Abstract
In this paper I compare the roles that the explicit and implicit educational theories of John Dewey and John Rawls play in their political works to show that Rawls’s approach is skeletal and inappropriate for defenders of democracy. I also uphold Dewey’s belief that education is valuable in itself, not only derivatively, contra Rawls. Next, I address worries for any educational theory concerning problems of distributive justice. Finally, I defend Dewey’s commitment to democracy as a consequence of the demands of productive public inquiry and education.
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Notes
See Dworkin (1977). Dworkin’s example imagined an island setting in which people are given an equal set of seashells as a form of currency, which are to represent as a whole the total value of goods on the island. Dworkin was realistic through the many permutations and outcomes he can imagine in thinking that even when people start out fairly, inevitably circumstances will come about in which some will be dissatisfied with their lot. The envy test is his notion that a distribution is fair when no one envies the bundle of goods of the other. He believed it is inevitable, no matter how fair the starting point, that some will come to envy the bundles of others.
Charles S. Peirce first pointed out this fundamental flaw to intuitionist epistemological strategies. He developed his most direct statement of this problem in reference to his critiques of Cartesianism, and its notion of intuiting clear and distinct ideas. See “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man,” and “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” in Houser and Kloesel (1992, pp. 11–27, 28–55). It is true that with the notion of reflective equilibrium Rawls shed hard-line intuitionism and leaned in an inductivist direction, but this fact only supports my claim in this paper that the public give and take of concept formation is important and should be seen as a goal of education in political theory.
Recall, for example that Rawls called for a certain sort of “citizenship education” in the civil rights and laws of the land.
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for recommending I make explicit this distinction between Rawls, Nozick, and Dewey. Among other differences, liberal theorists generally treat persons as fully-formed, able to contract with one another before entering society at least hypothetically, for example.
Weitz focused on this passage in her article, but for a different purpose.
I am not here supporting the exclusions of citizenship that Aristotle puts forward.
Weitz incorrectly claims that Dewey presents this view in Democracy and Education. Her reference is actually to his essay, “Liberalism and Equality,” (Dewey 1936/1987, pp 368–372).
I believe this critique applies even if one does not hold to a time-slice interpretation of Rawls, since the same point can be made about process.
Callan wrote, “I claim that Rawls is mistaken. The distinction he draws between the two liberalisms is illusory.”
See Dewey (1916/1980), chapter 10, where he summarized this distinction between spectator and agent (or participant) approaches to knowledge and education.
The reference is to Dewey’s essay, “The Ethics of Democracy,” (1888/1969, pp. 227–249).
References
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Weber, E.T. Dewey and Rawls on Education. Hum Stud 31, 361–382 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-008-9101-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-008-9101-1