John Dewey · Philosophy
Dewey’s enlargement of democracy from a form of government into a whole way of living together: not merely voting and majority rule, but a mode of associated life rich in shared interests and open, free communication across every group.
Ask most people what democracy is and they will describe a machinery: elections, majority rule, representative assemblies, a constitution, the ballot. Dewey did not deny that democracy needs these political forms, but he insisted they are only the outward apparatus of something far deeper. Democracy, for Dewey, is not fundamentally a way of choosing rulers; it is a way of living together. Its home is not only the voting booth but the family, the workplace, the school, the neighborhood, every place where people associate. A country can have all the machinery of elections and still fail to be democratic in Dewey’s sense if its people live in fixed classes, walled off from one another, sharing few interests and communicating little across the barriers that divide them. Conversely, the democratic spirit is present wherever people meet as equals, pool their concerns, and work out their common life together through free communication. Democracy is primarily a quality of shared experience, and only secondarily a set of political institutions.
Dewey’s two criteria are worth dwelling on, because together they define his whole social ideal. The first - many and varied shared interests, consciously recognized - means that in a democracy people are bound together by a web of common concerns, and that they must constantly refer their own actions to others’ and consult others’ actions to guide their own. This mutual reference is the opposite of a society split into masters and servants, or into castes that never see the point of one another’s lives. The second - full and free interaction between groups - means that no group turns inward and rigid; each is open to the others, and this openness forces continual change, the readjustment of habit as people meet new situations through varied contact. Where these two conditions hold, barriers of class, race, and territory begin to dissolve, because people can no longer help perceiving the full human import of what they do. Democracy, on this account, is the name for a social life that is maximally shared and maximally open - a community whose members grow through the very breadth and freedom of their associated life.
Here Dewey’s politics and his educational philosophy fuse into one. If democracy is a demanding way of life - requiring citizens who can share widely, communicate freely, think for themselves, and cooperate with others unlike them - then those capacities do not appear by magic at the ballot box. They must be grown, deliberately, in every rising generation. This is why Dewey held that democracy and education are inseparable, and why he could say that a democracy is committed, by its very nature, to an education that develops in each person the power of independent thought and the disposition to cooperate. A society organized in fixed classes can afford to educate most of its people narrowly, training each merely for a preassigned slot. A democracy cannot: it needs every citizen to be capable of judgment and initiative, because in a democracy everyone shares in shaping the common life. So the democratic ideal makes a specific demand on schooling - it must be the kind of shared, active, thinking community life that we met in the first lesson, because only such a school forms the habits a democratic way of life requires. Democracy has to be created anew by each generation, and education is the means of its creation.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Dewey defined democracy as ‘more than a form of government; primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience,’ and measured any society by two criteria: how numerous and varied its shared interests are, and how full and free its interaction with other groups is. Explain democ…
Leads to Plato.
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