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In this paper I draw on the concept of Confucian self -cultivation to strengthen John Dewey’s democratic education project. For Dewey, democracy is primarily a form of associated living, marked by the broad sharing of interests and rich communication among social groups. In appealing to Confucian philosophy to bolster Dewey’s educational project I adopt the framework of global Intercultural philosophy, placing philosophical approaches from different cultural traditions together to augment intellectual resources and advance philosophical understanding. This approach initially dictates a comparative method: “setting into dialogue sources from across cultural, linguistic, and philosophical streams” (Littlejohn, n.d.). I draw particularly upon the Analects of Confucius, the collected works of John Dewey, and standard interpretive works. But I go beyond mere comparison, to argue for an enriched form of democratic education, bolstered by Confucian insights, and suitable for contemporary Western democracies.

John Dewey's Democracy and Education is the touchstone for a great deal of modern educational theory. It covers a wide range of themes and issues relating to education, including teaching, learning, educational environments, subject matter, values, and the nature of work and play. This Handbook is designed to help experts and non-experts to navigate Dewey's text. The authors are specialists in the fields of philosophy and education; their chapters offer readers expert insight into areas of Dewey work that they know well and have returned to time and time again throughout their careers. The Handbook is divided into two parts. Part I features short companion chapters corresponding to each of Dewey's chapters in Democracy and Education. These serve to guide readers through the complex arguments developed in the book. Part II features general articles placing the book into historical, philosophical and practical contexts and highlighting its relevance today.

In this essay, Leonard Waks reconsiders the issue of the public character of charter schools, that is, schools funded through public taxation but operated by non-state organizations such as nonprofit and for-profit educational corporations and nongovernmental public interest organizations. Using John Dewey's conception of a democratic public as a framework, Waks examines the following questions: (1) Are schools chartered and funded by government, but operated by nonprofit nongovernmental organizations, ever appropriate instruments of a democratic public? (2) If so, what criteria might distinguish those that are appropriate from those that are not? (3) How might public education be re-institutionalized so as to include the charter schools that are appropriate? Waks concludes that Dewey's theory of democratic publics can play a useful role in thinking about how to balance the democratic benefits of charter schools for the various subcommunities of our society with the democratic requirement of broad public discourse and intergroup education.

Background/Context Although the concept of listening had been neglected by philosophers of education, it has received focused attention since 2003, when Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon addressed it in her presidential address to the Philosophy of Education Society. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study Haroutunian-Gordon offered a cognitive theory of listening, according to which an act of listening involves raising questions about both the speaker's utterance and the listener's own beliefs. Research Design This article draws on the methods of philosophical analysis to provide a competing account of listening. This account distinguishes between two types of listening, a cognitive (thinking) type and a noncognitive (empathic feeling) type. Findings/Results By considering a number of familiar classroom incidents, I show that both kinds of listening have important roles in teaching and learning. Conclusions/Recommendations I conclude by questioning whether the empathic type of listening can directly be taught. I conclude that it cannot be, but that teachers can provide three kinds of “helps” indirectly to foster its growth in learners.

In this essay, Leonard Waks reviews three recent books on cosmopolitan education: Kwame Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers; Neil Burtonwood's Cultural Diversity, Liberal Pluralism, and Schools: Isaiah Berlin and Education; and Thomas Popkewitz's Cosmopolitanism and the Age of School Reform: Science, Education and Making Society by Making the Child. Each of the three books challenges cosmopolitan universalism. Appiah argues that universal principles do not help us understand how members of distinct cultural groups can flourish in close proximity. Burtonwood adds that the expression of these principles in conflict situations can offend and humiliate illiberal groups and render them culturally reactive, inventing restrictive ideals of cultural “purity” that block cosmopolitan harmony. Popkewitz argues that the cosmopolitan premise of enlightenment for all imposes civilizing disciplines on those the dominant groups perceive as “others,” disciplines that render them abject. Taken together, the three books provide important planks in a comprehensive critique of cosmopolitan universalism as a philosophy of education.

1. A Travelling Classic On the centennial anniversary of the publication of Dewey’s Democracy and Education (New York, Macmillan, 1916) this symposium (including contributions from European and non European scholars) explores both the epoch-making significance and the topicality of the ideas in Dewey’s masterpiece for the development of European educational reflection. Democracy and Education has frequently been represented as a turning point in educational discourse, inaugurating a radically...

