Education and Culture

Greetings and welcome to the latest issue of Education & Culture. Before highlighting the articles featured in this issue (33.1), I would like to report briefly on the history and usage of the Open Access feature at Education & Culture. As you might recall, the journal moved to Open Access in 2013, making issues three years and older available through Purdue e-Pubs, the online publishing platform of Purdue University Press (PUP). This archive is accessible through the dropdown menu on the Education & Culture page of the PUP website (http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/eandc/) and extends all the way back to volume one from 1976. Almost since the day this feature was first enabled, it saw a great deal of activity, with articles being accessed from around the globe (as evidenced by the download map appearing at the bottom of the main Education & Culture page). Indeed, there are now many thousands of downloads each year, with, as I was just informed from the latest usage report, 5,000 downloads in April 2017 alone. This includes, for example, 25 downloads from Japan, 50 from China, 100 from Germany, 100 from South Africa, 351 from Mexico, over 700 from the UK, and over 2,000 from the US. I think it is fair to say from such data that Education & Culture enjoys an international readership and that interest in the life and work of Dewey remains strong and is genuinely global.

We begin this new issue of Education & Culture with a provocative article by Jeremiah Dyehouse and Krysten Manke entitled "The Philosopher as Parent: John Dewey's Observations of his Children's Language Development and the Development of His Thinking about Communication." It is well known that Dewey paid a great deal of attention to the growth and development of his children, but little of philosophical import is generally made of the issue. Dyehouse and Manke contend, however, that Dewey's informal inquiries "influenced the development of his early educational experiments as well as his later pragmatic communicative philosophy." Next, we come to Jeff Frank's probing "Bound to the Mimetic or the Transformative? Considering Other Possibilities." In this piece Frank, in the Deweyan spirit, attempts to rethink the philosophical construction and choreography of Philip Jackson's widely read "The Mimetic and the Transformative: Alternative Outlooks on Teaching" as a means of helping Jackson (and the reader) move fruitfully beyond the historical dualism of these longstanding traditions in teaching. We then segue into Lance Mason's explorations of Dewey's thinking about the democratic possibilities and purposes of education in "The Significance of Dewey's Democracy and [End Page 1] Education for 21^st Century Education." The main thrust of Mason's argument is that the term "21^st century education" has become a proxy for the uncritical assumption that the primary purpose of formal education is job preparation, whereas Dewey insists on a broader, more inclusive vision, namely, "that of cultivating a social spirit in students." Audrey Cohan and Charles Howlett then bring us to the always-timely subject of peace education in "Global Conflicts Shattered World Peace: John Dewey's Influence on Peace Educators and Practitioners." While "global conflicts shattered [Dewey's] hope for world peace," the authors report, "he persevered in his missive of democracy and tolerance," believing strongly that "democratic societies are best suited to preserve peace and societal harmony." With this in mind, Cohan and Howlett then examine the influence of Dewey's ideas on peace education in his own day as well as their continuing impact on contemporary approaches to peace education in the work of present-day practitioners. We finally conclude this stimulating issue with a close look at Sidney Hook's often controversial relationship with Communism in Courtney Ferriter's "Sidney Hook's Pragmatic Anti-Communism: Commitment to Democracy as Method." Rebutting common opinion, Ferriter argues compellingly that scholars and historians have tended to misread Hook's anti-Communism in perceiving it as the result of a blinkered dogmatism that belied his pragmatic roots. Upon more thorough examination, however, Ferriter finds that Hook always maintained a commitment to the democratic method characterizing Deweyan pragmatism, no less than the...