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THE PARADOX OF RACE AND CULTURE IN DEWEY'S DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2017

Thomas Fallace
Thomas Fallace*
Affiliation:
William Paterson University of New Jersey
*
fallacet@wpunj.edu
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Abstract

Democracy and Education was Dewey's magnum opus on education, the work in which he pulled together decades of research and thinking on schooling in a democratic society. It was also the work in which Dewey explicitly and implicitly affirmed his theories on race and cultural development. In this intellectual history, the author argues that Democracy and Education represented a transition in Dewey's thinking on race and culture, away from his previous concerns with psychological-sociological stage theory toward his expanded focus on cultural pluralism as an essential component of democratic life. As a result, Dewey presented a contradictory perspective on race and culture that both depicted nonwhite societies as previous steps in the universal stages of development, but also valued racial and cultural diversity as necessary elements of his theory of cultural pluralism. The juxtaposition of Dewey's pre-1916 concern with genetic stage theories and his post-1916 concern for cultural pluralism created a paradox in his views on race and culture, one with which educators are still struggling today.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , October 2017 , pp. 473 - 487
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2017 

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References

NOTES

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