The term ‘educational value’ may be used to refer to several distinct kinds of value, which fit together in a complex pattern. This chapter reviews the most important kinds of value and then constructs a conception of educational value suitable for assessing the value of MOOCs as educational instruments. The key kinds of value of enduring importance in education are technical value – being good at various intellectual and practical arts, and use value – being good for some end. One subspecies of use value – beneficiality or being good for the good of a being – is of particular importance. Good education conduces to technical goodness that benefits learners. The book then addresses the twin questions: can MOOCs contribute to goodness at intellectual and practical arts, and are MOOCs beneficial – in the broadest sense – for learners?

In an earlier article I drew a distinction between two general types of listening. In one the listener brings pre-determined categories to bear in extracting useful information from the speaker’s utterance. In the other the listener suspends such categories to hear as much as possible in the utterance. This distinction has been challenged by Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon. This article responds to her critique.

This article provides a close reading of Democracy and Education, situated in the context of Dewey’s work prior to and during World War I, to illuminate the close tie between Dewey’s overriding concerns during this period and today’s educational concerns. The analysis suggests two projects for contemporary democratic educators.

In interview format this paper provides an introduction to the US education system for the non‐American faculty member, focusing primarily on the university sector. Issues addressed include: key differences inherent in the US system (versus the majority of the world); the structure of education; the role of the individual states and that of the federal government; funding; accreditation; faculty assessment and promotion; and the practicalities of teaching for an American university.

Globalization, unlike 20th century social and economic developments, will cause fundamental rather than merely incremental educational change. `Globalization' refers to a complex of technological and economic factorsincluding the global spread of communicationtechnology networks, and the global integration ofproduct and labor markets. I argue that (1) there is a powerful new alliance among elites and educational consumers for fundamental change; (2) globalization destabilizes the internal processes of school organizations that constrain fundamental change,motivating educators to innovate; (3) globalization erodes the institutional categories of public discourse that hold standard school practice in place, allowing a `shadow institution' of non-standard educational agencies to form; and (4) new synthetic visions of educational institutions in better accord with models of rational action in networked environments, are being formulated; and (5) these are now guiding a convergence of piecemeal innovations towards a fundamentally transformed institutional pattern.

In his books Public Opinion and The Phantom Public, Walter Lippmann argued that policy leaders should deny the public a significant role in policy-making. Public opinion, he argued, would inevitably be ill-informed, self-interested and readily manipulated. In The Public and its Problems, Dewey countered Lippmann by arguing that the problem of the public was neither self-interest nor misinformation, but lack of community. He proposed a theory of public ideas - new public social science and a new journalism that gave social investigations the “potency of art” as a means for community formation. Dewey added nothing in The Public and its Problems to explain just how literary art could weld individuals into a community. In this paper I draw on the Dewey corpus to flesh out that crucial phase of his argument. The "double merger" account I offer also illuminates hidden connections between the ‘Great Community’ (chapter 5) and the necessity of local exchanges in ‘The Problem of Method’ (chapter 6) of The Public and its Problems. Dewey’s account is that (1) works of social inquiry presented with the “potency of art” (e.g., works of investigative creative non-fiction) provide broad audiences with immersive common experiences, and (2) local exchanges stemming from these immersive experiences can lead to a blurring of personal, ego-centric identities in a common citizen identity that supports effective common action.

Rorty's neopragmatism is an attempt to retrofit Dewey's experimentalism for the post-modern situation. Specifically, he substitutes "language" for "experience" and "culture" for "science", to arrive at a philosophy "no closer to science than to art". I argue that the first move results from misunderstanding of the role experience plays in the context of verification in Dewey's experimental logic. The second move leaves Rorty without any alternative method even for approaching the very problems which Dewey proposed to solve with his experimentalism.

This paper explores the changes associated with the move from an industrial to a postindustrial society and discusses the corresponding shifts in education. After reviewing a number of contemporary responses to the present crisis within society, the paper examines some of the implications for the concept of citizenship and suggests that, while much remains unknown, the task of education in a postindustrial society will still be to furnish knowledge and skills that articulate with the requirements of social life.

In “Reimagining Teacher Education” (RTE) Deborah Seltzer-Kelly and her co-authors bring a “complexity perspective” to teacher education, embracing a “complexity-based model” to “re-imagine the preparation of teachers” and to forestall deficit models of academic problems and oppositional attitudes of students. They also adopt a complexity-based method of inquiry, as Seltzer-Kelly, the lead author, preserves the “richness and variety of the multiple voices” of her co-authors while seeking to “draw them together” to “highlight some connections”. This method (quoting A. P. Bochner) “gives up the illusions of transcendental observation in favor of the possibilities of dialogue and collaboration.” In what follows I comment briefly upon this unconventional method, consider the “rhetoric of equity and meritocracy” its authors locate as a primary source of deficit models, and provide an additional perspective on complexity-based teacher education.

