Education and Culture

Introduction: Why Dialogue with Dewey Today?

John Dewey was engaged, throughout his work, in the reconstruction of American democracy and education. Committed to that philosophy for and in action that is pragmatism, a philosophy for solving the problems of human beings, he addressed himself to what he saw as the crisis of democracy in twentieth-century America. In 1927, discussing the erosion of the public sphere in American society, Dewey criticized what he saw as the hollow concept and practice of “citizenship” in democracy. In the “void between government and the public,” men became, he warned, “skeptical of the efficiency of political action.”¹ Indifference and apathy are the signs of a bewildered public—a state where one does not know “what one really wants.”² This is a kind of existential crisis of democracy. Dewey reminds us that the phenomenon of the “eclipse of the public”³ has a bearing not only on democracy as a matter of deliberative procedure or political participation, but also on one’s way of living, on an ethical dimension of life: the question of how one should live a good life. For him, the political task of democracy, what it means to be a citizen, is inseparable not only from the ethical but also from the educational—a dimension of education that involves the internal transformation of human being. He proposed the recreation of the “Great Community”—a public space in which different individual voices are heard through mutual learning and cooperation. How I should live is inseparably related to how I live with others.

In the beginning of the twenty-first century the significance of Dewey’s pragmatism needs to be critically reconsidered not only in America, but also on a global scale. Americanization, as both a dimension and an engine of globalization, flattens, rather than enhances, global awareness; or worse, it assimilates, in the name of hospitality, the different, the foreign, and the silent into its own home. Privatization [End Page 101] and selfish individualism, the standardization of taste in the global market—all present challenges to citizenship education. Furthermore the loss of common ground between ethnic and religious groups is demonstrated in continuing wars and tensions around the world. The sense of the lack of common ground is too real to be ignored. How should we initiate and continue the search for the common when we confront radical differences in values, with no apparent hope for reconciliation? In order to rectify this growing sense of lack, education in the “knowledge,” “skills,” and “dispositions” of citizenship has been offered as a solution.⁴ The nature of the skepticism and the nihilistic sense of loss seem to call for something more than—perhaps something that precedes—questions of knowledge, skills, and dispositions. If Dewey’s philosophy is the product of American thinking, how far is it itself a part of the problem of globalization? Or, if it aims to be a voice critical of its own culture and society, how far can Deweyan democracy resist the tide of Americanization? All these imminent challenges and questions require us to be engaged in dialogue with and reconstruction of Dewey’s pragmatism. This is also necessary for destabilizing the way in which we use the language of democracy in the discourse of a globalized economy, and for remembering a forgotten dimension of education—one that serves the task of creating democracy as a way of life. The point of this paper, therefore, is to revive and reconstruct Dewey’s pragmatism so that it becomes an alerting and inspiring voice in response to the nihilistic crisis of today’s democracy and education. In other words this is a Deweyan task of reconstruction in philosophy, and it prompts the present endeavor in the continuing critical reception of the inheritance of American pragmatism.

First, a hidden (or forgotten) dimension—the Emersonian perfectionist dimension—is discussed as a potentially helpful way of enhancing pragmatism’s potential today. I shall especially highlight three ethical modes of relation to others—open-mindedness, friendship, and sympathy—that Dewey proposes as crucial conditions for achieving democracy, starting at home, expanding outwards...