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John Dewey (1859–1952) was one of American pragmatism’s early founders, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, and arguably the most prominent American intellectual for the first half of the twentieth century. Dewey’s educational theories and experiments had global reach, his psychological theories influenced that growing science, and his writings about democratic theory and practice helped shape academic and practical debates for decades. Dewey developed extensive and often systematic views in ethics, epistemology, logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, and philosophy of religion. Because Dewey’s approach was typically genealogical, couching his views within philosophy’s larger history, one finds in Dewey a fully developed metaphilosophy.

Dewey’s “cultural naturalism” (which he favored over “pragmatism” and “instrumentalism”) is a critique and reconstruction of philosophy within the ambit of a Darwinian worldview (Lamont 1961; MW4: 3). Following William James, Dewey thought philosophy had become overly technical and intellectualistic, divorced from assessing everyday social conditions and values ( FAE , LW5: 157–58). Philosophy, he believed, needed to be reconnected with education-for-living (philosophy as “the general theory of education”), viz., social criticism at the most general level, a “criticism of criticisms” ( EN , LW1: 298; see also DE , MW9: 338).

Understood within the Darwinian evolutionary arena, philosophy becomes an activity taken by interdependent organisms-in- environments. From this standpoint of active adaptation, Dewey criticized traditional philosophers’ tendency to abstract and reify concepts derived from living contexts. Along with other classical pragmatists, Dewey critiqued metaphysical and epistemological dualisms (e.g., mind/body, nature/culture, self/society, and reason/emotion) reconstructing their elements as parts of larger continuities. For example, human thinking is not a phenomenon categorically external from the world it seeks to know; indeed, such knowing is not a purely rational attempt to escape illusion and discover ultimate “reality” or “truth”. Rather, knowing is one among many ways organisms with evolved capacities for thought and language cope with problems. Minds, then, are not passive observers but are engines of active adaptation, experimentation, and innovation; ideas and theories are not rational fulcrums to transcend culture, but rather function within culture, adjudged on situated, pragmatic grounds. Knowing, then, is no “divine spark”, for while knowing (or inquiry , to use Dewey’s term) includes calculative or rational elements, these are agentially entangled with the body and emotions.

Beyond academia, Dewey was an active public intellectual, infusing contemporary issues with insights found in philosophy. He addressed topics of broad moral significance, such as human freedom, economic alienation, race relations, women’s suffrage, war and peace, and educational methods and goals. Typically, he integrated discoveries made via public inquiries back into his academic theories. This practice-theory-practice rhythm powered every area of Dewey’s intellectual enterprise, and perhaps explains the enduring usefulness of his philosophy in many academic and practical arenas. The fecundity of Dewey’s ideas continues to manifest in aesthetics, education, environmental policy, information theory, journalism, medicine, political theory, psychiatry, public administration, sociology, and philosophy, per se.

Short Chronology of the Life and Work of John Dewey

2.1 associationism, introspectionism, and physiological psychology, 2.2 the “reflex arc” and dewey’s reconstruction of psychology, 2.3 instincts/impulses, 2.4 perception/sensation, 2.5 acts and habits, 2.6 emotion, consciousness, 3.1 the development of “experience”, 3.2 traditional views of experience and dewey’s critique, 3.3 dewey’s positive account of experience, 3.4 metaphysics, 3.5 the development of “metaphysics”, 3.6 the project of experience and nature, 3.7 empirical metaphysics and wisdom, 3.8 criticisms of dewey’s metaphysics, 4.1 the organic roots of instrumentalism, 4.2 beyond empiricism, rationalism, and kant, 4.3 inquiry, knowledge, and truth, 5.1 experiential learning and teaching, 5.2 traditionalists, romantics, and dewey, 5.3 democracy through education, 7. political philosophy, 8. art and aesthetic experience, 9.1 dewey’s religious background, 9.2 aligning naturalism and religion, 9.3 “religion” vs. “religious”, 9.4 faith and god, 9.5 religion as social intelligence—a common faith, collections, abbreviations of dewey works frequently cited, individual works, b. secondary sources, other internet resources, related entries, 1. biographical sketch.

John Dewey lead an active and multifarious life. He is the subject of numerous biographies and an enormous literature interpreting and evaluating his extraordinary body of work: forty books and approximately seven hundred articles in over one hundred and forty journals.

Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont on October 20, 1859 to Archibald Dewey, a merchant, and Lucina Rich Dewey. Dewey was the third of four sons; the first, Dewey’s namesake, died in infancy. He grew up in Burlington, was raised in the Congregationalist Church, and attended public schools. After studying Latin and Greek in high school, Dewey entered the University of Vermont at fifteen and graduated in 1879 at nineteen. After college, Dewey taught high school for two years in Oil City, Pennsylvania. Subsequent time in Vermont studying philosophy with former professor H.A.P. Torrey, along with the encouragement of the editor of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy , W.T. Harris, helped Dewey decide to attend graduate school in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University in 1882. There, his study included logic with Charles S. Peirce (which Dewey found too “mathematical”, and did not pursue), the history of philosophy with George Sylvester Morris, and physiological and experimental psychology with Granville Stanley Hall (who trained with Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig and with William James at Harvard). [ 1 ]

Though Dewey later attributed important credit to Peirce’s pragmatism for his mature views, Peirce had no sizable impact during graduate school. There, his main influences—Neo-Hegelian idealism, Darwinian biology, and Wundtian experimental psychology— created a tension he fought to resolve. Was the world fundamentally biological, functional, and material or was it inherently creative and spiritual? In no small part, Dewey’s career was launched by his attempt to mediate and harmonize these views. While sharing the idea of “organism”, Dewey also saw in both — and rejected— any aspects he deemed overly abstract, atomizing, or reductionistic. His earliest attempts to create a “new psychology” (aimed at merging experimental psychology with idealism) sought a method to understand experience as integrated and whole. As a result, Dewey’s early approach modified English absolute idealism. In 1884, two years after matriculating, Dewey graduated with a dissertation criticizing Kant from an Idealist position (“The Psychology of Kant”); it remains lost.

While scholars still debate the degree to which Dewey’s mature philosophy retained early Hegelian influences, Hegel’s personal influence on Dewey was profound. New England’s religious culture, Dewey recalled, imparted an “isolation of self from the world, of soul from body, [and] of nature from God”, and he reacted with “an inward laceration” and “a painful oppression”. His study (with George Sylvester Morris) of British Idealist T.H. Green and G.W.F. Hegel afforded Dewey personal and intellectual healing:

Hegel’s synthesis of subject and object, matter and spirit, the divine and the human, was, however, no mere intellectual formula; it operated as an immense release, a liberation. Hegel’s treatment of human culture, of institutions and the arts, involved the same dissolution of hard-and-fast dividing walls, and had a special attraction for me. ( FAE , LW5: 153)

Philosophically, early encounters with Hegelianism informed Dewey’s career-long quest to integrate, as dynamic wholes, the various dimensions of experience (practical, imaginative, bodily, psychical) that philosophy and psychology had defined as discrete.

Dewey’s family, as well as his reputation as a philosopher and psychologist, grew while at various universities, including the University of Michigan (1886– 88, 1889–1894) and the University of Minnesota (1888–89). At Michigan, Dewey developed long-term professional relationships with James Hayden Tufts and George Herbert Mead. In 1886, Dewey married Harriet Alice Chipman; they had six children and adopted one. Two of the boys died tragically young (two and eight). Chipman had a significant influence on Dewey’s advocacy for women and his shift away from religious orthodoxy. During this period, Dewey wrote articles critical of British idealists from a Hegelian perspective; he taught James’ Principles of Psychology (1890), and labeled his own view “experimental idealism” (1894a, The Study of Ethics , EW4: 264).

In 1894, at Tuft’s urging, President William Rainey Harper offered Dewey leadership of the Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago, which also included Psychology and Pedagogy. Motivated to put these disciplines into active collaboration, Dewey accepted and began building the department by hiring G.H. Mead from Michigan and J.R. Angell, a former student at Michigan (who also studied with James at Harvard). Dubbed the “Chicago School” by William James, Dewey, Tufts, Angell, Mead and several others developed “psychological functionalism”. He also published the seminal “Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” (1896, EW5; hereafter RAC ), and broke from transcendental idealism and his church.

At Chicago, Dewey founded The Laboratory School, a site to test psychological and educational theories. Dewey’s wife Alice was the principal from 1896–1904. Dewey became active in Chicago’s social and political causes, including Jane Addams’ Hull House; Addams became a close personal friend of the Dewey’s. Dewey and his biographer, daughter Jane Dewey, credited Addams with helping him develop his views on democracy, education, and philosophy. The significance of Dewey’s intellectual debt to Addams is still being uncovered (“Biography of John Dewey”, Dewey 1939a; see also Seigfried 1999, Fischer 2013).

In 1904, conflicts related to the Laboratory School lead Dewey to resign his Chicago positions and move to the philosophy department at Columbia University in New York City. There, he established an affiliation with Columbia’s Teacher’s College. Important influences at Columbia included F.J.E. Woodbridge, Wendell T. Bush, W.P. Montague, Charles A. Beard (political theory) and Franz Boas (anthropology). Dewey retired from Columbia in 1930, going on to produce eleven more books.

In addition to many significant academic publications, Dewey wrote for various non-academic audiences, notably in the New Republic ; he was active in leading, supporting, or founding a number of important organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Association of University Professors, the American Philosophical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the New School for Social Research. Dewey spoke out to support progressive politics and social change. His renown as a philosopher and educator lead to numerous invitations; in 1922, he inaugurated the Paul Carus Lectures (revised and published as Experience and Nature , 1925), gave the 1928 Gifford Lectures (revised and published as The Quest for Certainty , 1929), and gave the 1933–34 Terry Lectures at Yale (published as A Common Faith , 1934a). He traveled for two years in Japan and China, and made notable trips to Turkey, Mexico, the Soviet Union, and South Africa.

In 1946, almost two decades after Alice Chipman Dewey died (1927), Dewey married Roberta Lowitz Grant. John Dewey died of pneumonia in his home in New York City on June 1, 1952.

Source: H&A 1998, xiv

• 1859 Oct. 20. Born in Burlington, Vermont
• 1879 Receives A.B. from the University of Vermont
• 1879–81 Teaches at high school in Oil City, Pennsylvania
• 1881–82 Teaches at Lake View Seminary, Charlotte, Vermont
• 1882–84 Attends graduate school at Johns Hopkins University
• 1884 Receives Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University
• 1884 Instructor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Michigan
• 1886 Married to Alice Chipman
• 1888–89 Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota
• 1889 Chair of Department of Philosophy at the University of Michigan
• 1894 Professor and Chair of Department of Philosophy (including psychology and pedagogy) at the University of Chicago
• 1897 Elected to Board of Trustees, Hull-House Association
• 1899 The School and Society
• 1889–1900 President of the American Psychological Association; Studies in Logical Theory
• 1904 Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University
• 1905–06 President of the American Philosophical Society
• 1908 Ethics
• 1910 How We Think
• 1916 The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, Democracy and Education, Essays in Experimental Logic
• 1919 Lectures in Japan
• 1919–21 Lectures in China
• 1920 Reconstruction in Philosophy
• 1922 Human Nature and Conduct
• 1924 Visits schools in Turkey
• 1925 Experience and Nature
• 1926 Visits schools in Mexico
• 1927 The Public and its Problems
• 1927 Death of Alice Chipman Dewey
• 1928 Visits schools in Soviet Russia
• 1929 The Quest for Certainty
• 1930 Individualism, Old and New
• 1930 Retires from position at Columbia University, appointed Professor Emeritus
• 1932 Ethics
• 1934 A Common Faith, Art as Experience
• 1935 Liberalism and Social Action
• 1937 Chair of the Trotsky Commission, Mexico City
• 1938 Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, Experience and Education
• 1939 Freedom and Culture, Theory of Valuation
• 1946 Married to Roberta (Lowitz) Grant; Knowing and the Known
• 1952 June 1. Dies in New York City

2. Psychology

Dewey’s involvement with psychology began early. He hoped the emerging discipline would answer philosophy’s deepest questions. His initial approach resembled Hegelian Idealism, though it did not incorporate Hegel’s dialectical logic; instead he sought new methods in psychology (Alexander 2020). By overcoming longstanding divisions (between subject and object, matter and spirit, etc.) he would show how human experiences —physical, psychical, practical, and imaginative —all integrate in one, dynamic person ( FAE , LW5: 153). Dewey’s large ambitions for psychology (as the new science of self-consciousness), imagined it as the “completed method of philosophy” (“Psychology as Philosophic Method”, EW1: 157). Nominally a textbook, Psychology (1887 EW2) introduced psychology’s study of the self as ultimate reality.

Dewey developed his own psychological theories. Extant accounts of behavior were flawed, premised upon outdated and false philosophical assumptions. (He eventually judged that such larger questions about the meaning of human existence exceeded the resources of psychology.) Dewey’s work at this time reconstructed components of human conduct (instincts, perceptions, habits, acts, emotions, and conscious thought) and these proved integral to later, mature accounts of experience. They informed his lifelong contention that mind, contrary to long tradition, is not fundamentally subjective and isolated, but social and interactive, emerging in nature and culture.

Dewey’s entry into psychology coincided with two dominant trends: introspectionism (arising from associationism, a.k.a., “mentalism”) and the newer physiological psychology (imported from Germany). Earlier British empiricists, such as John Locke and David Hume, explained intelligent behavior with (1) internally inspected (“introspected”) entities, including perceptual experiences (e.g., “impressions”), and (2) thoughts or ideas (e.g., “images”). These accrue toward intelligence via an elaborate process of associative learning. Discovery-by-introspection was indispensable to many empiricists, and to physiological cum experimental psychologists (e.g., Wundt).

Dewey was deeply influenced by graduate study of physiological psychology with G. Stanley Hall, whose classes included theoretical, physiological, and experimental psychology. Dewey conducted laboratory experiments on attention. Unlike the introspectionists, Hall’s methods incorporated strict experimental controls, a biology-based approach which proffered Dewey an organic and holistic model of experience capable of overcoming the subjectivist dualisms plaguing the older, associationist models. [ 2 ] However, Dewey still found experience atomized and mechanistic in physiological psychology, stemming from a reliance upon “sense data”. From his Hegelian perspective, this psychology could never account for a wider, socio-cultural world. Briefly, for Dewey, “organism” entails “environment” and “environment” entails “culture”. A rigorously empirical psychology could restrict study to “the” mind but was bound to forge connections with other sciences. [ 3 ]

Dewey sought an account of psychological experience that respected experimental limits and culture’s pervasive influences. James’s tour de force, The Principles of Psychology (1890), modeled how to explain the conscious and intelligent self without appealing to a transcendental Absolute. The Principles’ emphatically biological conception of mind, Dewey recalled, gave his thinking “a new direction and quality” and “worked its way more and more into all my ideas and acted as a ferment to transform old beliefs” ( FAE , LW5: 157). Rather than measuring psychic phenomena against preexisting abstractions, it deployed a “radical empiricism” that starts from lived experience’s actual phases and elements and aims to understand its functional origins.

One expression of this Jamesean turn was Dewey’s seminal critique of the reflex arc concept (1896). The “reflex arc” model of behavior was an influential way to empirically and experimentally explain human behavior using stimulus-response (cause-effect) pairings. It sought to displace less observable and testable approaches relying upon “psychic entities” or “mental substance”. In the model, a passive organism encounters an external stimulus, causing a sensory and motor response — a child sees a candle (stimulus), grasps it (response), burns her hand (stimulus), and pulls her hand back (response). This makes explicit the event’s basic stimuli and responses, describing connections in mechanistic and physiological terms. No recourse to mysterious and unobservable entities is necessary.

Dewey criticized the reflex arc on several grounds. First, events (sensory stimulus, central response, and act) are artificially separated for purposes of analysis. “The reflex arc”, Dewey wrote, “is not a comprehensive, or organic unity, but a patchwork of disjointed parts, a mechanical conjunction of unallied processes” ( RAC , EW5: 97). Second, the model falsifies genuine interaction; organisms do not passively receive stimuli and then actively respond; rather, organisms continuously interact with environments in cumulative and modifying ways. The child encountering a candle is already actively exploring, anticipating; noticing a flame modifies ongoing actions. “The real beginning is with the act of seeing; it is looking, and not a sensation of light” ( RAC , EW5: 97). Third, the model too rigidly designates certain events ( the stimulus, the response); it reifies them and ignores a wider, ongoing matrix of activity. Effectively, Dewey was pointing out the ironic fact that the reflex arc model — intending to shed metaphysical assumptions — was inadvertently creating new ones. We are seeking to discover, Dewey argued, “what stimulus or sensation, what movement and response mean ” and we are finding that “they mean distinctions of flexible function only, not of fixed existence ” ( RAC , EW5: 102; emphasis mine). His suggestion is pragmatic; rather than an underlying reality ( pure stimulus, pure response), psychology should look to meanings. Pragmatically, then, terms such as stimulus, response, sensation, and movement “mean distinctions of flexible function only, not of fixed existence” ( RAC , EW5: 102). Meanings of terms are understood once they are seen as functional acts in a dynamic context that includes aims and interests. [ 4 ]

Dewey’s critique and reconstruction of the reflex arc presaged other important developments in his pragmatism. The wider lesson was the need to pay greater attention to context and function, and he applied it over his career to science more broadly, and to logic and mathematics. This was a warning not to mistake analyses’ eventual outcomes as evidence for already-existing entities. [ 5 ] It was also a reminder that specific applications of theory earned salience by their value in a longer temporal context, checked both prospectively and retrospectively.

Rather than recount Dewey’s extensive reconstruction of the human self, here is a cursory review to illustrate how he developed some basic notions: instincts/impulses, perceptions, sensations, habits, emotions, sentiency, consciousness, and mind.

James had already attacked attempts to explain complex, developed behavior by reference to preexisting impulses and instincts (e.g., “Habit”, James 1890: chapter 4); Dewey continued the assault. Such explanations fail to consider instinct’s plastic and pliable character. Across a variety of individuals, instincts considered simple or basic are anything but—they blossom into many different habits and customs. [ 6 ] Also, instincts are not pushing an essentially passive creature, but are actively taken up in diverse circumstances, for diverse purposes. “Instinct”, like “stimulus”, has meaning depending upon contextual factors which may include biological and socio-linguistic responses. There is no psychology without social psychology, no plausible inquiry into pure, biological instincts (or other “natural” powers) without consideration of social and environmental factors, let alone the particularities of a given inquiry. As interactive phenomena-in-environment, instincts/impulses are better framed as transactions ( HNC , MW14: 66).

Dewey’s argument about instincts applied to perception and sensation as well — do not base an empirical science on unquestioned, metaphysical posits, and do not rely upon strictly analytical methods that use simple elements to build up complex behavior. Too often, such methods are inadequate to explain psychological phenomena. Accordingly, Dewey attacked the then-common view that a perception (1) was simply and externally caused, (2) completely occupied a mental state, and (3) was passively received into an empty mental space.

Such elements grow out of an erroneous “psychophysical dualism” that radically separates perceiver from world. Consider (1), perception as causation. Perception as simply and externally caused is contravened by the Darwinian, ecological model. There, organism-environment interactions include, but are not ontologically reducible to , “minds”, “bodies”, and their impingements— the so-called “impressions” and “ideas” of modern philosophy. We do encounter surprising, unbidden events but such occurrences do not justify leaping to metaphysical conclusions, that there is a world “out there” and a mind “in here”.

While experience is profoundly qualitative, qualities are never simply received nor are they contextless. This new view of qualities rejects the longstanding dualism between “objective” and “subjective”. A lemon’s “yellowness” or “tartness” are neither in a perceiver nor in a lemon; each quality emerges from complex interactions that can later be characterized ( as “tartness”) for reasons germane to the inquiry. Dewey wrote,

The qualities never were ‘in’ the organism; they always were qualities of interactions in which both extra-organic things and organisms partake. ( EN , LW1: 198–199)

Thus, as discriminated, perceptions and qualities are made in inquiry and language, not reports of ontological entities that are simple, discrete, or ultimate. “Perception”, then, is shorthand for more complicated interacting events. “Red” abstracts from a more complex experience (e.g., red-car-merging-into-my-lane), and the pragmatic question becomes, What is the function of this abstraction? How does it mediate thought or action for future experiences? (“A Naturalistic Theory of Sense-Perception”, LW2: 51; EN , LW1: 198–199)

Regarding (2), perceptions pervading mental states, Dewey echoes James in “The Stream of Thought” (James 1890: chapter 9). While a perception may occupy mental focus, there is also an attendant “fringe” which contributes contrast and creates, in the wider situation, an “underlying qualitative character” (“Qualitative Thought”, LW5: 238 fn. 1). The aforementioned “tartness” of the lemon relies for its character upon a slew of “fringe” conditions (e.g., immediate past flavors, gustatory anticipations, etc.).

