Democracy, experience, and education: Promoting a continued capacity for growth

Phi Delta Kappan

Volumn 84, Issue 7, 2003, Pages 525-529

  Garrison, William H ^a  

^a Milpitas Unified School District   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 25844470522     PISSN: 00317217     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/003172170308400710     Document Type: Review

References (24)

1. Carl Glickman, Renewing America's Schools: A Guide for School-Based Action (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993), pp. 8-9.
2. In contrasting school renewal and school reform along the lines of traditional versus progressive values and beliefs, John Goodlad professes to a certain "scariness" in the language of school reform, where the "sheer omission" of any reference to a nurturing pedagogy "dehumanizes." John I. Goodlad, "Flow, Eros, and Ethos in Educational Renewal," Phi Delta Kappan, April 1999, pp. 574, 576.
3. In Chapter 1 of Experience and Education, titled "Traditional vs. Progressive Education," John Dewey wrote, "The history of educational theory is marked by opposition between the idea that education is development from within and that it is formation from without; that it is based upon natural endowments and that education is a process of overcoming natural inclination and substituting in its place habits acquired under external pressure." John Dewey, Experience and Education (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1938), p. 17.
4. For a more current rendition of the politics driving this argument, see Kristen L. Buras, "Questioning Core Assumptions: A Critical Readingofand Response to E. D. Hirsch's The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them," Harvard Educational Review, Spring 1999, pp. 67-93.
5. Linda Darling-Hammond, "Reframing the School Reform Agenda: Developing Capacity for School Transformation," Phi Delta Kappan, June 1993, p. 754.
6. Roger Soder, "When Words Find Their Meaning: Renewal Versus Reform," Phi Delta Kappan, April 1999, p. 569.
7. See, for example, Nel Noddings, "Renewing Democracy in Schools," Phi Delta Kappan, April 1999, pp. 579-83. Noddings addresses "the discourse that lies at the heart of education in a liberal democracy: What experience do students need in order to become engaged participants in democratic life?"
8. There is a substantial body of research that addresses the recurring myths regarding the failure of our public schools. See, for example, David C. Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle, The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America's Public Schools (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1996); or many of the articles written by Gerald Bracey in his monthly Kappan Research column and his annual Bracey Reports.
9. This becomes a "chicken-or-the-egg" question when arguing for the necessity of infusing democratic values into public educational institutions. But the issue is not how a more democratic educational process is necessary for a better democracy. To move beyond this circular prescription means understanding the "other half" of the relationship: how democracy is an essential ingredient of learning, necessary for education.
10. The non- or anti-democratic nature of schooling seems to be best understood today by the current movement for school renewal. In his introduction to the April 1999 Kappan Special Section on Educational Renewal, Roger Soder gives a brief overview of the challenges faced by those who see the substantial denial of democratic values in public education. Soder, op. cit.
11. Larry Cuban, "The Lure of Curriculum Reform and Its Pitiful History," Phi Delta Kappan, October 1993, pp. 183-84.
12. Michael W. Apple, "The Hidden Curriculum and the Nature of Conflict," Interchange, vol. 2, no. 4, 1971, pp. 27-40.
13. John S. Mann, "Curriculum Criticism," Teachers College Record, September 1969, pp. 27-40.
14. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916; reprint, New York: Macmillan, 1944), p. 76.
15. Jean Piaget, Science of Education and the Psychology of the Child (New York: Orion Press, 1970), p. 27.
16. Dewey, Democracy and Education, p. 81.
17. Ibid., p.100.
18. Dewey, Experience and Education, p. 48.
19. In discussing "the need of a measure for the worth of any given mode of social life," Dewey wrote, "Now in any social group whatever, even in a gang of thieves, we find some interest held in common, and we find a certain amount of interaction and cooperative discourse with other groups. From these two traits we derive our standard. How numerous and varied are the interests which are consciously shared? How full and free is the interplay with other forms of association?" Dewey, Democracy and Education, p. 83.
20. Dewey, Experience and Education, pp. 27-28.
21. At the perceptual level, my understanding of the world directs my exploration of the environment, which confirms or modifies my understanding. See Ulric Neisser, Cognition and Reality (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1976).
22. Dewey, Experience and Education, p. 67.
23. Ibid., p. 38.
24. Ibid., pp. 49-50.