Introduction By 1909, when Dewey celebrated his fiftieth birthday, he had long since augmented the pragmatic ideas of Charles Peirce and William James and forged from them a powerful method of philosophical, social, and educational critique and reconstruction. James had labeled him a philosophical hero and his ideas were inspiring leading philosophers and progressive era reformers. Following his death in 1952, and by his centennial year 1959, during the depths of the Cold War and the ascendency of Anglo-American analytical philosophy, Dewey was at best a marginal figure in both social criticism and philosophy. In recent years, however, his star has again risen. Dewey’s pragmatism has attracted abundant scholarly attention, inspired a new wave of original pragmatist thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Cornel West, and Richard Shusterman, and in Dewey’s sesquicentennial year is again an important resource in addressing contemporary issues. Cosmopolitanism in 2009 is arguably the philosophical and social counterpart of the progressivism of 1909. In this paper, I argue that Dewey’s pragmatism has (at least) two valuable lessons for the theory and practice of cosmopolitanism. After situating Dewey in the current discussion of cosmopolitanism and locating this cosmopolitan strain in his own philosophy, I show the value of his theory of inquiry as a meta-theory for cosmopolitan studies and of his theory of agency through art for building cosmopolitan publics for deliberation and action.

During the years 1982–1983 a consensus emerged among U.S. leaders in government, business, and education regarding educational reform. Responding to a new “information era,” leaders asserted the need for a new core curriculum of “new basics,” to promote higher order skills and scientific and technological literacy, hands-on familiarity with computers to produce “computer literacy,” and the utilization of the new information technologies to improve learning in traditional curriculum areas. But since then certainty about the role of technology has faded. Despite the rush to purchase computers and put them to use in schools, district level planning has been grossly inadequate and procurement decisions have often been unwise. Potentially important technologies have been neglected, while visionary ideas for using computers to build “higher order skills” for typical learners in the traditional curriculum areas have not been validated. The “high tech” consensus of 1983 has collapsed, and a new policy agenda for “restructing” the schools has begun to emerge.

Ivan Mich — philosopher, historian, educator, and social critic — was born in Vienna, Austria, on September 4, 1926. In the Fall term of 1990, the Penn State Science, Technology, and Society Program organized a symposium on Illich’s thought to celebrate his fifth year as our colleague and in anticipation of his sixty-fifth birthday in 1991. Rustum Roy put the idea in motion by urging several members of the STS faculty and invited guests to prepare informal talks on the key books in the Mich corpus and the major themes explored in them.

It is difficult for readers new to Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Societyto grasp its message unless they place it in the ideological context of the late 1960s. Painting with a broad brush, we may say that focal concerns of this time included inequality, psychological impotence, and environmental crisis

Citizens in our technological society are increasingly confronted with lifestyle choices and public policy issues which are beyond the scope of widely distributed analytical, interpretive, and practical skills. Examples of these issues include life-extension, genetic screening, solid waste disposal, strategic defense in space, release of genetically engineered organisms into the environment, and funding the super-collider and human genome projects. Because an intelligence sufficient to confront such matters is not possessed by masses of people from all social groups, the quality of our lives, our democratic institutions, our natural environment, and the very existence of future generations are all threatened.

The STS education movement is identified and related to the critique of technology of the 1960s–1970s. The critics of technology included the system of education in their critiques. There is a practical tension or “contradiction” in attempting to develop their insights within the curriculum routines of the schools and colleges. This tension is explored under six categories: reductive knowledge, socialization of technical modes of thinking, technicalized processes of learning, the loss of meaning, radical monopoly over learning, and the socialization of secular values.

The Indian-America philosopher Sri Chinmoy Ghose has distinguished between outer silence, inner silence, and innermost silence. In this paper I explore these distinctions and their educational relevance. My main conclusions are that (a) a deep inner silence, undistracted by questions or other thoughts, is at the root of one paradigm kind of good listening in education, and (b) what Chinmoy refers to as “innermost silence” is the moral virtue of receptivity to others that sustains inner silence, even under challenging conditions, a virtue of importance in teaching and in learning from others.