Finally, regarding passive reception (3), perception is already a “taking up” by organisms already functioning in situations; there is no instantaneous and passive apprehension of stimuli. Taking up always means selectivity, a process of adjustment that take some time. Perception is never naïve, never a confrontation with some “given” content already imbued with inherent meaning. Long before Wilfred Sellars (see entry on Sellars ) dismissed the passive-perception-encounter as modern empiricism’s “Myth of the Given”, Dewey had rebuked such claims. All seeing is seeing as —adjustments within larger acts. These habits of adjustment can change (subsequent selections and interpretations are modified), so what is perceived can shift ( DE , MW9: 346).

The 1896 “Reflex Arc” paper argued that simpler constituents are insufficient to explain complex behavior; Dewey found that the “act” provided a better starting point ( HNC , MW14: 105). Acts help organisms cope with their environment; they direct movement. Acts exhibit selectivity and express interest, which make things meaningful. Our ancestors’ selective acts to satisfy instinctive hunger resulted in choosing certain foods (safe) over others. Over time, more elaborate interest in food becomes social norms (dining, e.g.) and aesthetic expectations (cuisine).

Following James and Peirce, Dewey integrates “habit” deeply into his philosophy, using it to explain various dimensions of human experience (biological, ethical, political, and aesthetic) as manifested in complex and social behaviors—walking, talking, cooking, conversing. [ 7 ] Habits are complex, composed of acts which unfold in time. Acts may begin with instinct borne of need and muddle toward reintegration and satisfaction. To become a habit, an act-series changes gradually and cumulatively; one act leads to the next. “Habit” emerges when acts cumulatively link to structure experience. Habit, Dewey wrote, “is an acquired predisposition to ways or modes of response, not to particular acts” ( HNC , MW14: 32). Such “ways” draw on past experiences, including social and linguistic interaction. Habits shared by groups are “customs”.

Dewey challenged assumptions about the routine nature of habits. Habits may become routine, but are not strictly automatic or insulated from conscious reformulation. Indeed, they cannot be literally automatic because every situation is somehow new. Thus, the same exact acts never repeat. Unlike machine routines, organic habits remain plastic, changeable. Habitually eating sweets is subject to contingency (toothache) and modification (restraint); thus, conscious reflection is the first stage of habits’ revision.

He also challenged the notion that habits were dormant powers, waiting to be invoked. Instead, habits are “energetic and dominating ways of acting” determining what we do and are: “All habits are demands for certain kinds of activity; and they constitute the self” ( HNC , MW14: 22, 21). Habits are not individual possessions or inner forces; rather, they are transactions between organisms and environments, functions making adaptation or reconstruction possible.

Habits enter into the constitution of the situation; they are in and of it, not, so far as it is concerned, something outside of it. (“Brief Studies in Realism”, MW6: 120)

Because situations are cultural as well as bio-physical, habits are ineliminably social. So-called “individual” habits emerge within the social world of friends, family, home, work, media, etc. Change of habit, then, is not a project of invoking sheer willpower, but rather one of intelligent inquiry into relevant, frequently wider and social, conditions (psychological, sociological, economic, etc.).

Dewey redescribed “emotion” as he did “habit” — a basic form of involvement in “coordinated circuits” of activity. But while habits are controlled responses to problematic situations, emotion is not predominantly controlled or organized; emotion is an organism’s “perturbation from clash or failure of habit” ( HNC , MW14: 54). As with the other psychological accounts, Dewey reconstructs emotion as transactional with other experiences (also typically analyzed as discrete — “rational,” “physical,” etc.).

Dewey’s account draws upon Darwin and James. Darwin argued that internal emotional states cause organic expressions which, depending on their survival value, may be subject to natural selection. James sought to decrease the distance between emotion and accompanying bodily expression. In cases of emotion, a perception excites a pre- organized physiological mechanism; recognizing such changes just is the emotional experience: “we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike” (James 1890 [1981: 450]). Dewey’s “The Theory of Emotion” (1894b & 1895, EW4) pushed James’ point further, toward an integrated whole (feeling-and-expression). Being sad is not merely feeling sad or acting sad but is the purposive organism’s overall experience. In effect, Dewey is gently correcting James’ (1890) reiteration of mind-body dualism. To understand emotion, we must see that “the mode of behavior is the primary thing” (“The Theory of Emotion”, EW4: 174). Like habits, emotions are not private possessions but emerge from the dynamic organism-environment complex; emotions are “called out by objects, physical and personal” as an intentional “response to an objective situation” ( EN , LW1: 292). As I encounter a strange dog, I am perplexed about how to react; usual habits are inhibited and there is emotion. (“The Theory of Emotion”, EW4: 182) We may say emotions are intentional insofar as they are “ to or from or about something objective, whether in fact or in idea” and not merely reactions “in the head” ( AE , LW10: 72).

Philosophically, emotion is a central feature of Dewey’s critique of traditional epistemology and metaphysics. By pursuing simple or pure rational access (to truth, reality) such systems misrepresent and castigate emotion as distraction, confused thought, or bodily interference; naturally, emotion becomes something needing to be suppressed, controlled, or bracketed. For Dewey, emotion is courses through individuals (reasoning, acting) and social groups (creating cultural meanings). He connects the traditional balkanization of emotion to non-philosophical motives, such as the segregation of leisure from labor and men from women. On Dewey’s reading, traditional rationalistic approaches require not just logical but moral critique.

2.7 Sentiency, Mind, and Consciousness

Dewey’s accounts of sentiency, mind, and consciousness build upon those of impulse, perception, act, habit, and emotion. A cursory view completes this sketch of Dewey’s psychology.

As with other psychic phenomena, sentience emerges through organism-environment transactions. Creatures seek to satisfy needs and escape peril; when precarity disrupts stability a struggle to reestablish balance begins, and what follows is adjustment of self, environment, or both. Sometimes previously successful methods (pre-organized responses) fail, and we become ambivalent. Divided against ourselves about what to do next, it proves advantageous to inhibit practiced responses (look before leaping). It is this inhibitory pause of action that, Dewey wrote, “introduces mental confusion, but also, in need for redirection, opportunity for observation, recollection, anticipation” ( EN , LW1: 237). In other words, inhibition makes new ways of considering alternatives possible, imbuing crude, physical situations with new meaning. Thus, Dewey wrote, sentiency or feeling

is in general a name for the newly actualized quality acquired by events previously occurring upon a physical level, when these events come into more extensive and delicate relationships of interaction. ( EN , LW1: 204)

At this stage, the new relationships are not yet known ; they do, however, provide the conditions for knowing. Symbolization, language, liberates these now-noticed relationships using tools of abstraction, memory, and imagination ( EN , LW1: 199).

Dewey rejected traditional accounts of mind-as-substance (or container) and more contemporary reductions of mind to brain states ( EN , LW1: 224–225). Rather, mind is activity, a range of dynamic processes of interaction between organism and world. Language offers some clues to the diversity of ways we can think of mind: as memory (I am re mind ed of X); as attention (I keep her in mind , I mind my manners); as purpose (I have an aim in mind ); as care or solicitude (I mind the child); as heed (I mind the traffic stop). “Mind”, then, ranges over many activities: intellectual, affectional, volitional, or purposeful. It is

primarily a verb…[that] denotes every mode and variety of interest in, and concern for, things: practical, intellectual, and emotional. It never denotes anything self-contained, isolated from the world of persons and things, but is always used with respect to situations, events, objects, persons and groups. ( AE , LW10: 267–68)

As Wittgenstein ( entry on Wittgenstein, section on rule-following and private language ) pointed out 30 years later, no private language (see entry on private language ) is possible given this account of meaning. While meanings might be privately entertained, they are not privately invented; meanings are social and emerge from symbol systems arising through collective communication and action ( EN , LW1: 147).

Active, complex animals are sentient due to the variety of distinctive connections they have with their environment. But “mentality” (mindfulness) arises due to the eventual ability to recognize and use meaningful signs. With language, creatures can identify and differentiate feelings as feelings, objects as objects, etc.

Without language, the qualities of organic action that are feelings are pains, pleasures, odors, colors, noises, tones, only potentially and proleptically. With language they are discriminated and identified. They are then “objectified”; they are immediate traits of things. ( EN , LW1: 198)

The bull’s charge is stimulated by the red flag, but the automobile driver takes the red stoplight as a sign.

Dewey thus de-divinized mind while accentuating new aspects of mind’s significance. No longer our spark of divinity, as some ancients held, mind is also no mere ghost in a machine. Mind is vital , investigating problems and inventing tools, aims, and ideals. Mind bridges past and future, an “agency of novel reconstruction of a pre- existing order” ( EN , LW1: 168).

Like mind, consciousness is also activity—the brisk transitioning of felt, qualitative events. Profoundly influenced by James’s metaphor of consciousness as a constantly moving “stream of thought” ( FAE , LW5: 157), Dewey did not conclude that an account of consciousness could be adequately captured in words. Talk about consciousness is always elliptical—it is “vivid” or “conspicuous” or “dull”—always falling shy of the phenomenon. Because the experience of consciousness is ever-evanescent, we cannot fix it as with objects of our attention— for example, “powers”, “things”, or “causes”. Dewey, then, evokes but does not define consciousness. Consider these contrasts in Experience and Nature , ( EN , LW1: 230)

As the comparison makes obvious, psychological life is processual and active; accordingly, Dewey describes consciousness in terms suiting dynamic organisms. Consciousness is thinking-in-motion, ever-reconfiguring series of events that are felt as qualitative experience proceeds. If mind is a “stock” of meanings, consciousness is the realization-and-reconstruction of meanings, reconstructions which can reorganize and redirect activity ( EN , LW1: 233).

Dewey occasionally tried to convey his notion of consciousness performatively, inviting readers to reflect about consciousness while they were reading about it. Here, again, “focus” and “fringe” play a crucial role. ( EN , LW1: 231). As physical balance controls walking, mental meanings adjust and direct ongoing foci and interpretation.

3. Experience and Metaphysics

Dewey’s notion of “experience” evolved over the course of his career. Initially, it contributed to his idealism and psychology. After he developed instrumentalism in Chicago during the 1890’s, Dewey moved to Columbia, revising and expanding the concept in 1905 with his historically significant “The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism” ( PIE , MW3). “The Subject-matter of Metaphysical Inquiry” (1915, MW8) and the “Introduction” to Essays in Experimental Logic (1916, MW10) developed the concept, showing “experience” did more than rebut subjectivism in psychology, but was also central to his metaphysical accounts of existence and nature (Dykhuizen 1973: 175–76). This was concretized in Dewey’s 1923 Carus Lectures, revised and expanded as Experience and Nature (1925, revised edition, 1929; EN , LW1). Further extensions and elaborations followed, notably in Art as Experience (1934b, AE , LW10). [ 8 ]

Pivotal to his oeuvre, interested readers should track experience across this entry; here, the focus will be on Dewey’s philosophical method and metaphysics.

Why was experience so important that it permeated Dewey’s approach to philosophy? Three influences were paramount. First, Dewey inherited Darwin’s idea of nature as a complex congeries of changing, transactional processes without fixed ends; in this context, experience means the undergoing and doing of organisms-in-environments, “a matter of functions and habits, of active adjustments and readjustments, of coordinations and activities, rather than of states of consciousness” (“A Short Catechism Concerning Truth”, MW6: 5). Second, Dewey took from James a radically empirical approach to philosophy—the insistence that perspectival experience, (e.g., the personal , emotional , or temperamental ) was philosophically relevant, including to abstract and logical theories. Finally, Dewey accepted Hegel’s emphasis on experience beyond the subjective consciousness — manifest in social, historical, and cultural modes. The self is constituted through experiential transactions with the community, and this vitiates the Cartesian model of simple, atomic selves (and any methods based upon that presumption). Understood this way, philosophy starts where we start, personally — with complex, symbolic, and cultural forms.

These influences, plus Dewey’s own inquiries, convinced him “experience” was the linch-pin to a broader theory of human beings and the natural world. This renewed focus on experience also amounted to a metaphilosophy; it discarded the assumption that philosophy gave special insights into ultimate truth or reality. Philosophy was equipment for living.

As both sheer terminology and as Dewey deployed it, “experience” generated much confusion and debate. Dewey commented about this toward the end of his life. [ 9 ] Decades later, one of Dewey’s foremost philosophical celebrants, Richard Rorty, lambasted Dewey for both the term and (what Rorty perceived as) Dewey’s intentions. [ 10 ] (Rorty 1977, 1995, 2006) (Rorty 1977, 1995, 2006) Nevertheless, since the term lives on, both in Dewey’s work and in everyday discourse, it deserves continued analysis.

Understanding Dewey’s view of experience requires, first, some notion of what he rejected. It was typical for many philosophers to construe experience narrowly, as the private contents of consciousness. These might be perceptions (sensing), or reflections (calculating, associating, imagining) done by the subjective mind. Some, such as Plato and Descartes, denigrated experience as a flux which confused or diverted rational inquiry. Others, such as Hume and Locke, thought experience (as atomic sensations) provided the mind at least some resources for knowing, but with limits. All agreed that percepts and concepts were different and in tension; they agreed that sensation was perspectival and context-relative; they also agreed that this relativity problematized the assumed mission of philosophy—to know with certainty—and differed only about the degree of the problem.

Dewey disputed the empiricist conviction that sensations are categorically separable contents of consciousness. This belief produced a “whole epistemological industry” devoted to the general problem of “correspondence” and a host of specific puzzles (about the existence of an external world, other minds, free will, etc.) (“Propositions, Warranted Assertibility, and Truth”, LW14: 179). This “industry” isolates philosophy from empirically informed accounts of experience and from pressing, practical problems. Regarding mental privacy, Dewey argued that while we have episodes of what might be called mental interiority, it is a later development: “Personality, selfhood, subjectivity, are eventual functions that emerge with complexly organized interactions, organic and social” ( EN , LW1: 162; see also 178–79). Regarding sensorial atomicity, discussed previously in the section on psychology ,

Dewey explained sensation as embedded in a larger sensori-motor circuit, a transaction which should not be quarantined to any single phase—nor to consciousness.

Dewey levied similar criticisms against traditional accounts of reflective thought. He denied a substantial view of mind, especially one ontological apart from body, history, or culture. Reasoning is one function of mind, not the exercise of a separate “faculty”. There is no reason to purify reasoning of feeling, either; reasoning is always permeated with feelings and practical exigencies. It may be practical, at times to “bracket out” a feeling or exigency when they interfere with mental calculating, but it is nevertheless true that reasoning subsists in a wider and “qualitative world” (“Psychology and Work”, LW5: 243).

We have, already, an outline of Dewey’s view: experience is processual, transactional, socially mediated, and not categorically prefigured as “rational” or “emotional”. We add three additional, positive characterizations of experience: first, as experimental ; second, as primary (“had”) or secondary (“known”); and third, as methodological .

First, experience exhibits a fundamentally experimental character. Dewey’s saw, during decades in education, how children’s experiences alternate between acting and being acted upon. Such phases become “experimental” when agents (students) consciously relate what is tried with what eventuates as they come to understand which actions are significant for controlling future events. When experience is experimental, we name the outcome “learning”. [ 11 ]

Second, most of experience is not known or reflective; it is barely regulated or reflected upon. As such, it is “felt” or “had”. Dewey also calls such experience direct and primary. The other kind experience, the focus of philosophy, is characterized by “knowing” or mediation-by-reflection. Dewey labels these “indirect”, “secondary”, or “known”. Known experience abstracts from had (or direct) experience purposefully and selectively, isolating certain relations or connections. The Quest for Certainty provides a cogent description:

[E]xperienced situations come about in two ways and are of two distinct types. Some take place with only a minimum of regulation, with little foresight, preparation and intent. Others occur because, in part, of the prior occurrence of intelligent action. Both kinds are had ; they are undergone, enjoyed or suffered. The first are not known; they are not understood; they are dispensations of fortune or providence. The second have, as they are experienced, meanings that present the funded outcome of operations that substitute definite continuity for experienced discontinuity and for the fragmentary quality due to isolation. ( QC , LW4: 194) [ 12 ]

Dewey’s had/known distinction describes existence without presupposing a dualism between appearance/reality. Much can be unknown without therefore being illusory or merely apparent. Pace Plato, we are not trapped in a cave of illusions with reason as our only escape. We cope with a world that is often confusing or opaque; as we try to make meaning, we keep track of ideas especially helpful predicting and controlling circumstances. Some other experiences are simply enjoyed without making them less real .

Third, Dewey’s renewed and expanded focus on experience was methodological. This requires some unpacking. Dewey’s distinction between experience “had” and “known” was more than a phenomenological observation; it was directive about how philosophy should be done. (We can see this kind of move embedded in Peirce’s pragmatic maxim and James’s radical empiricism.) For Dewey, experience is not just “stuff” presented to (or witnessed by) consciousness; experience is activity, engagement with life. Philosophy, too, is a form of lived activity, which means that doing philosophy properly requires a different starting point. In life, even philosophers do not start with a theory. Theories undoubtedly enter in, but not first. “The vine of pendant theory”, Dewey wrote about the denotative method, “is attached at both ends to the pillars of observed subject-matter” ( EN , LW1: 11; see also 386). [ 13 ]

Following James and Peirce, Dewey is challenging the theoretical assumptions of previous philosophies—“substances”, “mind vs. body”, “pleasure as natural aim”, and so on. Dewey’s philosophical work did critique those concepts, but the point here is metaphilosophical—that we do not start with what is abstract, conceptual. Dewey’s concern with such theoretical starting points was that they isolate philosophy from a more thoroughgoing empiricism capable of engaging actual human problems.

“Experience as method”, then, is both a warning and a positive recommendation. It warns philosophers to recognize that while intellectual terms may seem “original, primitive and simple” they should be understood as the historically and normatively situated “products of discrimination and classification” ( EN , LW1: 386; see also 371–372, 375). “Knowing” does not stand beyond experience or nature, but is an activity with its own standpoint and qualitative character. Whatever theory is eventually devised, a genuinely experiential method will check it against ordinary experience ( EN , LW1: 26). [ 14 ]

The experiential or denotative method tells us that we must go behind the refinements and elaborations of reflective experience to the gross and compulsory things of our doings, enjoyments and sufferings—to the things that force us to labor, that satisfy needs, that surprise us with beauty, that compel obedience under penalty. ( EN , LW1: 375–76)

Such a method is critical because it forces inquirers to check previous interpretations and judgments against their live encounters in a new situation ( EN , LW1: 364). Philosophy has to engage with new subject matters (and theories), accept challenges beyond the traditional “problems of philosophy”, and embrace the idea that “the starting point is the actually problematic ” ( EN , LW1: 61).

Much that is central to Dewey’s metaphysics has been discussed—the transactional organism-environment setting, mind, consciousness, and experience. Accordingly, this section will examine how Dewey conceived of “metaphysics”, the main project in Experience and Nature , how he attempted to reconnect empirical metaphysics with an ancient idea (philosophy as wisdom), and some of the criticisms his conception received.

Debate over a definite meaning for the term “metaphysics”, was as alive in Dewey’s day as in ours. From the beginning, Dewey sought to critique and reconstruct metaphysical concepts (e.g., reality, self, consciousness, time, necessity, and individuality) and systems (e.g., Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel). Like his fellow pragmatists Peirce, James, and Mead, Dewey wished to transform not eradicate metaphysics. Dewey’s early metaphysical views were closest to idealism, but engagements with experimental science and instrumentalism convinced him to abandon the traditional goal of ultimate and complete accounts of reality.

His interest in metaphysics was revivified at Columbia by colleague F. J. E. Woodbridge, who thought metaphysics could be done in a “descriptive” rather than an extra-physical way (“Biography of John Dewey”, in Schilpp 1939: 36). While many of Dewey’s most important metaphysical works focused on experience (discussed above), special attention is due to “The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism” (1905, PIE , MW3), “The Subject-Matter of Metaphysical Inquiry” (1915, MW8), and his “Introduction” to Essays in Experimental Logic (1916c, MW10). [ 15 ] These were all vital precursors to his magnum opus, Experience and Nature . EN ’s final chapters, dealing with art and consummatory experience, were further developed in Art as Experience (1934b, LW10), a text containing additional and significant metaphysical discussions.

