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education,
Dewey developed his own theory through discussions of classical educational philosophy
from Plato to behaviorism. In the paper, I am going to present and discuss Dewey's use of
these thinkers, in particular his replies to Rousseau and Herbart.
15.15 – 16.00
Saying ’we’: Navigating Differences, Cultivating Solidarity
Claudia Schumann, Stockholm University
ABSTRACT: In a progressively cosmopolitanizing world, one of the paradoxes of
individualization is that the growing demand for global mobility and flexibility poses serious
challenges for the fostering of solidarity while our personal freedoms increase. In Deweyan
spirit, critical theorist Axel Honneth argues that practices of solidarity play a vital role for the
future of democratic life insofar as they help actualize a more fully-fledged social freedom
beyond liberal theory’s thin notion of negative freedom. This conception of solidarity and
social freedom will be explored in light of Wittgensteinian ideas in order to make sense of the
intricate interplay of exemplarity, intersecting differences, power and embodiment. Saying
‘we’ is not simply an assertion of commonalities certain members of a community share in
contrast to others which we exclude by delineating this ‘we’. Rather, saying ‘we’ can also
function as an acknowledgment of claims others make upon us. How can we cultivate
relations of solidarity within educational institutions under these conditions?
Session 3: Reversing the democratic recession?
13.15-14.00
The Paradoxical Attributions of Democratic Will Formation
Torill Strand, University of Oslo
ABSTRACT: Dewey’s Democracy and Education represented a turning point in the educational
discourse, initiating a radically new regime for educational theory which has deeply
influenced the 20th century’s educational discourse. But to what degree may a Deweyan
outlook help to strengthen democratic will formation of today’s youths? In exploring this
question I read Dewey’s political philosophy of education. Focus is his radical theory of
democracy in relation to the paradoxes, promises and pitfalls of a Deweyan citizenship
education.
14.15-15.00
John Dewey’s Theory of Growth and Citizenship in Tanzania and Uganda
Katariina Holma, University of Eastern Finland
ABSTRACT: John Dewey’s Democracy and Education (1916) posits a vision of education
embedded in lived experience in which overcoming resistance and conflict leads to growth,
creating the conditions for further growth. On the basis of Dewey’s seminal contribution, it is
possible to claim that growth can be pursued in virtually every instance of human living.
Growth is also at the heart of one of the most crucial dimensions of Dewey’s philosophy: the
connection between democracy and education, and the Deweyan commitment to the
process of experience entails a belief in the intelligence of everyday citizens to determine
and pursue ends-in-view within their shared situations. In my presentation, I will explore the
potential of the notion of growth in conceptualizing the experiences of citizenship in the
context of the work of development NGOs in Tanzania and Uganda. My discussion is related
to a wider research project – “Growth into Citizenship in Civil Society Encounters” funded by
the Academy of Finland (2015-2019) – where we aim to gain a understanding of the
processes of “growth into citizenship” in these contexts both philosophically and empirically,
drawing on development studies, sociology, anthropology, political science, and
philosophical pragmatism. My presentation focuses particularly on the Deweyan theory of
growth and its potentials and limitations in these pluralist contexts.
15.15 – 16.00
Notes on Dewey's concept of democracy and consequences for the school
Hansjörg Hohr, University of Oslo
ABSTRACT:Some distinctions could ease the access to and discussion of Dewey's concept of
democracy. I will distinguish between reason, cause and manifestation. The reasons for
democracy explain why democracy is desirable. The concept of experience, here, is decisive
as democracy is the way of life that affords the best conditions for experience. Dewey's
deliberations on causes offer societal conditions for the existence of democracy. Central in
this respect will be democracy as a moral idea. It is about trust in the power of reason and of
free deliberation. As to manifestation it specifies what democracy is. In this respect the
thought of democracy as a personal way of life will be in focus while social structures are
seen as projections of the individual attitudes.
All three aspects seem to offer only modest support to a democratic education in school. As
to the opportunity to various and numerous activities the logic of school points in the
opposite direction. As to free deliberation there is a certain space for it in school, but the
main thrust is to become an informed citizen. And as to the tenet of social structures being
projections of individual attitude, that would make democratic education all but impossible.
However, there is a decisive criterion of democratic education already in "The Child and the
Curriculum" and that is that the curriculum has to be related to the child's experience in such
a way that the experience is challenged and nudged toward a more systematic organization
of knowledge.