Education Theory Reading Network

Reading: Dewey’s Philosophy of Education: Representing and intervening- in John Dewey’s Democracy and Education: A British tribute

Edited by Steve Higgins and Frank Coffield

First paragraph: 

Dewey’s insights into learning still provide rich ground for addressing fundamental questions of education. Educationalists continue to wrestle with problems he defined and delineated and the polarizations he contested but saw as a necessary element in the development of thought and action are as pertinent today as they were when he was writing. Questions of pedagogy, access, and knowledge are still much to the fore: on the one hand, the concern amongst educators to see ‘schooling as a site of knowledge construction’ (Yandell, 2014); on the other, a demand that curricula should consist of the transmission of the ‘best of what is thought and said’ (cited in Yandell, 2014). Dewey appreciated that such oppositions fail to capture all the issues at stake – or to put it in more Hegelian terms, the oppositions themselves have an expressive role to play.

Contact Brahm Norwich for the online link details and for a copy of the reading.