While labels tend to obscure what was innovative in his work, it is safe to say Dewey composed a realist, naturalistic, non-reductive, emergentist, process metaphysics. [ 16 ] He described nature’s most general features (“generic traits”) while trying to do empirical justice to the world as encountered. His account also aimed to remain fallible and useful for future researchers seeking to improve life with philosophy. In the end, Dewey described his efforts as a “metaphysics” and as a “system”: “the hanging together of various problems and various hypotheses in a perspective” (“Nature in Experience”, LW14: 141–142). He did not propose a metaphysics from a god’s eye point of view, but one informed and motivated by “a definite point of view” and linked to the contemporary, human world (“Half-hearted Naturalism”, LW3: 75–76 ).

Experience and Nature provides extended criticism of past metaphysical approaches, especially their quest for certainty and assumption of an Appearance/Reality framework, and a positive, general theory regarding how human existence is situated in nature. It is empirical, descriptive, and hypothetical, eschewing claims of special access beyond “experience in unsophisticated forms”. Such experience, Dewey argued, gives us “evidence of a different world and points to a different metaphysics” ( EN , LW1: 47). EN looks to existing characteristics of human culture, anthropologically, to see what they reveal, more generally, about nature. One significant product is Dewey’s isolation, analysis, and description of “generic traits of existence” and their relations to one another.

While this entry lacks space for even a bare summary, it is noteworthy that EN begins with an extensive discussion of method and experience as a new starting point for philosophy. An extensive presentation of the generic traits follows, which later informs discussions about science, technology, body, mind, language, art, and value. While the traits are not presented systematically (à la other metaphysicians such as Spinoza or Whitehead) there is a progression moving from the more basic to the more complex. [ 17 ]

One might ask, How can metaphysics contribute to the world beyond academic philosophy? Dewey aimed to return philosophy to an older, ancient mission—the pursuit of wisdom. And while Dewey describes philosophy as inherently critical, a “criticism of criticisms”, it still raises questions about the objectives of an empirical, hypothetical, naturalistic metaphysics? ( EN , LW1: 298) Dewey raises the issue, himself, prophylactically:

As a statement of the generic traits manifested by existences of all kinds without regard to their differentiation into physical and mental, [metaphysics] seems to have nothing to do with criticism and choice, with an effective love of wisdom. ( EN , LW1: 308)

His answer comes by way of an account of existence’s generic traits, which purportedly provides “a ground-map of the province of criticism, establishing base lines to be employed in more intricate triangulations” ( EN , LW1: 308). [ 18 ] A new metaphysics, like a new map, offers new possibilities for framing and explaining the world. This could discredit entrenched truisms—e.g., men are rational, women are emotional, humans are intelligent, animals are dumb, etc.— or facilitate new connections and new meanings. As Dewey saw it, the long tradition of philosophy had rendered too basic conceptual tools (kinds, categories, dualisms, aims, and values) unassailable; his reconsideration offered a new basis for metaphysics, one which would be relevant and revisable.

"Map-making" suggested a new way to do metaphysics and a new role for philosophers. Philosophers, on this model, become “liaison officers”, intermediators able to facilitate communication between those speaking at cross purposes or in different jargons ( EN , LW1: 306). Drawing from contemporary circumstances and purposes, the maps drawn could not promise certainty or permanency but would need to be redrawn according to changing needs and purposes. Their test, as with the rest of Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy, would lay in their capacity to sharpen criticisms and secure values.

Dewey received and responded to many criticisms of his metaphysical views. Critics often overlooked that his aim was to undercut prevailing metaphysical genres; often, his view was rashly consigned to some other extant camp. (He was characterized, variously, as a realist, idealist, relativist, subjectivist, etc. See Hildebrand 2003.) One recurrent criticism was that his statement in PIE (that “things are what they are experienced as” ) could not yield a metaphysics because it merely reported subjective and immediate experience; such reports, the criticism went, prevented a more mediated and (properly) objective account. Twenty years later, EN received similar reactions by critics who attacked Dewey’s non-binary approach to experience and nature. [ 19 ]

Subsequent criticisms focused upon Dewey’s supposed neglect of a tension between “qualities” vs. “relations”. Qualities, the argument ran, are immediate, whereas relations are mediate; how could Dewey claim they coexist in the same item of experience? This seemed to embody a contradiction. [ 20 ] Richard Bernstein (1961) seized on this issue, and claimed that Dewey harbored two irreconcilable strains, a “metaphysical strain” and a “phenomenological strain”, but failed to sufficiently account for them with his “principle of continuity”. One response to Bernstein argued that his critique unwittingly reenacted the very spectatorial standpoint Dewey’s experiential starting point seeking to overcome. [ 21 ]

In recent years, some debate whether Dewey should have engaged in metaphysics at all. Richard Rorty and Charlene Haddock Seigfried argued that Dewey’s critique of traditional metaphysics was as far as he should have gone; his further efforts diverted him from more important ethical work (Seigfried 2001a, 2004) or plunged him into foundationalist projects previously disavowed (“Dewey’s Metaphysics” in Rorty 1977). Defenders argue that Dewey’s genuinely new approach to metaphysics avoids old problems while contributing something salutary to culture at large (Myers 2020, Garrison 2005, Boisvert 1998a, Alexander 2020).

4. Inquiry and Knowledge

The interactional, organic model Dewey developed in his psychology informed his theories of learning and knowledge. Within this framework, a range of traditional epistemological proposals and puzzles (premised on metaphysical divisions such as appearance/reality, mind/world) lost credibility. “So far as the question of the relation of the self to known objects is concerned”, Dewey wrote, “knowing is but one special case of the agent-patient, of the behaver-enjoyer-sufferer situation” (“Brief Studies in Realism”, MW6: 120). As with psychology, Dewey’s wholesale repudiation of the traditional metaphysical framework required extensive reconstruction in every other area; “instrumentalism” was one popular name for Dewey’s reconstruction of epistemology (or “theory of inquiry”, as Dewey preferred). [ 22 ]

As with his earlier functional approach to psychology, Dewey’s instrumentalism leveraged Darwin to dissolve entrenched divisions between, for example, realism/idealism, science/religion, and empiricism/rationalism. Change and transformation become natural features of the actual world, and knowledge and logic are recast as ways to adapt, survive, and thrive. The better way to understand reasoning is by looking to the dynamic and biological world which harbors it, rather than the traditional paradigms of static precision, physics or mathematics. [ 23 ]

Early statements of instrumentalism (and definitive breaks by Dewey with Hegelian logic) may be seen in “Some Stages of Logical Thought” (Dewey 1900 [1916], MW1); that essay follows Peirce ( entry on Peirce section on pragmatism, pragmaticism, and the scientific method ], [ 24 ] especially the well known 1877–78 articles championing the larger framework of scientific thinking, namely the “doubt-inquiry process” (MW1: 173; see also Peirce 1877, 1878). This account is developed in Studies in Logical Theory (Dewey 1903b, MW2), by Dewey and his collaborators at Chicago. In the work, Dewey acknowledges a “preeminent obligation” to James (Perry 1935: 308–309). [ 25 ]

Studies criticizes transcendentalist logic extensively, concluding that logic should not assume either thought or reality’s existence in general but should rest content with the function or use of ideas in experience :

The test of validity of [an] idea is its functional or instrumental use in effecting the transition from a relatively conflicting experience to a relatively integrated one. ( Studies , MW2: 359)

Thus, instrumentalism abandons all psycho-physical dualisms and all correspondentist theories of knowing. Dewey wrote,

In the logical process the datum is not just external existence, and the idea mere psychical existence. Both are modes of existence—one of given existence, the other of possible , of inferred existence….In other words, datum and ideatum are divisions of labor, cooperative instrumentalities, for economical dealing with the problem of the maintenance of the integrity of experience. ( Studies , MW2: 339–340)

While instrumentalism was of a piece with Dewey’s other views, it was also responding to dialectic within philosophy’s epistemological positions, particularly between British empiricism, rationalism (see entry on rationalism vs. empiricism ), and the Kantian synthesis.

Classical empiricists insisted that sensory experience provided the origins of knowledge. They were motivated, in part, by the concern that rationalistic accounts effort to link knowledge with thought alone (away from particular sense stimuli), were too unchecked. Without the constraints of sense experience, philosophy was doomed to keep producing wildly divergent systems. Classical empiricists, like Dewey, shared a genuine interest in scientific progress; such progress required, first, escape from unfettered speculation. The account developed by figures such as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume claimed that (in Locke’s version) the world writes on a receptive blank slate, the mind, in the language of ideas. Using faculties of memory, association, and imagination, knowledge is generated; extension of knowledge must, on this account, be traceable to origination in sense experience.

Rationalists, in contrast, argued that knowledge was both abstract and deductively certain. Sensory experiences are fluid, individualized, and permeated by the relativity borne of innumerable external conditions. How could a philosophical account of genuine knowledge—necessarily certain, self-evident, and unchanging—be derived using sensorial flux? No, knowledge must be derived from inner and certain concepts. Knowledge, then, is produced by an immaterial entity, mind, with an innate power to reason, independent of the contingencies of practical ends and physical bodies.

Kant responded to the empiricist-rationalist tension by reigning in their ambitions; philosophy must stop attempting to transcend the limits of thought and experience. Philosophy’s more modest and proper aspiration is to discover what can be known in the phenomenal world. Kant, then, refused an originary role to either percepts or concepts, arguing that sense and reason are co-constitutive of knowledge. More important, Kant argued for mind as systematizing and constructive.

Dewey’s response to this three-way epistemological conflict was foreshadowed in the earlier discussion of the “Reflex Arc” paper and the idea of sensori-motor circuits. For Dewey, any proposal premised on a disconnected mind and body—or upon one assuming that stimuli (causes, impressions, or what have you) were atomic and in need of synthesis—was a non-starter. [ 26 ]

Accepting some of Kant’s criticisms of rationalism and empiricism, Dewey rejected Kant’s propagation of several significant but unjustified assumptions: that knowledge must be certain; that nature and intellect were categorically distinct; and that it was justified to posit a noumenal realm (things-in-themselves). Dewey also questioned Kant’s supposition that the sensations ingredient to knowledge are initially inchoate; such a claim was, Dewey believed, driven by Kant’s architectonic. Methodologically, perhaps most significantly, Dewey followed James in criticizing Kant’s standpoint as too spectatorial. From a pragmatic, Jamesean, “radical empiricist” standpoint, one may accept a wide variety of phenomenon (clear, vague, felt, remembered, anticipated, etc.) as real even though they are not known .

Thus, for Dewey, Kant falls short of the philosophical perspective needed to synthesize perception and conception, nature and reason, practice and theory. While Kant’s model of an active and structuring mind was a clear advance over passive ones, it retained the retrograde picture of knowledge as reality’s faithful mirror. Kant failed to see knowledge as a dynamic instrument for managing (predicting, controlling, guiding) future experience. This pragmatic conception of knowledge judges it as one would an eye or hand, gauging how it affects the organism’s ability to cope:

What measures [knowledge’s] value, its correctness and truth, is the degree of its availability for conducting to a successful issue the activities of living beings. (“The Bearings of Pragmatism Upon Education”, in MW4: 180)

Thus, Dewey replaced Kant’s mind-centered system with one centered upon experience-nature transactions—“a reversal”, Dewey wrote, “comparable to a Copernican revolution” ( QC , LW4: 232).

In the context of instrumentalism, what is “logic” and “epistemology”? Dewey does not discard these but insists on a more empirical approach. How do reasoning and learning actually happen? [ 27 ] Dewey comprehensively addresses logic in his 1938 Logic: The Theory of Inquiry ( LTI , LW12), which calls logic the “inquiry into inquiry”. LTI attempts to systematically collect, organize, and explicate the actual conditions of different kinds of inquiry; the aim, previewed in his 1917 “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy”, is pragmatic and ameliorative: to provide an “important aid in proper guidance of further attempts at knowing” (MW10: 23).

Throughout his career, Dewey described the processes and patterns evinced in active problem solving. Here, we consider three: inquiry, knowledge, and truth. There is, Dewey argued, a “pattern of inquiry” which prevails in problem solving. “Analysis of Reflective Thinking” (1933, LW8) and LTI (LW12) describes five phases. Disavowing the usual divide between emotion and reason, inquiry begins (1) with a feeling of something amiss, a unique and particular doubtfulness; this feeling endures as a pervasive quality imbued in inquiry and serves as a kind of “guide” to subsequent phases. Next, because what is initially present is indeterminate, (2) a problem must be specifically formulated; note that problems do not preexist inquiry, as typically assumed. [ 28 ] Next, (3) a hypothesis is constructed, one which imaginatively utilizes both theoretical ideas and perceptual facts in order to forecast possible consequences of eventual operations. Next, (4) one reasons through the meanings involved in the hypothesis, estimating implications or possible contradictions; frequently, discoveries here direct one return to an earlier phase (to reformulate the hypothesis or redescribe the problem). [ 29 ] Finally, inquiry closes, (5) acting to evaluate and test the hypothesis; here, inquiry discovers whether a proposed solution resolves the problem, whether (in LTI ’s terminology) inquiry has converted an “indeterminate situation” into a “determinate one”.

The inquiry pattern Dewey sketched is schematic; actual cases of reasoning often lack such discreteness or linearity. Thus, the pattern is not a summary of how people always think but rather how exemplary cases of inquirential thinking unfold (e.g., in the empirical sciences).

Knowledge, on Dewey’s transactional model of inquiry, departs from tradition and brought to earth. “Knowledge, as an abstract term”, Dewey wrote,

is a name for the product of competent inquiries. Apart from this relation, its meaning is so empty that any content or filling may be arbitrarily poured in. ( LTI , LW12: 16)

To understand a product, one must understand the process; this is Dewey’s approach. By denying that knowledge is an isolated product, he effectively denies a metaphysics that makes mind- the-substance separate from everything else. He does not depreciate knowing as an activity , and strongly maintains that “intelligence” is crucial to mediating individual and societal conflicts. [ 30 ]

Truth is also radically reevaluated. Truth long connoted an ideal— an epistemic fixity (a correspondence, a coherence) capable of satisfying the need for further inquiry. Since this is not the actual situation human beings (or philosophy) inhabits, the ideal should be set aside. Still, Dewey was ever the (re)constructivist; in “Experience, Knowledge, and Value” (1939c) he provided an account. Truth no longer points toward something transcendental but toward the process of inquiry (“Experience, Knowledge, and Value”, LW14: 56–57). A proposition is “true” insofar as it serves as a reliable resource:

In scientific inquiry, the criterion of what is taken to be settled, or to be knowledge, is being so settled that it is available as a resource in further inquiry; not being settled in such a way as not to be subject to revision in further inquiry. ( LTI , LW12: 16)

Truth is not beyond experience, but is an experienced relation, particularly one socially shared. In How We Think , Dewey wrote,

Truth, in final analysis, is the statement of things “as they are,” not as they are in the inane and desolate void of isolation from human concern, but as they are in a shared and progressive experience….Truth, truthfulness, transparent and brave publicity of intercourse, are the source and the reward of friendship. Truth is having things in common. ( HWT , MW6: 67; see also “The Experimental Theory of Knowledge”, 1910b, MW3: 118)

In Dewey’s instrumentalism, then, knowledge and truth are adjectival not nominative, describing a process which, as Peirce tells us, can persist as long as we do. “There is no belief so settled as not to be exposed to further inquiry” (LTI, LW12: 16). Words like “knowledge” and “truth” are honored because of their historic service as tools for past inquiries and their aid in securing values.

5. Philosophy of Education

Around the world, Dewey remains as well known for his educational theories (see entry on philosophy of education, section Rousseau, Dewey, and the progressive movement ) as for his philosophical ones. A closer look shows how often these theories align. Recognizing this, Dewey reflected that his 1916 magnum opus in education, Democracy and Education ( DE , MW9) “was for many years that [work] in which my philosophy, such as it is, was most fully expounded” ( FAE , LW5: 156). DE argued that philosophy itself could be understood as “the general theory of education”, avoiding further hyper-specialization and investing more earnestly in everyday problems.

This was a call to see philosophy from an educational standpoint:

Education offers a vantage ground from which to penetrate to the human, as distinct from the technical, significance of philosophic discussions….The educational point of view enables one to envisage the philosophic problems where they arise and thrive, where they are at home, and where acceptance or rejection makes a difference in practice. If we are willing to conceive education as the process of forming fundamental dispositions, intellectual and emotional, toward nature and fellow-men, philosophy may even be defined as the general theory of education . ( DE , MW9: 338)

Dewey was active in education his entire life. Besides high school and college teaching, he devised curricula, established, reviewed and administered schools and departments of education, participated in collective organizing, consulted and lectured internationally, and wrote extensively on many facets of education. He established the University of Chicago’s Laboratory School as an experimental site for theories in instrumental logic and psychological functionalism. This school also became a site for democratic expression by the local community.

Dewey’s “Reflex Arc” paper applied functionalism to education. “Reflex” argued that human experience is not a disjointed sequence of fits and starts, but a developing circuit of activities. Framed this way, learning is a cumulative, progressive process where inquirers move from dissatisfying doubt toward satisfying resolutions of problems. “Reflex” also shows that the subject of a stimulus (e.g., the pupil) is not a passive recipient but an agent actively selecting stimuli within a larger field of activities.

Cognizance of these facts, Dewey argued, compelled educators to discard pedagogies based on the mind as “blank slate”. In The School and Society Dewey wrote, “the question of education is the question of taking hold of [children’s] activities, of giving them direction” (MW1: 25). How We Think (1910c, MW6) primarily aimed to help teachers apply instrumentalism. Overall, education’s intellectual goals would advance by acquainting children using the general intellectual habits of scientific inquiry.

The native and unspoiled attitude of childhood, marked by ardent curiosity, fertile imagination, and love of experimental inquiry, is near, very near, to the attitude of the scientific mind. ( HWT , MW6: 179)

These proposals entailed the revision of the teacher’s role; while teachers still had to know their subject matter, they also needed to understand students’ cultural and personal backgrounds. If learning was to incorporate actual problems, more careful integration of content with particular learners was needed. Motivational tactics also had to change. Rather than rewards or punishments, Deweyan teachers were to reimagine the whole learning environment, merging the school’s existing goals with pupils’ present interests. One strategy was to identify specific problems that could bridge curriculum and student and then formulate learning situations to exercise them. [ 31 ] This problem-centered approach was demanding, requiring teachers to train in subject matters, child psychology, and pedagogies for weaving these together. [ 32 ]

Dewey’s educational philosophy emerged amidst a fierce 1890’s debate between educational “romantics” and “traditionalists”. Romantics (also called “New” or “Progressive” education by Dewey), urged a “child- centered” approach; the child’s natural impulses provided education’s proper starting point. Education should not fetter creativity and growth, even if content must sometimes be attenuated. Traditionalists (called “Old” education by Dewey) pressed for “curriculum-centered” approaches. Children were empty cabinets curriculum fills with civilization’s contents; the main job of instruction was to ensure receptivity with discipline.

Dewey developed an interactional model to move beyond that debate, refusing to privilege either child or society. (See “My Pedagogic Creed”, 1897b, EW5; The School and Society , 1899, MW1; Democracy and Education , 1916b, MW9; Experience and Education , 1938b, LW13, etc.) While Romantics correctly identified the child (replete with instincts, powers, habits, and histories) as an indispensable starting point for pedagogy, Dewey denied that the child was the only starting point. Larger social groups (family, community, nation) have a legitimate stake in passing along extant interests, needs, and values as part of an educational synthesis.

