Abstract
The previous chapter explored a range of challenges created by the collaborative progressives’ commitment to reasoned, joint dialogue as the central practice of a democratic society. The pedagogy of John Dewey’s Laboratory School exemplified key limitations of this approach in the real world, preparing students for the world as Dewey and other collaborative progressives wished it had been, not as it really was.
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Notes
Jane Mansbridge, “A Paradox of Size,” in From the Ground Up, ed. George Bonnello (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992), 159–76.
For discussions of this problem, see Robert Alan Dahl and Edward R. Tufte, Size and Democracy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1973);
Robert Alan Dahl, On Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998);
Norberto Bobbio and Richard Bellamy, The Future of Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987);
Alexis de Tocqueville, J. P. Mayer, and Max Lerner, Democracy in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). This paradox is generally “solved” through a strategy of representative government (see Dahl and Tufte, Size and Democracy), an option I explore later.
For a more recent discussion of similar challenges, see Danilo Zolo, Democracy and Complexity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992).
John Dewey, “Review of Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann,” in The Middle Works: 1899–1924: Vol. 13, 1921–1922, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 344.
John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Columbus, OH: Swallow Press, 1954), 128.
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989);
Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (Malden, MA: Polity, 1999).
Ernesto Laclau, Emancipations (New York: Verso, 1996), 98–99.
Ibid., 40–41. Interestingly, see Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1922), 173: “The doctrine of the omnicompetent citizen is for most practical purposes true in the rural township.”
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
Cited in Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 225; also see 457.
John Dewey, “Freedom and Culture,” in The Later Works: 1925–1953: Vol. 13, 1938–1939, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 176.
See Anne Phillips, “Dealing with Difference: A Politics of Ideas or a Politics of Presence?” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 139–52.
Jane J. Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 414.
Katherine Camp Mayhew and Anna Camp Edwards, The Dewey School: The Laboratory School of the University of Chicago, 1896–1903 (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1936), 489.
John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 197.
Dewey, “A Common Faith,” in The Later Works, vol. 9, ed. Jo Anne Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), 57, 19, 17, italics added.
Steven C. Rockefeller, John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 64.
Gail Kennedy, “Pragmatism, Pragmaticism, and the Will to Believe—A Reconsideration,” The Journal of Philosophy 55, no. 14 (1958): 578–88.
Maxine Greene, “Exclusions and Awakenings,” in Learning from Our Lives, ed. Anna Neumann and Penelope L. Peterson (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997), 18–36;
Raymond D. Boisvert, “The Nemesis of Necessity: Tragedy’s Challenge to Deweyan Pragmatism,” in Dewey Reconfigured: Essays of Deweyan Pragmatism, ed. Casey Haskins and David I. Seiple (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 151–68.
On the importance of a tragic view of life in pragmatic thought, also see Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966);
see Aaron Schutz, “Contesting Utopianism: Hannah Arendt and the Tensions of Democratic Education,” in Preserving Our Common World: Essays on Hannah Arendt and Education, ed. Mordechai Gordon (Boulder: Westview, 2001), 93–126.
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© 2010 Aaron Schutz
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Schutz, A. (2010). John Dewey and a “Paradox of Size”. In: Social Class, Social Action, and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113572_4
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