Education and Culture

In assembling scholars for the John Dewey Symposium for the 2015 Annual Meeting in Chicago, I sought thinkers who would critically engage Maxine Greene’s philosophy of democratic education. The recent death of Greene (1917–2014), long-time member of the Society, friend and teacher of many members, and John Dewey Lecturer in 1988, had left a powerful absence among educational philosophers, and many had honored her legacy with loving tributes. The Symposium’s aim was to bring together scholars in critical engagement with her work.

Greene had interpreted, critiqued, and in some ways enlarged Deweyan philosophy for much of her career. Key to her democratic educational thought was the concept of the social imagination:

We also have our social imagination: the capacity to invent visions of what should be and what might be in our deficient society, on the streets where we live, in our schools. As I write of social imagination, I am reminded of Jean-Paul Sartre’s declaration that “it is on the day that we can conceive of a different state of affairs that a new light falls on our troubles and our suffering and that we decide that these are unbearable.”¹

Three philosophers of education sought to explore the theme of social imagination in Greene’s work. James Giarelli, Wendy Kohli, and James Stillwaggon contributed essays to the Symposium, which are published here. Maxine Greene herself is also published at the end of this set of papers. Giarelli, Kohli, and Stillwaggon all enjoyed rich relationships with Greene as her student, colleague, or friend, and usually in some combination of all three roles. Each of their essays here are cast within those relational webs. Together they weave a tribute that critically mines and extends Greene’s insights on the social imagination and the possibilities for democratic education.

Giarelli’s paper, “Maxine Greene on Progressive Education: Toward a Public Philosophy of Education,” reveals a treasure—one found in the cleaning out of old files. Giarelli took the occasion of the Symposium to reveal a never-published manuscript written by Greene in 1984. That manuscript was written for a book project that never reached fruition. The book was to examine the contributions of [End Page 1] The Social Frontier, a progressive education journal that was published from 1934 until 1939 (and as Frontiers of Democracy from 1939 to 1943).² Greene sent Giarelli the manuscript, “Liberalism and Beyond: Toward a Public Philosophy of Education,” in 1984, and he rediscovered it quite recently while cleaning out his files in preparation for retirement. We are honored to publish this “lost” manuscript of Greene’s in this issue of Education and Culture.

Giarelli’s essay revisits the connections between Greene and Dewey on democracy, particularly examining how their work both intersected with and diverged around democratic education themes. His essay examines Greene’s relationship with liberalism and progressivism by revisiting his correspondences with Greene as well as themes in her 1984 manuscript. Greene’s own essay narrates trends in educational philosophy and liberalism in her readings of issues of Social Frontier, providing a rich story of educational philosophy in North America and its perennial debates. Also revealed in Greene’s essay is her lifelong relationship with progressivism and progressive education. She was an insider-outsider: Greene navigated the male-dominated worlds of philosophy and progressive education and embraced significant strands of progressive thought, but she also brought significant critical interpretations to the discourse through her existential, phenomenological, and aesthetic treatments of democratic ideas. This liminal engagement with democratic progressivism yielded a rich “critical and complicated arc of thought,” as Giarelli notes of Greene’s work. Giarelli writes that for Greene, “a public philosophy of education must take biographies, background awareness, interpreted experience, and point of view into account,” which underscores the historical and the personal in the appearance of both Giarelli’s and Greene’s essays here.

Wendy Kohli, in “The Dialectical Imagination of Maxine Greene: Social Imagination as Critical Pedagogy,” reminds us of Greene’s existentialism as a tool for situating consciousness in the context of our own lived experiences in the world. Greene was...