Still, of these two approaches, Dewey more adamantly rejected traditionalists’ (overly) high premium on discipline and memorization. While recognizing the legitimacy of conveying content (facts, values), it is paramount that schools eschew indoctrination. Educating meant incorporating , giving wide latitude for unique individuals who, after all, would inherit and have dominion over the changing society. This is why who the child was mattered so much. Following colleague and lifelong friend G.H. Mead’s ideas about the social self, Dewey argued that schools had to become micro-communities to reflect children’s growing interests and needs. “The school cannot be a preparation for social life excepting as it reproduces, within itself, the typical conditions of social life” (“Ethical Principles Underlying Education”, 1897a, EW5: 61–62). [ 33 ]

Connecting child, school, and society aimed not only to improve pedagogy, but democracy as well. Because character, rights, and duties are informed by and contribute to the social realm, schools were critical sites to learn and experiment with democracy. Democratic life includes not only civics and economics, but epistemic and communicative habits as well: problem solving, compassionate imagination, creative expression, and civic self-governance. The range of roles a child might inhabit is vast; this creates a societal obligation to make education its highest political and economic priority. During WWII, Dewey wrote,

There will be almost a revolution in school education when study and learning are treated not as acquisition of what others know but as development of capital to be invested in eager alertness in observing and judging the conditions under which one lives. Yet until this happens, we shall be ill-prepared to deal with a world whose outstanding trait is change. (“Between Two Worlds”, 1944, LW17: 463)

Democracy is much more comprehensive than a form of government, it is “not an alternative to other principles of associated life [but] the idea of community life itself” ( PP , LW2: 328). Individuals exist in communities; as their lives change, needs and conflicts emerge that require intelligent management; we must make sense out of new experiences. Education empowers that by teaching the attitudes and habits (imaginative, empirical) that made the experimental sciences so successful. Dewey called these attitudes and habits “intelligence”. [ 34 ]

Informing these areas—science, education, and democratic life—is Dewey’s naturalism, which redirects hope away from what is immutable or ultimate (God, Nature, Reason, Ends) toward the human capacity to learn from experience. In “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us” (1939b) Dewey wrote,

Democracy is the faith that the process of experience is more important than any special result attained, so that special results achieved are of ultimate value only as they are used to enrich and order the ongoing process. Since the process of experience is capable of being educative, faith in democracy is all one with faith in experience and education. All ends and values that are cut off from the ongoing process become arrests, fixations. They strive to fixate what has been gained instead of using it to open the road and point the way to new and better experiences. (“Creative Democracy”, LW14: 229)

Democracy’s success or failure rests on education. Education is most determinative of whether citizens develop the habits needed to investigate problematic beliefs and situations while communicating openly. While every culture aims to convey values and beliefs to the coming generation, the most important thing is to distinguish between education which inculcates collaborative and creative hypothesizing from education which foments obeisance to parochialism and dogma. This same caution applies to philosophy itself.

Dewey wrote and spoke extensively on ethics throughout his career; some writings were explicitly about ethics, but ethical analyses appear in works with other foci. [ 35 ] As elsewhere, Dewey critiques then reconstructs traditional views; he argued it is typical for traditional systems (e.g., teleological, deontological, or virtue-based) to seek comprehensive and monocausal accounts of, for example, ultimate aims, duties, or values. Such ideal theorizing is obligated to explain morality’s requirements for all individuals, actions, or characters.

Dewey argued for a more experimental approach. Rather than an ultimate explanatory account of moral life, ethics should describe intelligent methods for dealing with novel and morally perplexing situations. No ultimate values should be stipulated or sought. [ 36 ] The only value Dewey celebrated as (something like) ultimate was “growth”. [ 37 ] Ethics means inquiry into concrete, problematic conditions; such inquiry may use theories to inform hypotheses tested in experience. Reliable hypotheses may come to be called “knowledge”, but must, in the end, be considered fallible and revisable. Actual resolutions to moral problems typically point toward plural factors (aims, duties, virtues), rather than just one ( TIF , LW5). Moreover, actual conduct (including inquiry) is undertaken not by isolated, rational actors but by social beings. [ 38 ] “Conduct”, Dewey wrote,

is always shared; this is the difference between it and a physiological process. It is not an ethical “ought” that conduct should be social. It is social, whether bad or good. ( HNC , MW14: 16)

Dewey’s ethical theory, like those in education and politics, utilizes his transactional views of experience, habit, inquiry, and the communicative, social self. It also exemplifies his metaphysics — a world both precarious and stable, where conflict is natural and quests to ignore or permanently eradicate it are fantastical. [ 39 ] Conflict is a generic trait of life, not a defect; theories denying this tend to be so reductive and absolutist that they divorce inquiry from the essential details of concrete situations, cultures, and persons. Such strategies tend to fail. [ 40 ]

Progress in ethical theory, then, means inquiry that is more discriminating and revelatory of consequences and alternatives. [ 41 ] Improving inquiry requires better methods of deliberation; this means being open to contributions from many sources: sciences, social customs, jurisprudence, biographies, moral systems of the past. [ 42 ] Deliberation especially benefits from what Dewey called “dramatic rehearsal”, where imaginative enactment of possible scenarios can illuminate the emotional weight and color of potential ethical choices. [ 43 ]

For further details on Dewey’s ethics, see the entry Dewey’s moral philosophy by E. Anderson (2023) and Hildebrand (2018).

Dewey’s political philosophy, like other areas, builds on the idea that individuals are not self-subsistent social atoms but are constituted in social environments; it also builds on humans’ ability to inquire to solve problems in hypothetical and experimental ways. [ 44 ] As elsewhere, theory is instrumental; concepts do not uncover an underlying “reality,” but are functional (or not) in particular, practical circumstances. Concepts and theories in political theory are fallible and amenable to reconstruction. Dewey rejected approaches relying upon non-empirical, a priori assumptions (e.g., about human nature, progress, etc.) and those proposing ultimate, typically monocausal, explanations. His work criticized and reconstructed core concepts (individual, freedom, right, community, public, state, and democracy) along naturalist and experimentalist lines. Besides numerous articles (for academic and lay audiences), Dewey’s political thought is found in books including The Public and Its Problems (1927b, LW2), Individualism, Old and New (1930f, LW5), Liberalism and Social Action (1935, LW11), and Freedom and Culture (1939d, LW13). Because Democracy and Education (1916b, DE , MW9) emphasizes profound connections between education, society, and democratic habits—it also merits study as a “political” work.

Enormous changes occurred during Dewey’s lifetime, including massive US population growth, the rise of industrial, scientific, technological, and educational institutions, the American Civil War, two world wars, and a global economic depression. These events strained prevailing liberal theories, and Dewey labored to reconceive democracy and liberalism. “The frontier is moral, not physical”, Dewey urged, proposing that democracy was tantamount to a “way of life” which required continual renewal to survive. [ 45 ] Beyond governmental machinery (universal suffrage, recurring elections, political parties, trial by peers, etc.), he also characterized democracy as “primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” ( DE , MW9: 93; see also, PP , LW2: 325). Such experience, expressed through collaborative inquiry, required intellectual and emotional competencies so that shared problems and value differences could be discussed and addressed. Ultimately, democracy requires faith that experience is a sufficient resource for future solutions, and that recourse to transcendent rules or aims can be outgrown. [ 46 ]

Dewey’s analysis of individualism arose from earlier academic interests and his sensitivity to contemporary economic and technological pressures. [ 47 ] The older “atomic” individualism—where natural egoists vie to maximize their standing—was now harming not protecting individuals; deployed as a rhetorical pretext, it was enabling wealthy and powerful interests to undermine most of the protections which initially justified liberalism. [ 48 ]

Dewey’s counter-proposal was “renascent liberalism”. [ 49 ] Reconstructing its core concept (“atomic” individuals become “social”), made other key political notions revisable—e.g., “liberty”, “freedom”, and “rights” —as all were resituated in an instrumentalist framework ( LSA , LW11: 35; E , MW5: 394). [ 50 ] Also revised are notions of “community” and “public”. A democratic “public” forms around problems, and aims to conduct experimental inquiry that leads to redress ( PP , LW2: 314). Dewey also expressed a grave concern, still with us today, regarding “inchoate” publics. Such publics include members lacking the education, time, and attention necessary for inquiry. They present democracy with perhaps its most significantly undermining condition ( PP , LW2: 321, 317).

For further details on Dewey’s political theory, see the entry on Dewey’s political philosophy by M. Festenstein (2023) and Hildebrand (2018).

Dewey’s magnum opus on aesthetics, Art as Experience ( AE , LW10: 31) states that art, as a conscious idea, is “the greatest intellectual achievement in the history of humanity” (31). [ 51 ] Such high praise deserves notice. Dewey began writing about aesthetics very early, regarding art’s relevance to psychology (1887, EW2), to education (1897c, EW5), the invidious distinction between “fine” and “practical” art (1891, EW3: 310–311), and on Bosanquet (1893, EW4). His own theory emerged in Experience and Nature (1925a, EN , LW1) and flourished in AE (1934b); he proposed aesthetics as central to philosophy’s mission, namely rendering everyday experience more fulfilling and meaningful.

Dewey’s aesthetics has four main objectives and an overarching purpose. First, it explicates artworks’ ontology, the interrelated processes of making and appreciation, and specifies the functions of interpretation and criticism. [ 52 ] Second, it examines arts’ social role in presenting, reimagining, and projecting human identity. Third, it analyzes the communicative functions of art, especially in education and political life. Finally, it describes and analyzes the implications of art’s expression as experience; such experience can reach levels of integration as they become qualitatively distinct, or “consummatory”. [ 53 ] Consummatory experience happens occasionally; sometimes it occurs not in an “artistic” context (concert, museum, etc.) but in unexpectedly quotidian circumstances. It is life at its fullest. The overarching purpose of Dewey’s aesthetics is determining how more of life’s experiences could become consummatory.

The main problem posed by AE is: How did a chasm arise between the arts, artists and ordinary people? How have cultural conditions and aesthetic theories (reinforced by institutions) isolated “art and its appreciation by placing them in a realm of their own, disconnected from other modes of experiencing”? ( AE , LW10: 16) AE makes art’s natural continuities with everyday life explicit, while seeking to prevent its reduction to mere entertainment or “transient pleasurable excitations”. ( AE , LW10: 16) [ 54 ] Dewey criticizes traditional aesthetics’ spectatorial (or theoretical) starting point and offers radically empirical accounts of art making, appreciation, expression, form, and criticism. Because aesthetic experience has organic roots, it can be recognized even in everyday objects and events. [ 55 ] Again, the goal is dissolution of dualisms between “fine” and “useful” objects to foment a greater “continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living” ( AE , LW10: 16).

For further details on Dewey’s aesthetics, see entry on Dewey’s aesthetics by T. Leddy (2021) and Hildebrand (2018).

9. Religion, Religious Experience and A Common Faith

The whole story of man shows that there are no objects that may not deeply stir engrossing emotion. One of the few experiments in the attachment of emotion to ends that mankind has not tried is that of devotion, so intense as to be religious, to intelligence as a force in social action. ( A Common Faith , 1934a, LW9: 52–53)

Dewey grew up in a religious family; his devout mother pressured her sons to live up to a similar devotion. His family church was Congregationalist; a bit later, including in college, Liberal Evangelicalism proved more acceptable. At twenty-one, while living in Oil City, Pennsylvania, Dewey had a “mystic experience” which he reported to friend Max Eastman:

There was no vision, not even a definable emotion—just a supremely blissful feeling that his worries [about whether he prayed sufficiently in earnest] were over. (Dykhuizen 1973: 22)

Dewey belonged to congregations for about thirty-five years, turning away circa 1894 as he left for a post in Chicago. After that, Dewey’s deepest loyalties lay outside religion; he was, as John J. McDermott put it,

an unregenerate philosophical naturalist, one for whom the human journey is constitutive of its own meaning and is not to be rescued by any transcendent explanations, principles of accountability, or posthumous salvation. (McDermott 2006, 50–51)

Dewey returned to philosophical issues of religion in the 1930’s. “What I Believe” (1930, LW5) argued for a new kind of “faith”, a “tendency toward action”. Such a faith was not transcendental, but signified that “experience itself is the sole ultimate authority” (“What I Believe”, LW5: 267). This faith arises actively, from “the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situation of experience its own full and unique meaning” (“What I Believe”, LW5: 272). In 1933–34, Dewey gave the Terry Lectures at Yale, published as A Common Faith (1934a, ACF , LW9), his major statement on religion and religious experience.

Dewey’s endeavor in A Common Faith seems, in retrospect, insurmountable: to reconstruct religion in a way harmonious with his empirical naturalism, while transforming religious experience and belief to support and advance a secular conception of democracy. Religions vary, of course, but typically posit transcendent, eternal, unobservable entities and reveal themselves in ways which are not, shall we say, open to verification. Empirical experience, typically, is cast as inferior—castigated as flux, illusion, uncertainty, or confusion — and must be set aside. Dewey had squared himself against the metaphysics, epistemology, and seemingly the morality, of major religions.

Who was ACF ’s intended audience? Dewey was not addressing believers content with supernatural religion, nor religious liberals seeking a compromise that would place scientific and spiritual truths in separate categories. He was not addressing militant atheists, and rejected their dogmatism. [ 56 ] Rather, ACF addressed those who had abandoned supernaturalism yet still believed themselves religious (“Experience, Knowledge, and Value”, LW14: 79–80). ACF meant to salvage whatever made the religious attitude valuable in experience while shedding traditional religious frameworks and supernaturalistic beliefs.

Dewey’s strategy was to divorce “religious experience” from religion, showing how the former might arise within a natural and social context. [ 57 ] He found that none of the qualities reported by religious experiencers (feelings of peace, wholeness, security, etc.), offered evidence for the supernatural. ( ACF , LW9ff.) He also found that religious experience is not self-enclosed; it can color or affect other experiences. Just as sunset may exhibit “aesthetic” dimensions or a linguistic remark may betray a “moral” tint, various experiences may have a “religious” aspect ( ACF , LW9: 9.). The “religious” character of experience, then, is attitudinal, lending “deep and enduring support to the processes of living” ( ACF , LW9: 15). Dewey analyzed such religiosity as a kind of coping. Consider three options for coping: (1) accommodate an obstacle by resigning to put up with conditions imposed; (2) adapt or modify the obstacle’s conditions to one’s liking; finally, (3) adjust to the obstacle by changing one’s attitude and altering conditions. (Consider, as adjustment , the case of of becoming a parent which demands significant changes that encompass both self and environment.) Option (3) ( adjustment ) is characteristic of religious experience for it is “inclusive and deep seated” and transformative of attitudes in “generic and enduring” ways ( ACF , LW9: 12,13). Adjustment projects imaginative possibilities and puts them into action—both in oneself (wants, aims, ideals) and in surrounding conditions. The cumulative impact of adjustment is often the evolution of identity ( ACF , LW9: 13). [ 58 ]

Dewey’s effort to naturalize religion reinterpreted other traditional notions, including “faith” and “God”. Typically, faith is juxtaposed against reason. Faith requires neither empirical inquiry nor verification; it reposes in the transcendent and ultimate, in “things not seen”. It typically connotes intellectual acceptance, without proof, of religious propositions (e.g., “God exists and loves mankind”).

Dewey made at least two important criticisms of traditional faith. First, faith is too closely identified with intellectual acceptance, eclipsing its pragmatic side; faith in a cause , for example, indicates a practical willingness to act strong enough to modify present desires, purposes, and conduct. By over-identifying faith with intellectual recognition, traditional accounts undermine inquiry and constructive action. Second, faith tends to reify its objects (e.g., “sin”, “evil”, etc.) making them immune to inquiry and redescription. Creeds based on such interpretations of faith attempt to “solve” problems with formulaic appeals to absolutes. The better approach, Dewey argues, is fallibilistic and experimental: approaching problems with empirical inquiry. Insofar as traditional faith frustrates inquiry (and solutions), it tends to run counter to moral aims.

One faith Dewey can accept he calls “natural piety”. Natural piety is not grounded in unseen, supernatural powers; it is a “just sense of nature as the whole of which we are parts” and the recognition that, as parts, we are

marked by intelligence and purpose, having the capacity to strive by their aid to bring conditions into greater consonance with what is humanly desirable. (ACF, LW9: 18)

Faith grounded in natural piety accepts the idea that “experience itself is the sole ultimate authority” (“What I Believe”, LW5: 267).

Regarding God, Dewey’s naturalism disallows traditional models—a single being responsible for the physical and moral universe, and its inhabitants. Belief in God is neither warranted nor advisable. Instead, Dewey offers a reconstructed “God”. He proposes we think not of a singular object (person) but of the qualities to which God is compared—goodness, wisdom, love, etc. Such descriptions reveal our highest ideals. Remove the possessor of the ideals and consider how ideals pull us from possibility (imagination, calculation, action) to actualization —and one begins to understand "God" in Dewey’s sense:

This idea of God, or of the divine is also connected with all the natural forces and conditions—including man and human association—that promote the growth of the ideal and that further its realization….It is this active relation between ideal and actual to which I would give the name “God”. ( ACF , LW9: 34; see also 29–30)

As a pragmatist, a meliorist, and a humane democrat, Dewey sought to harness the undeniable power of religion and religious experience toward ends beneficial to all. Religion provides people with a story about the larger universe and how we fit. He knew simple critiques of religion were ineffective because they leave powerful needs unmet. Dewey did not propose swapping out old religious institutions for new ones; he hoped that emancipating religious experience from institutional and ideological shackles might free its energies toward a “common faith”, a passion for imaginative intelligence in pursuit of moral goods. Methods of inquiry and criticism are not mysteries; society is already deeply familiar with them. What was necessary would be for religious persons to connect inquiry with the enhancement of religious experience and values ( ACF , LW9: 23). If persons could appreciate how many celebrated accomplishments were due not to God but to intelligent, human collaboration, then perhaps the idea of community could inspire a non-sectarian, common faith. [ 59 ]

Dewey thought his call for a common faith was deeply democratic. The idea of the supernatural was, by definition, suspicious of experience (as an adequate guide) and, consequently, suspicious of empirical methods. Unchecked by lived experience or experiment, supernaturalism can produce deep divisions. Dewey’s common faith, in contrast, is bound up with experimental inquiry and open communication. This is why Dewey’s exhortation to exchange traditional religious faith for a common faith is another expression of his ideal of experimental democracy.

A. Works by Dewey

Citations to John Dewey’s works are to the thirty-seven-volume critical edition The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953 , edited by Jo Ann Boydston (Southern Illinois University Press, 1969–1991). The series includes:

• [EW] 1967, The Early Works , 1882–1898, 5 volumes.
• [MW] 1976, The Middle Works , 1899–1924, 15 volumes.
• [LW] 1981, The Later Works , 1925–1953, 17 volumes.

This critical edition was also published in electronic form as:

• The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953: The Electronic Edition , Larry A. Hickman (ed.), Charlottesville, Va.: InteLex Corporation, 1996, available online . To insure uniformity of citation, the electronic edition preserves the line and page breaks of the print edition.

In-text citations give the original publication date, series abbreviation, followed by volume and page number. For example LW10: 12 refers to page 12 of Art as Experience , which is published as volume 10 of The Later Works .

• [ ACF ] 1934a, A Common Faith
• [ AE ] 1934b, Art as Experience
• [ DE ] 1916b, Democracy and Education
• [ E ] 1908, Ethics , with James H. Tufts,
• [ E-rev ] 1932, Ethics , revised edition, with James H. Tufts,
• [ EEL ] 1916c, “Introduction” to Essays in Experimental Logic
• [ EN ] 1925a, Experience and Nature
• [ FAE ] 1930a, “From Absolutism to Experimentalism”
• [ H&A ] 1998, The Essential Dewey
• [ HNC ] 1922a, Human Nature and Conduct
• [ HWT ] 1910c, How We Think
• [ ION ] 1930f, Individualism, Old and New
• [ LSA ] 1935, Liberalism and Social Action
• [ LTI ] 1938c, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry
• [ PIE ] 1905, “The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism”
• [ PP ] 1927b, The Public and Its Problems
• [ QC ] 1929, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action
• [ RAC ] 1896, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology”
• [ RIP ] 1920, Reconstruction in Philosophy
• [ TIF ] 1930d, “Three Independent Factors in Morals”
• [ TV ] 1939e, Theory of Valuation
• 1884, “The New Psychology”, Andover Review , 2(Sept.): 278–289. Reprinted in EW1: 48–60.
• 1886, “Psychology as Philosophic Method”, Mind , old series, 11(42), 153–173. Reprinted in EW1: 144–67. doi:10.1093/mind/os-XI.42.153
• 1887, Psychology , New York: Harper and Brothers. Reprinted in EW2.
• 1891, Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics , Ann Arbor, Michigan: Register Publishing Company. Reprinted in EW3: 239–388.
• 1893, Dewey, review of Bosanquet, “A History of Aesthetic, by Bernard Bosanquet, formerly Fellow of University College, Oxford” , Philosophical Review , 2 (Jan. 1893):63–69. Reprinted in EW4: 189–197.
• 1894a, The Study of Ethics: A Syllabus , Ann Arbor, MI: The Inland Press. Reprinted in EW4: 220–362.
• 1894b, “The Theory of Emotion I: Emotional Attitudes”, Psychological Review , 1(6): 553–569. Reprinted in EW4: 152–169. doi:10.1037/h0069054
• 1895, “The Theory of Emotion II: The Significance of Emotions”, Psychological Review , 2(1): 13–32. Reprinted in EW4: 169–188. doi:10.1037/h0070927
• [ RAC ] 1896, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology”, Psychological Review , 3(4): 357–370. Reprinted in EW5: 96–109. doi:10.1037/h0070405
• 1897a, “Ethical Principles Underlying Education”, in Third Yearbook of the National Herbart Society , Chicago: The National Herbart Society, pp. 7–33. Reprinted in EW5: 54–83.
• 1897b, “My Pedagogic Creed”, School Journal , 54(Jan.): 77–80. Reprinted in EW5: 84–95.
• 1897c, “The Aesthetic Element in Education”, Addresses and Proceedings of the National Educational Association , pp. 329–30. Reprinted in EW5: 202–204.
• 1899, The School and Society , Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Reprinted in MW1.
• 1900 [1916], “Some Stages of Logical Thought”, The Philosophical Review , 9(5): 465–489. Revised and reprinted in 1916d: 183–219. Reprinted in MW1: 152–175. doi:10.2307/2176692
• 1903a, “Democracy in Education”, Elementary School Teacher , 4 (1903): 193–204. Reprinted in MW3: 229–239.
• 1903b, Studies in Logical Theory , Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Reprinted in MW2: 293–378.
• [ PIE ] 1905, “The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism”, The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods , 2(15): 393–399. Reprinted in MW3: 158–167. doi:10.2307/2011400
• 1906, “Beliefs and Realities” (later retitled “Beliefs and Existences”), Philosophical Review , 15(2): 113–119; originally read as the Presidential Address at the fifth annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association, at Cambridge, December 28, 1905. Reprinted in MW3: 83–100. doi:10.2307/2177731
• [ E ] 1908, with James H. Tufts, Ethics , New York: Henry Holt and Co. Reprinted in MW5.
• 1908–1909, “The Bearings of Pragmatism Upon Education”, Progressive Journal of Education , originally three papers, 1(Dec. 1908): 1–3; 1(Jan. 1909): 5–8; 1–(Feb. 1909): 6–7. Reprinted in MW4: 178–191
• 1910a, “A Short Catechism Concerning Truth”, in The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy , New York: Henry Holt and Co., pp. 154–168. Reprinted in MW6: 3–11.
• 1910b, “The Experimental Theory of Knowledge”, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy , New York: Henry Holt and Co., pp. 77–111. Reprinted in MW3: 107–127.
• [ HWT ] 1910c, How We Think , Boston: D. C. Heath and Co. Reprinted in MW6.
• 1912, “Contributions to A Cyclopedia of Education”, in MW7: 207–366.
• 1915, “The Subject-Matter of Metaphysical Inquiry”, The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods , 12(13): 337. Reprinted in MW8: 3–13. doi:10.2307/2013770
• 1916a, “Brief Studies in Realism”, in 1916d: 250–280. Reprinted in MW6: 103–122. Revised version of an article in two parts in 1911, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods , 8(15): 393–400, 8(20): 546–454.
• 1916b, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education , New York: Macmillan. Reprinted in MW9.
• [ EEL ] 1916c, “Introduction” to 1916d: v–vi. Reprinted in MW10: 320–365.
• 1916d, Essays in Experimental Logic , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• 1917, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy”, in his Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude , New York: Henry Holt and Co., pp. 3–69. Reprinted in MW10: 3–49
• [ RIP ] 1920, Reconstruction in Philosophy , New York: Henry Holt and Co. Reprinted in MW12.
• [ HNC ] 1922a, Human Nature and Conduct , New York: Henry Holt and Co. Reprinted in MW14.
• 1922b, “Realism without Monism or Dualism”, Journal of Philosophy , 19(12): 309–317, 19(13): 351–361 Reprinted in MW13: 40–60. doi:10.2307/2939872 doi:10.2307/2939610
• 1923, “Individuality in Education”, General Science Quarterly , 7(3): 157–166. Reprinted in MW15: 170–179. doi:10.1002/sce.3730070301
• [ EN ] 1925a, Experience and Nature , Chicago: Open Court Publishing.
• 1925, “The Naturalistic Theory of Perception by the Senses”, The Journal of Philosophy , 22(22): 596–606. Reprinted in LW2: 44–54 as “A Naturalistic Theory of Sense-Perception”. doi:10.2307/2015056
• 1927a, “Half-Hearted Naturalism”, The Journal of Philosophy , 24(3): 57–64. Reprinted in LW3: 73–81. doi:10.2307/2014856
• [ PP ] 1927b, The Public and Its Problems , New York: Henry Holt and Co. Reprinted in LW2.
• 1927c, “The Rôle of Philosophy in the History of Civilization”, The Philosophical Review , 36(1): 1–9. Reprinted in LW3: 3–11 as “Philosophy and Civilization”. doi:10.2307/2179154
• 1928, “Social as a Category”, Monist , 38(2): 161–177. Reprinted in LW3: 41–54 as “The Inclusive Philosophical Idea”,. doi:10.5840/monist192838218
• [ QC ] 1929, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action , New York: Minton, Balch and Co. Reprinted in LW4.
• [ FAE ] 1930a, “From Absolutism to Experimentalism”, in Contemporary American Philosophy: Personal Statements , George Plimpton Adams and William Pepperell Montague (eds), London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Macmillan Co., volume 2: 13–27. Reprinted in LW5: 147–60.
• 1930b, “Psychology and Work”, Personnel Journal , 8(February): 337–341. Reprinted in LW5: 236–242
• 1930c, “Qualitative Thought”, Symposium , 1(January): 5–32. Reprinted in his Philosophy and Civilization , New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1931, pp. 93–116. Reprinted in LW5: 243–262.
• [ TIF ] 1930d, “Trois facteurs indépendants en matière de morale”, Charles Cestre (trans.), Bulletin de la société française de philosophie , 30(4): 118–127. First publication in English, 1966, “Three Independent Factors in Morals”, Educational Theory , 16(3): 198–209, Jo Ann Boydston (trans.). Reprinted in LW5: 279–288. doi:10.1111/j.1741-5446.1966.tb00259.x
• 1930e, “What I Believe”, Forum , 83(March): 176–182. Reprinted in LW5: 267–278.
• [ ION ] 1930f, Individualism, Old and New , New York: Minton, Balch and Co. Reprinted in LW5: 41–124.
• 1931, “Context and Thought”, University of California Publications in Philosophy , (Berkeley: University of California Press), 12(3): 203–224. Reprinted in LW6: 3–21.
• [ E-rev ] 1932, with James H. Tufts, Ethics, Revised Edition , New York: Henry Holt and Co. Reprinted in LW7.
• 1933, “Analysis of Reflective Thinking”, in How We Think. a Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process , new edition, Boston: D. C. Heath and Co., ch. 7. Reprinted in LW8: 196–209.
• [ ACF ] 1934a, A Common Faith , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Reprinted in LW9.
• [ AE ] 1934b, Art as Experience , New York: Minton, Balch and Co. Reprinted in LW10.
• [ LSA ] 1935, Liberalism and Social Action , New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Reprinted in LW11: 1–66.
• 1936a, “A Liberal Speaks Out for Liberalism”, New York Times Magazine , 23 February 1936, pp. 3, 24. Reprinted in LW11: 282–288.
• 1936b, “Authority and Social Change”, School and Society , 44(10 October 1936): 457–466. Reprinted in LW11: 130–145.
• 1937, “Freedom”, chapter 9 in National Education Association, Implications of Social-Economic Goals for Education: A Report of the Committee on Social- Economic Goals of America , Washington, DC: National Education Association, pp. 99–105. Reprinted in LW11: 247–255.
• 1938a, “Democracy and Education in the World of Today”, pamphlet by the Society for Ethical Culture, New York. Reprinted in LW13: 294–303.
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• A Brief Account: John Dewey’s Ethics, Political Theory, and Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics , by David L. Hildebrand (2018)
• John Dewey, American Pragmatist, at pragmatism.org
• Gouinlock, James S., “John Dewey”, Encyclopedia Britannica , revision: 27 September 2018. URL = < https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Dewey >
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• Field, Richard, “John Dewey (1859–1952)”, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy . URL = < http://www.iep.utm.edu/dewey/ >
• Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, resources (research and teaching) on John Dewey and other American Philosophers
• The Center for Dewey Studies
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Democracy and Education

By john dewey, table of contents.

• Education as a Necessity of Life
• Education as a Social Function
• Education as Direction
• Education as Growth
• Preparation, Unfolding, and Formal Discipline
• Education as Conservative and Progressive
• The Democratic Conception in Education
• Aims in Education
• Natural Development and Social Efficiency as Aims
• Interest and Discipline
• Experience and Thinking
• Thinking in Education
• The Nature of Method
• The Nature of Subject Matter
• Play and Work in the Curriculum
• The Significance of Geography and History
• Science in the Course of Study
• Educational Values
• Labor and Leisure
• Intellectual and Practical Studies
• Physical and Social Studies: Naturalism and Humanism
• The Individual and the World
• Vocational Aspects of Education
• Philosophy of Education
• Theories of Knowledge
• Theories of Morals

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Article contents

Democracy and education in the united states.

• Kathy Hytten Kathy Hytten University of North Carolina at Greensboro
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.2
• Published online: 29 March 2017

There is an integral and reciprocal relationship between democracy and education. Democracy is more than a political system or process, it is also a way of life that requires certain habits and dispositions of citizens, including the need to balance individual rights with commitments and responsibilities toward others. Currently, democracy is under threat, in part because of the shallow and reductive ways it has been taken up in practice. Understanding the historical relationship between democracy and education, particularly how democracy was positioned as part of the development of public schools, as well as current approaches to democratic schooling, can help to revitalize the democratic mission of education. Specifically, schools have an important civic role in cultivating in students the habits and dispositions of citizenship, including how to access information, determine the veracity of claims, think critically, research problems, ask questions, collaborate with others, communicate ideas, and act to improve the world. Curriculum, pedagogy, and organizational structures are unique in democratic schools. Developing an active, inquiry-based curriculum; using a problem-posing pedagogy; and organizing schools such that students develop habits of responsibility and social engagement provide our best hope for revitalizing democracy and ensuring that it is not simply an empty slogan but a rich, participatory, justice-oriented way of life.

• United States
• social justice
• democratic schools
• purposes of education
• civic education

If we were to ask a typical citizen in the United States about the meaning of democracy, they would likely tell us that it is a political system that entails freedom, choice, and voting. They would have some familiarity with branches of the government, the electoral process, and the idea that citizens get to choose their leaders. They have probably learned that democracy is the best system in the world, especially in contrast to other possibilities, such as communism, socialism, totalitarianism, and oligarchy. They may point out how democratic societies allow individuals to do what they want, provide myriad consumer choices, and ensure opportunities for everyone who works hard to be successful, often implicitly conflating capitalism and democracy. Most likely, they take democracy for granted; it is simply the name for our way of life. Yet at the same time, the idea of democracy is fragile and contested and, from a global perspective, increasingly suspect. Democracy has been invoked to support a range of questionable practices, including invading foreign countries, declaring wars, exploiting the environment, and placing the needs of corporations above those of people. Democracy is called upon as the justification “for almost anything people want to do” (Beane & Apple, 2007 , p. 6), leading many around the world to worry “that an appeal to democracy is a veiled attempt by those making the appeal to dominate, to manipulate, or in other ways to advance their own interests at others’ expense” (Ryder, 2007 , para. 1). Ironically, the more democracy is called upon, the less we seem to agree on what it means, and the more empty an idea it becomes.

In this article, I offer a rich vision of democracy as a way of life and describe the role of education in supporting that vision. In contrast to a shallow view of democracy as merely a political process, I argue that democracy is an ethical ideal that must be deliberately fostered and nourished in order for it to survive. It is ever a work in progress, and the fundamental role of schools in democratic societies is to cultivate the habits, values, dispositions, and practices necessary to sustain a democratic way of life. Since the creation of public schools in the United States centuries ago, they have always served a civic mission, though the centrality of this mission has waxed and waned. In our current climate of high-stakes accountability, excessive international competition, and privatization of public goods, we have arguably lost sight of the crucial relationship between education and democracy. In order to revitalize the civic mission of public education, we must understand the meaning of democracy and the role of schools in teaching, modeling, and sustaining a democratic way of life.

I begin this article by defining democracy as a way of life that requires certain habits and dispositions of citizens, including the need to balance individual rights with commitments and responsibilities toward others. I then discuss some of the current threats to democracy, including the ambiguity surrounding its meaning, and the reductive ways in which it is interpreted in practice. Third, I describe the historical relationship between education and democracy, exploring how this relationship has developed over time. I focus especially on the ideas of John Dewey, as he dedicated so much of his philosophical work to detailing the intimate and reciprocal connections between democracy and education. Fourth, I make an argument for the role democracy should play in our thinking about education contemporarily, describing the civic habits and dispositions that schools should cultivate if democracy is to hold any meaning. Fifth, I sketch some visions for democratic schooling that can help to revitalize and sustain a democratic way of life, arguing that a way of life as fragile and precarious as democracy can only survive when schools equip young people, as citizens in the making, with the skills, knowledge, and dispositions needed to nourish it. I describe approaches to curriculum, pedagogy, and school organization that can best cultivate democratic habits and behaviors. I close by suggesting that thinking deeply about the relationship between democracy and education is critical to bringing about a more just, fulfilling, and peaceful world.

What Is Democracy?

Describing the meaning of democracy is a more difficult task than it might initially seem. Most of us learn that democracy is a “form of political governance involving consent of the governed and equality of opportunity” and that it involves direct participation in some activities in our society, including electing representatives who will speak and work on our behalf in others (Beane & Apple, 2007 , p. 7). We may also consider it a way of social and political organization, involving rules, laws, prohibitions, and rights, encapsulated in such documents at the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The word democracy comes from the Greek root demos , which means the population of a town or nation. Building on this root, Kohl ( 1992 ) writes that, “a democracy is a society in which the population rules, not royalty, not a small number of families, or the military” (p. 201). Yet exactly how the people rule, and who constitutes “the people,” are matters of ongoing debate. Historically, many people were excluded from democratic participation, including women, people from minority groups, slaves, and men who didn’t own land. Moreover, there are multiple ways in which people can be involved in governing themselves, from directly participating in deliberation and decision-making on a face-to-face level to voting for people whom they implicitly trust will make choices that are in their best interest. Held ( 2006 ) claims that the idea of democracy is contested and that key democratic ideas and ideals are sometimes ambiguous and inconsistent, including “the proper meaning of ‘political participation,’ the connotation of ‘representation,’ the scope of citizens’ capacities to choose freely among political alternatives, and the nature of membership in a democratic community” (p. x).

Describing the relationship between democracy and education is particularly challenging because there is only loose consensus on the meaning of democracy itself, and there are different forms of democracy in practice. Held ( 2006 ) identifies nine different (though often overlapping in important ways) models of democracy that have evolved over time: developmental republicanism, protective republicanism, protective democracy, developmental democracy, legal democracy, competitive elitist democracy, deliberative democracy, participatory democracy, and pluralism. Gabardi ( 2001 ) adds communitarian democracy and agonistic democracy to this list, while Biesta ( 2007 ) describes different ways of conceiving democratic subjectivity including individual, social, and political. Acknowledging the range of possibilities and practices, Dahl ( 2015 ) nonetheless argues that heart of democracy involves a belief in the political equality of citizens and that actualizing this belief requires, at a minimum, equal and effective opportunities for civic participation, voting equality, equal and effective opportunities to learn about a range of options and their potential consequences (what he calls “enlightened understanding”), citizen control of issues that get placed on the policymaking agenda, and inclusion of all adults as citizens in all matters that affect them.

Perhaps even more important than a political process, democracy is also a way of life, it is “both an ideal and an actuality” (Dahl, 2015 , p. 26), marked by values and practices that are complex, contested, and varied. In his well-known and often-cited description of democracy, John Dewey ( 1916 ) writes that it “is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” (p. 93), whose contours require regular discussion, assessment, and reinvention. Dewey goes on to suggest democracies are built upon the collaborative interdependence of people in a society who identify shared interests, work together to solve problems, and create ways of living together that bring out the best in everyone. We value democratic social arrangements because they offer us “the promise of freedom and self-determination in the context of shared commitment to the public good” (Gallagher, 2008 , p. 340). Yet there are always tensions, challenges, and conflicts among values in democratic societies. Among the most significant of these tensions is how we balance a commitment to autonomy alongside at least some minimal obligations to other people. One of the hallmarks of democratic societies is that they work to maximize individual liberty and autonomy, protecting the ability of individuals to advance their own interests without imposing upon them a singular vision of a good life. Liberal democratic theorists are thus “preoccupied with the creation and defense of a world in which ‘free and equal’ individuals can flourish with minimum political impediments” (Held, 2006 , p. 262). Alternatively, leftist, radical, and socialist-oriented democratic theorists worry about overly individualistic conceptions of democracy and defend the need for more collective orientations and intervention by states so as to ensure equality among citizens in reality, not just theory. The tension between liberty and equality never simply goes away; indeed, Mouffe ( 2009 ) claims this paradox is constitutive of democratic societies, it is “a tension that can never be overcome but only negotiated in different ways” (p. 5). Democratic educational theorists adopt a range of positions on the spectrum between liberal and leftist perspectives on the relationship between democracy and education, with many arguing that in our current era, and given existing threats to democracy, we need to reinvigorate our concern for common, not just individual, goods.

While understanding government systems and political processes is necessary for peaceful citizenship, the founders of democracy had grander ideals than simply creating laws for people to vote upon and follow. Rather, in the vein of Dewey, they believed that democracy was a way of life that involved values, principles, beliefs, and habits of being. Arguing from the more leftist perspective, Beane ( 2005 ) describes this way of life well. He maintains that democracy is ultimately an idea about how people can live together in ways that are equitable, just, enriching, and fulfilling. At the heart of democracy are two ideas: “that people have a fundamental right to human dignity and … that people have a responsibility to care about the common good and the dignity and welfare of others” (p. 9). The right to dignity requires the ability to access to information, think for oneself, decide how to live one’s life, be free from coercion, and pursue happiness. At the same time, as part of one’s responsibility toward others, we are compelled to care about common goods, work together to solve problems, participate in discussion, and improve our collective well-being. These ideas provide some “guidelines” and a moral compass for how people can “live and learn to work together democratically” (Beane, 2005 , p. 120). Yet in popular understanding, we have typically decoupled rights from responsibilities and lost sight of the centrality of common goods and commitments to others as an integral part of democratic living. In its most crass and neoliberal forms, democracy has too often come to mean celebration of individual self-interest. That is, as long as I obey laws, pay taxes, vote periodically, and don’t intentionally harm others, I can do pretty much anything that I want.

To challenge reductive, narrow, and overly individualistic and neoliberal visions of democracy, it is useful to consider it as an ethical, social, and political ideal—a dynamic work in progress. Minimally, argues Gutmann ( 1999 ), democracy entails the principles of nondiscrimination and nonrepression. In its ideal from, democracy involves the cultivation of individual characteristics and habits of being, such as caring, compassion, generosity, fairness, respect, imagination, courage, kindness, and cooperation. Concurrently, it requires that citizens create communal systems and arrangements that support inquiry, problem solving, diversity, and ongoing efforts at social reform. It involves both dispositions toward others and everyday practices, like listening, questioning, participating, and experimenting. An open flow of ideas and equitable access to information are necessary in democratic societies, even when that information may be unpopular, as this openness is imperative if people are to make informed decisions about issues that affect their lives (Beane & Apple, 2007 , p. 7). Democratic citizens value diversity and believe a range of ideas, worldviews, and perspectives is enriching and important. Indeed, the valuing of diversity and pluralism are central features of democratic societies, because in diversity there is strength. Moreover, they require that citizens actually at least minimally care about the welfare of others who are different from them and want to uncover social problems, work to solve these problems, and pursue peaceful means for navigating conflicts.

On the one hand, democracy is of course a political system, yet ideally, on the other hand, citizens come to view it as much more than that, seeing it more foundationally as a “creative, constructive process” that we need to nurture and protect, “a trek that citizens in a pluralistic society make together … a political path, a tradition of sorts, that unites them, not a culture, language, or religion” (Parker, 2003 , p. 21). In our richest visions of democracy, democratic citizens would understand that voting is only a small part of their responsibilities and that democracy is always unfinished and thus needs our sustained attention; it is not a gift we have simply received from our ancestors. Neumann ( 2008 ) captures this expansive and rich vision of democracy well, maintaining that democratic citizenship “involves a disposition for social responsibility and civic engagement; it involves participation in groups concerned with advancing foundational principles of liberty, justice, and equality and with improving human welfare and the environment of the country and planet” (p. 332). That is, it requires critical thinking and the habit of working with others to deliberate on matters of social importance as well as “faith in the individual and collective capacity of people to create possibilities for resolving problems” (Beane & Apple, 2007 , p. 7). While this vision of democracy as a way of life may never have been actualized widely, it is currently under significant threat, especially by shallow yet increasingly pervasive interpretations of democracy as nothing more than a system that protects and celebrates individual self-interests.

Democracy Under Threat

It is difficult to say whether democracy is more troubled now than any other time in our history. While some may argue that the deleterious impacts of neoliberal forms of globalization have led to a deeply problematic conflation of market freedom with democratic freedom and, in effect, have reduced our sense of democracy to little more than an empty slogan, there has been no time in our history when we have fully lived up to our democratic ideals. Moreover, different versions of democracy have always been in tension. Advocates of liberal, individualistic approaches to democracy have typically elevated individual freedoms and rights above common goods, arguing that these goods themselves are always contested and that the best way to protect individual liberty is through minimal state intervention. While we proclaim in the U.S. Declaration of Independence the equality of all “men” and their inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we have always excluded large groups of people from this supposed equality. It has taken the deliberate and sustained work of numerous civil rights activists to overturn slavery, extend voting privileges, and remove structural barriers to opportunity for historically marginalized peoples. And yet there is still much work to do to better achieve democracy in our times, especially given the growing gaps between the wealthy and poor around the world in terms of income, opportunity, health care, and overall quality of life. Indeed, advocates of more leftist visions of democracy suggest that we have lost sight of the fundamental commitment to equality that is part of democracy and maintain that states have an obligation to ensure not just “formal equality” among citizens “before the law, but also that citizens would have the actual capacity (and health, education, skills and resources) to take advantage of opportunities before them” (Held, 2006 , p. 278). They worry that we have frequently forgotten that democracy takes ongoing effort and commitment. Addressing this concern, Barber ( 1993 ) asserts that “we have been nominally democratic for so long that we presume it is our natural condition rather than the product of persistent effort and tenacious responsibility” (p. 44). He adds that “democracy is anything but a ‘natural’ form of association. It is an extraordinary and rare contrivance of cultivated imagination” (p. 44). As such, we need to perpetually attend to the work that democracy entails, recognizing that citizenship is an action, not merely a static identity.

Dewey also recognized the tendency to assume the existence of democracy rather than to understand it as an ongoing effort. He was especially troubled by this laissez-faire understanding while the United States was at the same time justifying its involvement in world wars “with the virtually unassailable statement that our soldiers were fighting to ‘make the world safe for democracy’ ” (Beane & Apple, 2007 , p. 5). Writing about the challenges he saw to our democratic way of life between the First and Second World Wars, Dewey ( 1938 ) called attention to our complacency and our habit of seeing democracy as simply a fact rather than a project that requires sustained focus. He lamented that citizens “had, without formulating it, a conception of democracy as something that is like an inheritance that can be bequeathed, a kind of lump sum that we could live off and upon” (pp. 298–299). Alternatively, he argued that each generation has to rework democracy in a fashion that is relevant for their times and that is responsive to contemporary challenges. Yet many people today still think of democracy in static ways, as a given, something that requires very little of citizens beyond voting and abiding by certain procedures. Goodlad, Mantle-Bromley, and Goodlad ( 2004 ) echo Dewey’s concern about stagnation, worrying that too many people simply “assume that the United States has a democratic system of governance” that was created “by the framers of the U.S. Constitution” and “that it is so thoroughly embedded in our collective psyche that it is invulnerable to external threats … and that all we have to do to maintain it is occasionally to vote” (p. 35). Compounding the belief that we have already fulfilled the promise of democracy in this country, the idea is also threatened by ambiguity surrounding its meaning, allowing it to be co-opted by those seeking to justify the global expansion of a way of life marked by self-interested, capitalist accumulation.

Absent sustained attention to the moral heart of democracy, namely commitment to individual freedom amid a concern for common goods, it often is reduced in public discourse and imagination to little more than a theory of individualism. We conflate capitalism and democracy, believing that an unregulated economic market is necessary and sufficient to secure democratic freedoms, which themselves are often reduced to consumer choices. Price ( 2011 ) argues that democracy is presented to us as system of governance that we ought to uncritically appreciate, one “that can only be built upon and sustained by free markets, private property, increased consumption and productivity, and the over-arching pursuit of profit” (p. 293). Yet unregulated capitalism under the guise of democratic globalization has led to the rapid concentration of wealth in the hands of an increasingly small portion of the population, as well as the pervasive assumption that economic growth inherently trickles down to the poor and improves their quality of life. There is little evidence that this is actually the case, and instead we have ever-growing gaps worldwide between the extremely wealthy and everyone else. One of the biggest challenges to democracy is the belief that our current approaches to globalization are actually democratic and that unregulated corporate behaviors can somehow protect the interests of citizens as opposed to simply shareholders.

Perhaps the biggest threat to democracy in our times is complacency. If we consider democracy as a given, we are unlikely to engage in the sustained efforts needed to bring it to fruition. Yet schools too often teach, both explicitly and implicitly, that democracy is merely the political system that we use to make decisions by in our country. We rarely discuss deeper visions for democracy or tensions and paradoxes within democracy or even reflect on the meaning of democracy at all. This allows those with more self-interested goals to assert, often persuasively, that their agendas are actually democratic. Apple and Beane ( 2007 ) capture this worry well when they argue that “rather than referring to ways in which political and institutional life are shaped by equitable, active, widespread, and fully informed participation, democracy is increasingly being defined as unregulated business maneuvers in a free-market economy” (p. 150). Revisiting the historic relationship between democracy and education can help to disrupt this reductive vision and provide the foundation needed to reclaim a more expansive understanding of what it means to live in a democratic society.

Historical Perspective on Democracy and Education

The founding and development of public schools in the United States were historically closely tied to democratic ideals. Indeed, as Schlesinger ( 2009 ) maintains, “it seems bizarre to have to make the case that the public school system should prepare citizens for democracy” (p. 88) since this why our school system was initially created in the first place. The founding fathers of the United States held important political motives for education, believing that critical literacy, as well as an understanding of history, were imperative for self-governance. These motives are evident in George Washington’s first message to Congress, where “he advocated for public schools that would teach students to ‘value their own rights’ and ‘to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority’” (Rothstein & Jacobsen, 2006 , p. 267). Consistently, in his farewell address he also talked about the importance of education to informed decision-making, claiming that “‘it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened’ by schools that teach virtue and morality” (Rothstein & Jacobsen, 2006 , p. 267).

Both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams also maintained the centrality of schooling to providing citizens with the information and habits needed to make wise decisions and to hold their leaders accountable. Jefferson acknowledged the potential for corruption in leadership, arguing that only an educated citizenry can protect against this. He wrote, “every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree” (Neumann, 2008 , p. 329). John Adams, who authored the section of the Massachusetts constitution focused upon “spreading the opportunities and advantages of education,” wrote about the importance of diffusing “wisdom and knowledge” to the broad population, because these are “necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties” (Michelli, 2005 , p. 11).

We can also see the relationship between education and democracy as an important part of the Common School Movement in the early part of the 1800s in the United States. Common school reformers believed that public schooling could help shape the population in progressive directions by providing all children access to shared basic information and the means to develop literacy skills, concurrently reducing tensions between social classes and developing citizens with the knowledge needed to self-govern. Spring ( 2005 ) identifies three distinctive features of this movement: creating schools “attended in common by all children in which a common political and social ideology was taught”; using schools as part of government policy aimed to address social, economic, and political problems; and building state agencies to regulate and administer schools (p. 74).

Considered the founder of the Common School Movement, Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education Horace Mann, in a series of annual reports he wrote to encourage support for public schooling, consistently maintained its integral role in sustaining democracy. For example, in his Tenth Annual Report in 1846 , he asserted that a democratic society requires public schools to provide, at the very least, the amount of education needed “to qualify each citizen for the social duties that he will be called to discharge,” including the information and dispositions necessary to maintain health, parent effectively, be a good witness or juror, and vote thoughtfully, and “for the faithful and conscientious discharge of all of those duties which devolve upon the inheritor of a portion of the sovereignty of this great republic” (Fraser, 2001 , p. 53). In another of his reports, written after a visit to Europe, Mann argued that schools needed to teach more than simply literacy, especially since students in autocratic regimes also learned to read and write. Instead, he offered “schools in a democracy could not be held accountable for academics alone, but must inculcate democratic moral and political values so that literacy would not be misused” (Rothstein & Jacobsen, 2006 , p. 268).

Historically, the discussion of the relationship between education and democracy, especially in the ideal, is most fully developed in the work of John Dewey. Across his large body of work, Dewey consistently argues that democracy is, first and foremost, a way of life marked by the degree to which individuals share similar interests and work across lines of difference in order to solve problems and create habits of interaction that allow all people to reach their potential. For Dewey, democracy and education are intimately and reciprocally related. He suggests that without an education that conditions us to understand both our freedoms and responsibilities toward others, democracy can neither develop nor endure. We need schools to learn the values, habits, and dispositions that form the heart of democratic living and that allow us to live “together in ways in which the life of each of us is at once profitable in the deepest sense of the word, profitable to himself and helpful in the building up of the individuality of others” (Dewey, 1938 , p. 303). The most essential function of schooling is to help develop democratic values and purposes. This goal should be the foundation for all other educational efforts. Dewey ( 1938 ) offers that school,

[i]s not the only means, but it is the first means, the primary means and the most deliberate means by which the values that any social group cherishes, the purposes that it wishes to realize, are distributed and brought home to the thought, the observation, judgment and choice of the individual. (p. 296)

It is through schools that we learn the meaning of democracy and develop commitment to others and to the processes of inquiry and collaborative problem solving necessary for individual and communal growth.

For Dewey, democracy is an evolving, creative, and cooperative way of life that must be nourished through schooling in order for it to survive. He argues that democratic citizens must learn to be critical, reflective, open-minded thinkers who can use their minds well to solve social, economic, and political problems and thereby reconstruct the world around them in more just, equitable, and fulfilling ways. The Educational Policies Commission echoed these beliefs in their 1938 report on “The Purposes of Education in American Democracy.” Sponsored by the National Education Association, then a quasi-governmental group comprised of teachers, educational professionals, and policymakers, members of the Commission were concerned about how schools should respond to challenges posed by global unrest in the wake of the First World War, and the aftermath of the Great Depression. The Commission opened this report stating definitively that “the democratic way of life establishes the purpose of American education,” yet they worried about how this way of life was being challenged both abroad and at home, and thus claimed, “the achievement of democracy through education” was “the most urgent and most intensely practical problem facing our profession” (Educational Policies Commission, 1938 , p. vii).

The vision of democracy offered by this Commission is consistently reflective of Dewey’s ideals and of more leftist visions of democracy that foreground the connection between freedom and equality. For example, they claimed that commitment to the general welfare was one of the most important elements of democratic living, asserting that

[d]emocracy prizes a broad humanitarianism … a feeling of kinship to other people more or less fortunate than oneself. One who lives in accordance with democracy is interested not only in his own welfare but in the welfare of others – the general welfare. (Educational Policies Commission, 1938 , pp. 7–8)

They went on to outline a number of other “minimum essentials of democracy,” including that democratic societies afford individuals inalienable rights, inescapable responsibilities, and respectful treatment; ensure access to information and the participation of the people in decision making; use peaceful and thoughtful methods of settling controversies; and work to create the conditions for all people to pursue happiness (Educational Policies Commission, 1938 , pp. 7–8). Speaking to educators, the Commission argued that democracy ought to be the guiding ideal for public schooling, and “those who administer and teach in the schools must regard the study of democracy as their first professional responsibility” (p. 16).

While I have only provided a snapshot of the historical connection between democracy and schooling, that democratic goals were central to the founding and development of a public school system in the United States is undeniable. There is significant support over time for Dewey’s ( 1897 ) belief that “the community’s duty to education is … its paramount moral duty” (p. 94). This is because it is only through education that “society can formulate its own purposes, can organize its own means and resources, and thus shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes to move” (Dewey, 1897 , p. 94). Democracy as a “ personal way of individual life” (Dewey, 1939 , p. 226) requires schools that nurture democratic attitudes, habits, and dispositions and that uphold a civic mission. Writing contemporaneously with Dewey, the Educational Policies Commission ( 1938 ) outlined a compelling vision for the civic responsibilities of schools in rich detail, suggesting that an educated, democratic citizen is sensitive to the disparities of human circumstance, acts to correct unsatisfactory conditions, seeks to understand social structures and processes, has defenses against propaganda, respects honest differences of opinion, has regard for the nation’s resources, measures scientific advance by its contribution to the general welfare, is a cooperating member of the world community, respects the law, is economically literate, accepts his or her civic duties, and acts upon an unswerving loyalty to democratic ideals (p. 108). Yet in our current era, we seem to have lost sight of this civic mission of schooling, pointing to the pressing need to revisit and establish anew a democratic vision for public education.

Role of Schools in a Democratic Society

While history illustrates that a civic mission was always an integral reason for public schooling, attention to this mission has waned over time, but especially in the last few decades, and particularly since the 1983 report assessing the quality of education in the United States, A Nation at Risk . This contentious report (as later analysis revealed much of the data and its interpretation to be problematic) set in motion a pattern of attacking public schools “for failing to keep up with other foreign powers with the context of Cold War geo-politics” (Au, 2009 , p. 44) and for implicitly allowing a “business model of competing in the global economy” (McClung, 2013 , p. 37) to trump civic purposes for schooling. The authors of the report claimed that international students were outperforming U.S. students in crucial areas of math and science. As part of the response to this report, states created education commissions to establish rigorous content standards and to develop a framework for schools to engage in regular testing to ensure that students met these standards. This high-stakes accountability regime was only exacerbated when the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation went into effect in 2002 . Frequent, high-stakes testing in reading and math are integral to NCLB, as the law mandates that students be tested in these subjects every year in grades 3–8 and at least once in high school. Testing in science at least once in elementary, middle, and high school was added in 2008 (Au, 2009 ). While ostensibly this system helps educators to ensure the achievement of all students, a corollary effect has been to significantly narrow the curriculum, as little attention is now paid in schools to nontested subjects like social studies, art, writing, and the humanities (Pederson, 2007 ).

One of the most disturbing consequences of an obsessive focus on students meeting standards in math, reading, and science, beyond the fact that standardized tests are now dictating and dominating the curriculum, is that concurrently, we have lost sight of more noble goals for schools. McClung ( 2013 ) laments that “the economic purpose of getting a job or getting into college in order to get a better job”—narrowly individualistic pursuits that implicitly presume our quality of life can be measured by the quantity of our paychecks—“has evolved into the de facto primary purpose of K–12 (and higher) education” (p. 37). Students are taking fewer classes in social studies, and in the best-case scenario schools are attempting to integrate social studies content into literacy goals. Yet as McGuire ( 2007 ) shows, social studies taught in this supposedly integrated fashion are not helping students to develop as democratic citizens, as typically students are simply offered disconnected bits of information to digest, memorize, and recall for tests. Instead of learning to think critically about history, current events, political systems, operations of power, and global dynamics, social studies topics are offered instrumentally as a way to improve reading skills. For example, “students are asked to find main ideas and supporting details, to compare and contrast, to make inferences, to scan, and to understand graphical material” (McGuire, 2007 , p. 621) but are not taught the habits and dispositions needed to become knowledgeable, engaged, social justice–oriented citizens.

It is against the backdrop of a declining attention to civic educational purposes that the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement released a 2003 report entitled The Civic Mission of Schools . Containing contributions from some of the most respected and distinguished scholars in the bipartisan field of civic education, the report was an outgrowth of a series of meetings held to reach consensus about the research, role, and value of civic education and provide recommendations for civic education reform, especially important in light of what they characterized as waning civic participation in the United States. The opening to this report echoes the knowledge and wisdom of our founding fathers:

For more than 250 years, Americans have shared a vision in which all citizens understand, appreciate, and actively engage in civic and political life—taking responsibility for building communities, contributing their diverse talents and energies to solve local and national problems, deliberating about public issues, influencing public policy, voting, and pursing the common good. Americans know that it is a rare and precious gift to live in a society that permits and values such participation. (Carnegie Corporation of New York and CIRCLE, 2003 , p. 8)

While they describe a compelling role for citizens in a democratic society, there is little evidence that today’s young people understand this “rare and precious gift” or that they are being taught the habits necessary to sustain it. The high stakes accountability movement only exacerbates this concern.

In arguing for revitalizing the civic mission of schools, this committee offers a powerful description of the habits and behaviors integral to democratic citizenship. This description can serve to guide efforts to center democratic goals for public education and to reform curriculum, pedagogy, and the organization of schooling. Their vision is worth quoting at length. They maintain that “competent and responsible citizens”:

Are informed and thoughtful; have a grasp and an appreciation of history and the fundamental processes of American democracy; have an understanding and awareness of public and community issues; and have the ability to obtain information, think critically, and enter into dialogue among others with different perspectives.

Participate in their communities through membership in or contributions to organizations working to address an array of cultural, social, political, and religious interests and beliefs.

Act politically by having the skills, knowledge, and commitment needed to accomplish public purposes, such as group problem solving, public speaking, petitioning and protesting, and voting.

Have moral and civic virtues such as concern for the rights and welfare of others, social responsibility, tolerance and respect, and belief in the capacity to make a difference. (Carnegie Corporation of New York and CIRCLE, 2003 , p. 4)

They offer this vision in the hopes that educators will better understand the centrality of schooling to democracy and, concurrently, strengthen their commitment to preparing young people to engage in the work needed to sustain and promote a democratic way of life.

In order to create the kinds of caring, competent, committed, and responsible citizens envisioned both by our founding fathers and by the wide range of democratic educational theorists exploring the issue of schooling for democracy, educators need to think more regularly in the language of habits and dispositions than in the more familiar language of content and standards. Instead of obsessing about what students know—the information that students must learn in order to be successful on standardized tests—educators need to attend much more to identifying how students should learn to be—the habits and dispositions that we ought to be cultivating. We should be as concerned, if not more concerned, with the kinds of people we are shaping and molding through schooling than we are with the isolated bits of information students can recall for tests or whether they outperform their counterparts around the world on these tests. To start, democratic citizens need to be in the habit of accessing information, determining the veracity of claims, thinking critically, researching problems, asking questions of those in power, dialoguing with others, finding resources, communicating ideas, and acting to improve the world around them. Stitzlein ( 2014 ) argues that developing certain habits of inquiry is at the heart of educating for democracy. Drawing from Dewey, she offers that such habits include “beliefs in equal opportunity, free communication, inclusion of varied perspectives, hope for a better future, and valuing of life uncoerced by others” (Stitzlein, 2014 , p. 63). In addition, democratic citizens must be empathetic and compassionate, media literate, responsible to others around them, and globally aware. They should be able to think for themselves and to substantiate their perspectives and opinions about the world on the basis of evidence and information, not easily falling victim to propaganda or lies.

The habits, dispositions, and behaviors of democratic citizenship don’t simply come naturally to people; they must be learned in the context of interaction with others. As most of all young people in the world attend schools, they are ideally positioned to directly and deliberately cultivate these habits. Parker ( 2003 ) describes the minimal qualities of good citizens in relation to foundational knowledge, cognitive habits, and dispositions toward others. He writes that democratic citizens understand that they are caught up in an “inescapable network of mutuality” with other people; exhibit practical and contextualized judgment; hold civic knowledge, including “knowing the conditions that have undermined democracies in the past”; demonstrate “civic know-how,” such as skills for deliberation and problem solving; and maintain a thirst for social, political, and economic justice (Parker, 2003 , p. 23). It is no doubt one of the most important roles of schools to cultivate these skills and habits, and to help students to “develop initiative and imagination, the capacity to name the world, the wisdom to identify the obstacles to their full humanity and to the humanity of others, and the courage to act on whatever the known demands” (Ayers, Kumashiro, Meiners, Quinn, & Stovall, 2010 , p. 13). These civic goals are surely as important, if not more important, than economic goals for schools, which are reflected in the ways, however inadvertently, schooling has often become simply about acquiring credentials for individualistic and selfish economic gain.

Taking democratic goals seriously would mean that we would organize and focus schools differently than we do now. At the very least, such schools would be “marked by an emphasis on cooperation and collaboration rather than competition” and would be organized to “encourage young people to improve the life of the community” around them, instead of simply using education as a steppingstone to personal gain (Beane & Apple, 2007 , p. 12). Cultivating democratic habits is no doubt best done in schools that are themselves structured to support a democratic vision and mission. While many schools and school districts allude to and even explicitly name issues of democracy in their mission statements, rarely do they demonstrate deep commitment to democracy in practice.

Democratic Schools

In contrast to the all-too-common reality of schools as passive places where students quietly absorb textbook-based information in classrooms, complete worksheets and standardized assessments, and where knowledge is artificially divided into disconnected subjects, schools that foster democratic habits are active, engaged spaces built around a culture of inquiry and civic engagement. They are organized such that teachers and students are encouraged to be creative, flexible, and experimental. They elevate cooperation and collaboration above competition and ask students to take ownership over their own education and to complete community engaged projects. Students in such schools study actual problems facing humanity, as opposed to simply learning about inherited truths, mathematical and scientific abstractions, or events in the past.

Reflecting on contemporary schooling, it is disturbing how little of the dominant content taught helps students to make meaning of the world around them, let alone to address and respond to pressing social concerns. Purpel brings this point home in a thought experiment he often performed with his teacher and administrator education students (Shapiro, 2006 , p. 18). He would begin his classes by posing two questions to students. First, he would ask them to brainstorm a list of the biggest problems currently facing humanity. Here they would typically identify such topics as war, poverty, terrorism, racism, famine, materialism, environmental degradation, prejudice, and greed. He would then ask them to reflect on if, and how, the education we offer young people prepares them to respond to any of these problems. As Shapiro ( 2006 ) reports, what usually resulted was a “stunned silence as they recognized how removed our educational focus and work have become from anything that attempts to help us engage and change the human condition in the contemporary world” (p. 18). Alternatively, an education that cultivates the “habits of heart and mind that make democratic life possible” (Wood, 1992 , p. xvi) reorients typical approaches to curriculum, pedagogy, and school organization such that content is meaningful, learning is vibrant and student centered, and schools are structured to cultivate relationships and build a sense of responsibility. We have many models of such democratic schools, and democratic practices within schools, which provide a vision for what is possible.

In democratic schools, the curriculum is built around inquiry, as students learn to ask questions of the world around them and to engage in civic work in their communities. They complete “transdisciplinary projects” that address social needs, while coupling “these with academic analyses of the social and institutional context” (Westheimer & Kahne, 1998 , p. 7). Rather than math and science, social studies are centered in a curriculum that prepares students for democratic citizenship. Students engage in self-reflection, work with others, question power, and develop action plans to change the world around them. As an example of this type of education, Westheimer and Kahne ( 1998 ) describe the curriculum of C. Wright Mills Middle School, which is designed around themes and “prompting challenges,” such as how to respond to hunger, violence, or homelessness in the local community and, concurrently, the world. Interdisciplinary teams of teachers start with these challenges and construct the curriculum around deep questions, covering required subjects and topics within the context of studying pressing social problems. Math and science are not neglected, rather these subjects are taught through real world examples, for instance, studying the economic costs of violence or violence in families (Westheimer & Kahne, 1998 , p. 9). Similarly, in his 5th grade classroom at Byrd Community Academy in Chicago, Schultz ( 2007 ) worked with his students to develop an entire year-long curriculum around understanding problems in their impoverished and neglected community and working to fix their collapsing school. This project paid off, as standardized test scores improved, but more importantly, students came to school feeling both valued and involved in learning that mattered. They attended school at unprecedented rates (98%) and had few disciplinary problems (Schultz, 2007 , p. 78). In both examples, educators model Wood’s ( 1992 ) belief that “less is more.” Describing meaningful democratic curricular reform, he writes, “not all of the facts we teach children will stick with them. But a habit of mind, something much more important, will stay with young people. It takes time, not coverage, to develop these habits” (Wood, 1992 , p. 168).

Paralleling a curriculum built around projects, inquiry, options, and engagement, educators teach differently in schools that cultivate the habits of democratic citizenship. They see themselves as co-learners, facilitators, and guides, not as experts whose role is to inform and enlighten students. They help students to “question power” by exposing them to social, economic, political, and cultural contradictions, creating spaces for them to dialogue about these contradictions, and pushing them to take action against education that dehumanizes (Elliott, 2015 , p. 20). Students learn to take positions and argue for their stances as part of a pedagogy premised on active learning. Imagining such a pedagogy, Wolk ( 2007 ) suggests that such schools replace textbooks, worksheets, formulaic assignments, and multiple-choice tests with activities that create a love of learning, an exploration of self, habits of caring and empathy, environmental literacy, multicultural understanding, a commitment to peace and nonviolence, media literacy, global awareness, creativity and imagination, and social responsibility. “Rather than being places where students sit in silence as their teachers talk all day,” argues Wolk, classrooms that cultivate habits of engagement are “dynamic public spaces where the authentic and vibrant discourse of daily democracy would be an essential part of the school experience” ( 2007 , p. 651).

Democratic teaching involves creating communities of learning, where collaboration and cooperation are the norm and students have opportunities to participate in decisions about curriculum, assignments, school organization, and assessment. Students learn to become social justice–oriented citizens who are “thoughtfully informed about a variety of complex social issues, think independently, and look for ways to improve society” (Westheimer, 2015 , p. 40). The curriculum and pedagogy of Deborah Meier’s ( 1995 , 2003 ) Central Park East Secondary School provides a powerful example of such schooling for democracy, as teachers in this school developed relationships of trust with students, provided them choices for their learning, asked them to exhibit and/or perform what they know, and habituated them to thinking critically. In teaching students to assess all information and curricular content, they pushed them to develop the habits necessary of good democratic citizens, for example, conditioning them to ask how we know what we know, whose perspective information comes from and why this matters, what causes what (as part of looking for patterns and connections), how things might be different, and why we should care (Meier, 1995 , p. 50).

Schools that foster the habits of democracy are organized and governed in ways that solicit and value the input of all stakeholders, including parents and community members. They are open and flexible places that model respect and teach responsibility. Wood ( 1998 ) laments the fact that we give students very few responsibilities in schools, instead worrying more about controlling their behavior and covering predetermined content. Yet if we want students to become responsible citizens, they need to practice responsibility. Putting this idea into action when he took over as principal at Federal Hocking High School, Wood completely reorganized the school around the ideas of “being accountable for one’s own actions, choosing to make a contribution, making wise decisions that take into account how decisions affect others, and making productive use of one’s own time” ( 1998 , p. 128). What this meant in practice is that high school students learned to track their own academic progress; displayed their learning through projects, portfolios, and exhibitions, instead of simply accumulating credits; took their learning into the community through action projects and internship experiences; managed their own time during the school day as they were given options for what to work on and how to learn; and assumed significant responsibilities in the school, including involvement in scheduling, organizing extracurricular activities, hiring staff, and designing the standard operating procedures of their school. Ultimately, to learn the habits and dispositions necessary for democratic citizenship, students need to practice them in schools that are organized to support the cultivation and development of democratic values. As Beane ( 2005 ) aptly notes,

[c]ritical thinking is learned only by thinking critically, reflection by reflecting, collaboration by collaborating, independence by working independently, social action by acting on social issues, compassion by caring for others, responsibility by having authentic and meaningful responsibilities, and decision making by making decisions. The only way we can have democracy is by being democratic. (p. 119)

Developing an active, inquiry-based curriculum; using a problem-posing pedagogy; and organizing schools such that students develop habits of responsibility and social engagement provide our best hope for revitalizing democracy and for ensuring that it is not simply an empty slogan but a rich, participatory, justice-oriented way of life.

As is evident from the preceding examples of democratic schooling, there is a close relationship between democracy and social justice, especially among leftist-oriented democratic educators who pay consistent attention to issues of equity and equality of opportunity in social, political, and educational arrangements. Leftist-oriented democratic educators are troubled by the glaring and persistent inequities in both our society and our educational system, the latter of which are especially apparent in inequitable funding for schools, lack of resources in poor districts, and pervasive achievement gaps between privileged and marginalized students. They argue that a commitment to social justice is part and parcel of what it means to be a democratic citizen. As social justice entails “the principles of ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’ for all people and respect for their basic human rights” (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2012 , p. xvii), it is inherently also a democratic value. Yet the degree to which social justice is centered in our thinking about democracy varies, and many liberal democratic theorists would argue for personally responsible and participatory models of citizenship (Westheimer, 2015 ), believing that in an ideologically diverse society we must respect students’ rights to identify the good life for themselves and not to seemingly compel them to uphold certain conceptions of what this life entails. These tensions are inherent in democratic education, which, like democracy itself, is ever a work in progress.

Final Thoughts

The future of democracy is tied to the quality of our public education system. Democratic societies need schools that teach the habits, dispositions, and practices of citizenship. Democracy is a precarious yet potentially powerful and energizing ethical ideal, in spite of the significant tensions and paradoxes in how we understand democratic life. It provides us a kind of moral compass for how we ought to live together amid our diversity, learning from each other and working to expand freedoms for all people. It is a way of life that celebrates individual autonomy and growth in the context of care for fellow citizens and the environment and a future of peace and social and political stability. The challenges to enacting democracy in our present time are many. Currently, despite how often we invoke democracy as part of our discussions about education, “schools don’t really teach the democratic way of life. Mostly they just teach about it. Or more accurately, they teach about its symbols and procedures” (Carnegie Corporation of New York and CIRCLE, 2003 , p. 118). Schools that truly emphasize democracy are few and far between, but they exist, and we can learn much from their practices. Commitment to democracy requires concurrent commitment to rich, sophisticated, ongoing, and comprehensive civic education. This is a move away from schooling that both implicitly and explicitly celebrates competitive individualism. Public schools have always played a significant role in the making of citizens and in bringing the kind of society we imagine to fruition. As Levinson ( 2012 ) powerfully argues, “decisions about how to educate our and others’ children are at their heart decisions about how we conceive of the world we live in now and how to create the world we want to inhabit in the future” (p. 54). A truly democratic future requires education that nurtures, fosters, and sustains the habits and dispositions of citizenship, as well as ongoing discussion about the nature of these habits, which is ultimately our best hope for creating a world that is just, mutually fulfilling, and peaceful.

Further Reading

• Apple, M. W. , & Beane, J. A. (Eds.). (2007). Democratic schools: Lessons in powerful education (2d ed.). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
• Beane J. A. (2005). A reason to teach: Creating classrooms of dignity and hope . Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
• Elliott, S. (2015). Teaching and learning on the verge: Democratic education in action . New York: Teachers College Press.
• Westheimer, J. (2015). What kind of citizen? Educating our children for the common good . New York: Teachers College Press.
• Apple, M. W. , & Beane, J. A. (2007). Lessons from democratic schools. In M. W. Apple & J. A. Beane (Eds.), Democratic schools: Lessons in powerful education (2d ed., pp. 150–155). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
• Au W. (2009). Social studies, social justice: W(h)ither the social studies in high-stakes testing? Teacher Education Quarterly , 36 (1), 43–58.
• Ayers, W. , Kumashiro, K. , Meiners, E. , Quinn, T. , & Stovall, D. (2010). Teaching toward democracy: Educators as agents of change . Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
• Barber, B. R. (1993). America skips school: Why we talk so much about education and do so little. Harpers , 287 (1722), 39–46.
• Beane, J. A. , & Apple, M. W. (2007). The case for democratic schools. In M. W. Apple & J. A. Beane (Eds.), Democratic schools: Lessons in powerful education (2d ed., pp. 1–29). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
• Biesta, G. (2007). Education and the democratic person: Towards a political conception of democratic education. Teachers College Record , 109 (3), 740–769.
• Carnegie Corporation of New York and CIRCLE . (2003). The civic mission of schools . New York: Carnegie Corporation and Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.
• Dahl, R. A. (2015). On democracy (2d ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Dewey, J. (1897). My pedagogic creed. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The early works, 1882–1898 (Vol. 5, pp. 84–95), Electronic edition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
• Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The middle works, 1899–1924 (Vol. 9), Electronic edition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University.
• Dewey, J. (1938). Democracy and education in the world of today. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The later works, 1925–1953 (Vol. 13, pp. 294–303), Electronic edition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University.
• Dewey, J. (1939). Creative democracy—the task before us. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The later works, 1925–1953 (Vol. 14, pp. 224–231), Electronic edition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University.
• Education Policies Commission . (1938). The purpose of education in American democracy . Washington, DC: National Education Association.
• Fraser, J. W. (2001). The school in the United States: A documentary history . New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Gabardi, W. (2001). Contemporary models of democracy. Polity , 33 (4), 547–568.
• Gallagher, C. W. (2008). Democratic policy making and the arts of engagement. Phi Delta Kappan , 89 (5), 340–346.
• Goodlad, J. I. , Mantle-Bromley, C. , & Goodlad, S. J. (2004). Education for everyone: Agenda for education in a democracy . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
• Gutmann, A. (1999). Democratic education . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Held, D. (2006). Models of democracy (3d ed.). Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
• Kohl, H. (1992). From archetype to zeitgeist: Powerful ideas for powerful thinking . Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
• Levinson, M. (2012). No citizen left behind . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• McClung, M. (2013). Repurposing education. Phi Delta Kappan , 94 (8), 37–39.
• McGuire, M. E. (2007). What happened to social studies? The disappearing curriculum. Phi Delta Kappan , 88 (8), 620–624.
• Meier, D. (1995). The power of their ideas: Lessons for America from a small school in Harlem . Boston: Beacon Press.
• Meier, D. (2003). So what does it take to build a school for democracy? Phi Delta Kappan , 85 (1), 15–21.
• Michelli, N. M. (2005). Education for democracy: What can it be? In N. M. Michelli & D. L. Keiser (Eds.), Teacher education for democracy and social justice (pp. 3–30). New York: Routledge.
• Mouffe, C. (2009). The democratic paradox . London: Verso.
• Neumann, R. (2008). American democracy at risk. Phi Delta Kappan , 89 (5), 328–339.
• Parker, W. C. (2003). Teaching democracy: Unity and diversity in public life . New York: Teachers College Press.
• Pederson, P. V. (2007). What is measured is treasured: The impact of the No Child Left Behind Act on nonassessed subjects. The Clearing House , 80 (6), 287–291.
• Price, J. M. (2011). Democracy: Critical red ideal. In J. L. DeVitis (Ed.), Critical civic literacy: A reader (pp. 291–304). New York: Peter Lang.
• Rothstein, R. , & Jacobsen, R. (2006). The goals of education. Phi Delta Kappan , 88 (4), 264–272.
• Ryder, J. (2007). John Dewey, democracy and a cosmopolitan ideal . Americana—E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary , 3 (2).
• Schlesinger, A. B. (2009). The death of why: The decline of questioning and the future of democracy . San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
• Schultz, B. D. (2007). “Feelin’ what they feelin’”: Democracy and curriculum in Cabrini Green. In M. W. Apple & J. A. Beane (Eds.), Democratic schools: Lessons in powerful education (2d ed., pp. 62–82). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
• Sensoy, O. , & DiAngelo, R. (2012). Is everyone really equal? An introduction to key concepts in social justice education . New York: Teachers College Press.
• Shapiro, H. S. (2006). Losing heart: The moral and spiritual miseducation of America’s children . Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
• Spring, J. (2005). The American school, 1642–2004 (6th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Stitzlein, S. M. (2014). Habits of democracy: A Deweyan approach to citizenship education in America today. Education and Culture , 30 (2), 61–86.
• Westheimer, J. , & Kahne, J. (1998). Education for action: Preparing youth for participatory democracy. In W. Ayers , J. A. Hunt , & T. Quinn (Eds.), Teaching for social justice (pp. 1–20). New York: Teachers College Press.
• Wolk, S. (2007). Why go to school? Phi Delta Kappan , 88 (9), 648–658.
• Wood, G. H. (1992). Schools that work: America’s most innovative public education programs . New York: Plume.
• Wood, G. H. (1998). A time to learn . New York: Penguin Putnam.

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The Role of Education in Democracy

• Posted October 8, 2020
• By Jill Anderson

Many people question the state of democracy in America. This is especially true of young people, who no longer share the same interest in democracy as the generations before them. Professor Danielle Allen , director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, has long studied what citizens need in order to succeed in democracy and how our social studies and civics education have impacted democracy.

"We have really disinvested in civic education and social studies. You can see that now in the comparison that we currently spend $54 per year per kid of federal dollars on STEM education and only 5 cents per year per kid on civics,” Allen says. “We have really ceased to lay the foundation in K–12 for young people to understand democracy, be motivated to participate in it, to have the skills and tools they need to participate effectively, and as a result, enjoy participation."

In this episode, Allen discusses how we got where we are today and what it will take to reinvest in education for democracy.

• Find ways to tell “an integrated version of U.S. history that is simultaneously honest about the crimes and wrongs of the past, but without falling into cynicism,” Allen says.
• When broaching a challenging topic in the classroom, begin from a place of inquiry. Try not to start with the instructional content or even understanding the issue, but let students think about what comes to mind about the issue and record their feelings and how they connect to it. “I think it’s really important that teachers be able to see what the starting points are – both analytically and emotionally that students have for engaging with these issues,” she says.
• To raise engaged citizens, Allen suggests bringing democratic practices of reason giving into the life of a family. “There are lots of lessons inside a family that can feed in to help the understanding of democratic practice,” Allen says.

 I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast. Harvard's Danielle Allen knows young people aren't as invested in democracy like the generations before them. Today, fewer than 30% under age 40 even consider it important to live in a democracy. Allen is a political theorist who's long studied what citizens need in order for democracy to succeed.

Education plays a big part in how we think about democracy, yet America's classrooms haven't always emphasized these subjects. With the presidential election just weeks away, I wanted to understand how education can preserve democracy and whether tensions rising in America signal a change underway.

Danielle Allen: In another moment of crisis in the country, The Cold War, the country really turned to science and technology to meet the moment. So there's the period during World War II, the Manhattan Project, for example, which really brought universities into the project of supporting national security with the pursuit of the atom bomb. That was a point in time, it was really the beginning of decades long investment in STEM education. That was important.

We needed to do that, but at the same time, over that same 50 year period, we have really disinvested in civic education and social studies. You can see that now in the comparison that we currently spend $54 per year per kid of federal dollars on STEM education and only 5 cents per year per kid on civics. So we have really ceased to lay the foundation in K–12 for young people to understand democracy, be motivated to participate in it, to have the skills and tools they need to participate effectively and as a result, enjoy participation.

Jill Anderson: We're also living in a time when teaching history is being really politicized and I'm wondering how you think we can effectively teach history and democracy to young people.

Danielle Allen: I've been really privileged over the last 15 months or so to be a part of a cross-institutional network under the banners and they call it the Educating for American Democracy Project and my center Harvard, the ethics centers participating. Jane Kamensky, who directs the Schlesinger Library for Women as a PI Tufts, Arizona state university and this group has pulled together a network of hundreds of scholars across the country with the goal of developing a blueprint, a roadmap for the integration of history and civics education K–12.

The reason I'm going through all of that is because at an early point in our work, directly thinking about the issue you just raised or polarization of our national history and polarization of education around civics, we decided that we were going to do two things on our roadmap.

One was to really structure it around inquiry to really focus on the kinds of questions that should be asked over the span of K–12 more so than on the answers and also that we would really focus on design challenges. That instead of seeing the disagreement about how to narrate our nation's history as a kind of end of the conversation, we would see it as the beginning of a conversation. So for instance, one of the design challenges we put to educators is that we have to find a way to tell an integrated version of US history that is simultaneously honest about the crimes and wrongs of the past, but without falling into cynicism and also appreciative in appropriate ways of the founding era without tipping into gamification.

So what we try to do is to say, "This is a design challenge. We don't know exactly what the answer is to meriting a history in this way that integrates clear-eyed view of the problems as well as a clear-eyed view of the goods and the potentialities, but we believe it can be done and we believe that this big country with so many committed educators is a place where we can experiment our way into solutions."

Jill Anderson: Right. One of the things I think is interesting as you look at the polls and voter turnout, and you often see young people not being as engaged, but when you look at some of the protests that have been happening around the country, it seems to be largely younger people. Is that a shift happening in our democracy where young people are maybe becoming more engaged?

Danielle Allen: It's certainly the case that young people are showing engagement through their participation in social movements and protests. In that regard, the moment is a lot like the 1960s with similar levels of engagement from young people. The question is whether or not young people who engage in the democracy tool of a social movement or of a protest can also understand themselves to have access to the tool of using political institutions. So social movements are an important part of the democracy toolkit, but they're just a part.

So it's really a question of whether or not young people see value in political institutions too, and can knit these things together. To some extent, I think that actually we really need to do work to redesign, even for example, our electoral system. So when we look around and we see that lots of people are disaffected or alienated or feel disempowered, that doesn't just mean that they're sort of haven't got enough education or don't have the right perspective.

It also means that our institutions aren't delivering what they promise. They're not responsive. They don't generally empower ordinary people and they very often don't deliver sort of equal representation. So in that regard, everybody, all citizens, civic participants have a job to do to think about redesigning our institutions so that they achieve those things.

On that front. I was again, fortunate to participate with a huge network of people through the American Academy Of Arts And Sciences, a commission on the future of the of practice of democratic citizenship and we released a report in June the 31 recommendations, a chunk of which are about redesigning our electoral system to deliver that responsive, empowering form of government that also provides equal representation.

Jill Anderson: Do you think something like this pandemic could be a tipping point because so much has moved online and I'm wondering how you think that might change civic action in education?

Danielle Allen: Well, the pandemic without any question is a huge exogenous shock, as we would say in social sciences, that it's a transformative event. Period. The magnitude is so significant. I think we're a very long way from being able to see and understand all of its impacts and consequences. For me personally, one of the things it has driven home is the weaknesses in our practices of governance. These weaknesses are partly institutional and partly cultural. Our polarization is one of the significant causes of our failure to come to grips with the current crisis. So I think for lots of people, the pandemic is really bringing our vulnerabilities to the surface. Also, for example, the disparate impacts across racial and ethnic groups of the disease and the underlying disparities in health equity has really come to the fore to visibility. So I think a lot of people are really focused in a more intensive way than in the past on addressing those problems.

I always sort of have a lot of confidence in the kind of creative energies of human beings when they really sort of see and face problems. So I believe that the moment does give us an opportunity to transform our conception of what we want for our society, what it means to name the public good, what it means to invest in the public good and my hope is that we'll be able to pull energy around a concept of the public good with us in the coming years.

Jill Anderson: We have this huge election coming up and the pandemic has somewhat overshadowed the election a little bit. I look at parents and their children and wonder are there things that parents could be doing at home to help raise their children to be more engaged and value democracy?

Danielle Allen: Well, I think there are a number of things. I mean, I actually think it matters to bring democratic practices of reason giving for example, into the life of a family. That can be very hard. Family structures are often and for very good reason, very hierarchical. So within the sort of context of hierarchical family structures, how can parents foster reason giving, hear their children's reasons for things, help their children understand what it means to engage in the back and forth around reasons, help them understand what it means for one person to lose out in one decision-making moment, but then to win out in another moment and nonetheless, even though we sort of exchange sacrifices for one another over the course of collective decision-making, our commitment to our social bond is so strong that that makes that sort of exchange of burdens tolerable. So I think there are lots of lessons inside a family that can feed into help the understanding of democratic practice.

Jill Anderson: One last final question would be if you have any thoughts or advice to share with the teachers out there who are working hard, and many of them working remotely to try to teach lessons about the upcoming election and all the things happening in the world.

Danielle Allen: So teachers really always have a hard job, and it's so hard now between the remote learning and the intensity of the external environment, the political questions and the debates and so forth. I think it's really important to remember that different students will bring different kinds of perspectives and exposures with them into the classroom. So I think when a teacher is trying to engage a hard topic, whether it's a hard element of history or a controversial issue in our contemporary debates, it's really important to start by bringing to the surface what's already in students' minds.

So maybe you use a Google doc, maybe you use a chat function, but when a topic comes up before sort of launching into the instructional content or the real digesting of the issue, just go ahead and let the students record the first thing that comes to mind for them when they hear the relevant issue and let them record the emotion that they connect to that issue. I think it's really important that teachers be able to see what the starting points are, both analytically and emotionally that students have for engaging with these [inaudible 00:10:35] issues.

Jill Anderson: Well, I want to thank you so much for taking the time and talking and sharing your thoughts today.

Danielle Allen: Thank you, Jill. Appreciate your interest.

Jill Anderson: Danielle Allen is the director of the Edmond J. Safra Center For Ethics at Harvard. She's a professor at the Harvard graduate school of education and faculty of arts and sciences. She leads the Democratic Knowledge Project, which focuses on how to strengthen and build that knowledge that democratic citizens need to operate their democracy. I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast produced by the Harvard graduate school of education. Thanks for listening.

An education podcast that keeps the focus simple: what makes a difference for learners, educators, parents, and communities

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Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education by Dewey

Revolutionizing education: Democracy Quest VR will take students on historic journey

A new virtual reality experience is one step closer to bringing history to life in secondary-education classrooms across the U.S.

Democracy Quest, a free educational resource being developed by the Center on Representative Government at Indiana University, was recently tested by IU Columbus students. Democracy Quest aims to increase the constitutional knowledge and civic-mindedness of students in sixth grade, and even in adults.

Democracy Quest will offer five learning modules focused on pivotal moments in U.S. history. Each fully realized world will be complete with characters to interact with, learn from and assist. Led by IU’s Stephanie Serriere and Elizabeth R. Osborn , the new experience had its first trial with students at the Columbus Learning Center on April 25. Serriere’s education students, as well as IU Columbus history students, were invited to participate in the trial.

“From 1700s Philadelphia through navigating the government of today, we are so excited to introduce students to major U.S. turning points in each of our virtual reality modules,” said Osborn, director of education for the IU Center on Representative Government. “The Constitution is in the history books, but what about the woman business owner who wasn’t invited to the Constitutional Convention? How do these proceedings affect her? Will she be better off with the new laws in action than she was before? Well, thanks to Democracy Quest, we can ask her.”

According to a recent study , for every $50 the U.S. government spends on STEM education, only 5 cents is spent on civic education. Osborn and Serriere hope Democracy Quest is a vital tool to mitigate this disparity. Civics education includes not only how governments are created but also how they are run today.

“Supporting civics education is paramount to handing down this ideal of democracy to the next generation,” said Serriere, professor of social studies education. “We hope we’ve found an innovative way to do that.”

Established in 1999, the Center on Representative Government was developed by former congressman Lee Hamilton as a nonpartisan, educational institution to create programs that inform, inspire and motivate students and to encourage civic participation to help prepare the next generation of citizens. Supported by a three-year, $5.7 million cooperative agreement award from the United States Department of Defense, Democracy Quest supports that mission.

Democracy Quest is building content about U.S. history, government, civics and law to help students develop critical-thinking skills through primary-source analysis and demonstrate that each individual has an opportunity to influence the trajectory of our country’s success. In a culminating activity, students who are taught a module will then work in a project-based learning environment to identify and develop alternative solutions to problems that can then be applied to similar situations they might face in the workplace and in their communities.

When the first module of Democracy Quest is complete, users will experience the Articles of Confederation and the Philadelphia national convention like never before. Students will be tasked with meeting five new virtual-reality characters — each a conglomeration of related experiences to present the perspectives of those not invited to the proceedings. Each encounter will also include interactive components to gamify the experience.

While the IU students tested a more minimal version on April 26, they did get to experience its potential at work. They navigated a simple maze, threw objects into a target and pulled a series of levers to move a ball from one side of a puzzle to the other. Each session ran for about 15 minutes — the target time for the finished version — and users who made it through the testing environment’s challenges were rewarded with a detailed old Philadelphia neighborhood to walk around in. While the graphics were still simple, they saw the promise of what was to come.

Onsite participants said they were pleased with the virtual reality experience and excited about its future. Many were education majors who could see the potential of a fully realized Democracy Quest and were looking forward to the finished version.

Jazzlynn Yeadon, an IU Columbus junior majoring in education, said she really enjoyed the experience, including the mini-games used to engage players and navigate the overall game.

“This could be very beneficial in my future classroom,” Yeadon said. “Kids are already so tech savvy, I can see this engaging them much more than reading a chapter in a social studies text book.”

To bring this virtual world to life, the IU team is conducting ongoing research to ensure historical accuracy in each module. Osborn serves as the chief historian and is leading their curriculum team, which includes graduate students like School of Education doctoral student Mariah Pol. They have been researching primary and secondary historical sources from the Library of Congress and other places to capture less well-known perspectives to then adapt this information into a rare or never-been-done-before methodology. Users can experience this information as if it were firsthand knowledge and discover historic details, down to even the accurate font used in the printing press.

They collaborate with Half Full Nelson , a game development company owned by IU alumnus Andrew Nelson, to engineer the virtual reality experience. Half Full Nelson has worked with the Center on Representative Government for over 10 years, creating numerous civic education materials that are used in schools nationwide. Nelson and his creative team, including game designer and artist Matt Madeira, are working closely with the IU team to ensure historical accuracy.

The team is just as interested in what comes after a user’s experience in the VR world as they are with the time spent inside. Through testing, they hope to determine whether the experience increases students’ knowledge of history and principles of democracy, while also determining their likelihood for future civic engagement. A research team led by Serriere, which includes doctoral student Kyle O’Brien and other graduate students, will also measure how the Democracy Quest materials impact teaching methods. The goal is to ultimately measure students’ recognition of diverse perspectives, empathy for diverse perspectives, and knowledge of principles of democracy and historical content.

The team is targeting Oct. 1 for the launch of the one full Democracy Quest module focused on the Philadelphia national convention. Production of the other four modules will occur during the next two years.

“It’s one thing to read about history, but it’s something else to be immersed in a more realistic experience of it: to see the sights, meet the people not necessarily involved with the decisions, but those still affected by them, especially voices not always centralized,” Serriere said. “Democracy Quest offers a new perspective on how U.S. government came to be, and students will hopefully use this understanding to enrich their own lives and the lives of others.”

Dan Melnick

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Education: B.A. in International Studies from the University of Michigan

Hometown: Damascus, Syria

Intended Academic Focus: Human rights and diplomatic relations.

Abdulaziz Alenezi

Education: Political Science with concentration in IR and minor in Middle Eastern & North African Studies

Hometown: Kuwait

Intended Academic Focus: Democratization, Democratic transition, Governance, and Authoritarianism.

Clayton Asai

Education: B.A. in International Social Sciences from Gakushuin University

Hometown: Tokyo, Japan

Intended Academic Focus: East Asian Politics, International Relations, and Comparative Politics

Lily Ashbrook

Education: B.A. in Political Science & Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Hometown: Los Angeles, California

Intended Academic Focus: Refugee Policy concerning Europe & the Middle East, Human Rights, Democratization.

Roudah Chaker

Education: B.A. in Government with a minor in History from Georgetown University

Hometown: Northern Virginia

Intended Academic Focus: The mechanisms and strategies of democratization, specifically exploring the role of social and informal institutions in facilitating or hindering the transition from autocratic regimes to democratic governance.

Education: B.A. in International Studies with a minor in Public Administration and a cluster in Peace & Conflict Transformation from Brigham Young University

Hometown: Ethiopia

Intended Academic Focus: Foreign relations, Conflict resolution, Democratization.

Zora Hermans

Education: BA in Political Science and Writing & Rhetoric from St. Edward’s University

Hometown: Silver Spring, MD

Intended Academic Focus: American politics, democratic backsliding, European politics, democratic institutions.

Gauri Kaushik

Education: B.A. in Politics and English from Mount Holyoke College

Hometown: Cupertino, California

Intended Academic Focus: Relationship between Religion, Ethnic Conflict, and Democracy in South Asia.

Education: B.A. in Political Science & Judaic Studies with a Certificate in Asian Studies from University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Hometown: Potomac, MD

Intended Academic Focus: Judicial reform, campaign finance reform and the role of the free press in furthering transparency & democratic reform.

Donya Lechqer

Education: B.A. in Political Science

Hometown: Virginia Beach

Intended Academic Focus: Middle Eastern and North African politics.

Education: Bachelor of Laws at China University of Political Science and Law

Hometown: China

Intended Academic Focus: Gender and international security, state-society relations

Education: Joint BA/MA student in Government, Georgetown University

Hometown: Taipei, Taiwan

Intended Academic Focus: Government

Jonathan Mendoza:

Education: B.A. in Arts for Social Advocacy, with a minor in Political Science, Poetry from Berklee College of Music

Hometown: Framingham, Massachusetts

Intended Academic Focus: Gathering and applying the lessons of foreign democratization efforts to multiracial pro-democracy political and social movement organizing in the US.

Education: B.A. in Political Science from Christopher Newport University

Hometown: Arlington, Virginia

Intended Academic Focus: Eurasia/Former Soviet Union area

Michael Parisi

Education: B.A. in International Relations and Modern History from the University of St Andrews

Hometown: Chicago, Illinois

Intended Academic Focus: Global authoritarianism and its connections to democratic backsliding as well as the growth of far right conceptions of nationalism in North America and Europe.

Saroy Rakotoson

Education: BA History and International Relation at King’s College London

Hometown: Antananarivo, Madagascar

Intended Academic Focus: Gender in IR or overall the place in gender in the institutions of Democracy

Education: Bachelor’s in Government and International Politics

Intended Academic Focus: Democracy Promotion, Political Behavior, and Research Methodology.

Alex Szlabowicz

Education: B.A. from the University of Florida

Hometown: Ft Myers, FL

Intended Academic Focus: Democracy promotion in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Justin Wanki

Education: Law

Hometown: Cameroon/Bamenda

Intended Academic Focus: Research about African and Latin American democracies.

Jacqueline Wu

Education: B.A. in Economics from National Chengchi University and M.A. in National Development from National Taiwan University (in progress)

Hometown: Taiwan

Intended Academic Focus: Democratization, Foreign policy, Global financial security, Technology governance.

Michelle Ye

Education: B.A. in English from University College London

Hometown: Toronto, Canada and Hong Kong, China

Intended Academic Focus: Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, International Relations.

Nicholas Zochowski

Education: Vanderbilt University

Hometown: Ann Arbor, Michigan

Intended Academic Focus: Legislatures, authoritarianism, democratization.

Current Second Years- Class of 2024

Milan Bailey

Education: B.S. in Political Science & Sociology from Campbellsville University

Hometown: Louisville, Kentucky

Intended Academic Focus: The relationship between human rights, democracy, religion, and law. Regional interests: MENA.

Adnan Basheer

Education: B.S. in Politics & International Relations from University College London (UCL)

Hometown: Dubai, U.A.E./Chennai, India

Intended Academic Focus: Good Governance reforms in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Charlene Batlle

Education: B.A. in Humanities with a concentration in Politics and Ethics from Bard College Berlin

Hometown: Pinar del Río, Cuba

Intended Academic Focus: Diplomacy, Democratic backsliding, Democracy Promotion.

Louis Bonnefous

Education: B.A. in Political Science & International Affairs from Northeastern University

Hometown: Paris, France

Intended Academic Focus: Immigration and refugees issues, relationship between nationalism and democracy in Europe, democracy promotion in Central and West Africa.

Leesa Danzek

Education: B.A. in Political Science from University of Southern California

Hometown: Simi Valley, California

Intended Academic Focus: Role of civil society in democratization and democratic backsliding; intersection of policy, media, and grassroots organizing in support of democracy, civil rights, and human rights; how social media is leveraged in international diplomacy.

Rafael de Osma Bedoya

Education: B.A. in International Business from Rollins College

Hometown: Lima, Peru

Intended Academic Focus: My present focus lies on investigating Latin America’s role in the energy transition as well as monitoring the imminent rise of polarization, democratic backsliding, and economic populism in the region.

Sohila Hassan

Education: B.A. in International Government and Politics with a minor in Security and Intelligence Studies from George Mason University

Hometown: Cairo, Egypt and Newport News, Virginia

Intended Academic Focus: Cultural and Societal Impacts of Democratization and Gender and Conflict.

Tyler Heffern

Education: B.A. in Politics from Fairfield University

Hometown: Stratford, Connecticut

Intended Academic Focus: Election Administration and Democratic Erosion.

Max Henning

Education: B.A. in Neuroscience from University of Southern California

Hometown: Pittsboro, North Carolina

Intended Academic Focus: The adaptation of international democracy assistance practices for application in the United States.

Collin Hulling

Education: Western Oregon University

Hometown: Sheridan, Oregon

Intended Academic Focus: Impact of Authoritarian regimes, especially China/Russia in young, and established democracies around the world.

Education: B.A. in Politics and International Relations from University of Kent (UK)

Hometown: Bangkok, Thailand

Intended Academic Focus: Political theory related to democracy, Democratic Backsliding in South East Asia (ASEAN), Diplomacy and Democracy, polarization and its influences around the world.

Ruwaidah Maudarbux

Education: B.A. in Media and Communication from De Montfort University, M.A. in International Studies and Diplomacy from School of Oriental and African Studies SOAS

Hometown: Northamptonshire – England

Intended Academic Focus: Democratic Backsliding, Institution Building.

Nathan Posner

Education: B.A. in Government from Georgetown University

Hometown: Atlanta, Georgia

Intended Academic Focus: Democratic Backsliding and Extremist groups in existing democracies.

Education: B.A. in Sociology from University of British Columbia

Hometown: Boulder, Colorado

Intended Academic Focus: Democratization, international development, corruption, with a regional interest in Eastern Europe/Europe.

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What's the role of college presidents in fostering civic engagement for democracy.

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DEMOCRACY / Traffic sign

Over 60 college and university presidents are uniting to foster democracy and civic engagement during this “ urgent moment for American higher education.” The initiative, called College Presidents for Civic Preparedness , falls under the auspices of the Institute for Citizens & Scholars . The initiative is focused on preparing “the next generation of well-informed, productively engaged, and committed citizens; defending free expression, civil discourse, and critical inquiry as essential civic norms; and increasing thoughtful engagement and better understanding by students for the effective functioning of our democracy.”

Raj Vinnakota, President, Institute for Citizens & Scholars

According to Raj Vinnakota , president, of the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, “College Presidents for Civic Preparedness is truly unique as it was created by, with, and for college presidents. In 2021, [we] held conversations with numerous presidents from a range of institutions on higher education’s important role in cultivating effective citizens. It became clear that there is more that college presidents could do to advance civic preparedness—and that collaboration and partnership would drive [a] more successful, sustained impact.” He added, “We have already seen [a] significant impact, as presidents have proven their commitment to advancing civic preparedness and uplifting free expression.” For example, presidents have spread the message in student orientations, faculty trainings, graduation speeches, new courses, and speaker series. The initiative’s website provides considerable detail on the work of the group across various colleges and universities, demonstrating its actions toward fostering civic dialogue.

Jonathan Holloway, president, Rutgers University

“In an era of extreme political polarization, increasing social instability , and declining faith in the nation’s institutions, I am more committed than ever to working with university presidents to prepare students to be engaged and educated citizens,” Rutgers University president Jonathan Holloway said. “Together, with our students, we will explore how we can preserve our freedoms while being respectful and openminded, intellectually honest and curious, and civil, decent, and understanding of one another.” 1 Holloway views education not only as a means of imparting knowledge but as a vehicle of fostering democratic values and engagement.

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The presidents will pursue a set of collective actions through the initiative. These include: 1. Meeting “regularly and confidentially for peer learning and the exchange of information, ideas, practices, and tools;” 2.) Helping “faculty engage effectively with free expression and civil discourse in the classroom;” and 3.) Creating and capitalizing on opportunities for “shared advocacy and public outreach on civic preparedness in higher education.”

Garry Jenkins, president, Bates College

From the perspective of Garry W. Jenkins, president of Bates College in Maine, “The ability to manage disagreement while seeking common ground and pursuing productive solutions is critically important in a democracy. Today, unfortunately, our society is in urgent need of developing such essential skills.” He continued, “It’s clear to me that both our nation’s K-12 schools and higher education must develop, promote, and nurture the democratic skills and values of tolerance, pluralism, negotiation, and respect for different views.” Jenkins’s viewpoint is grounded in the recognition of broader societal needs and the responsibility of educational institutions to address them.

Roslyn Artis, President of Benedict College.

Presidents of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), as well as other types of Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), are also involved in the initiative. Roslyn Artis, the president of Benedict College in South Carolina is one of these presidents. She shared, “This collective approach affords us the opportunity to share best practices and to critically interrogate ideas, policies and programs for potential implementation on our campuses. While there is no one-size fits all solution, presidential participants are committed to finding constructive solutions and creating deep engagement around notions of civic engagement on college campuses.” Artis stresses the need for critical evaluation of ideas and policies to effectively promote civic engagement on college campuses.

Matthew vandenBerg, President, Ohio Wesleyan University

Matthew vandenBerg, the president of Ohio Wesleyan University stated his rationale for joining the group: “Our nation and world face daunting, vexing problems too often exacerbated by an insufficiently educated populace, cultural tribalism, the dramatic erosion of civil discourse, and a reluctance to engage in constructive dialogue. Working together, American higher education can help to build fundamentally stronger communities by developing more educated, engaged, grace-filled, and solutions-oriented citizens.” From vandenBerg’s perspective, it is vital to provide a holistic approach to higher education.

The consortium, which was first announced with 15 members in August 2023, has grown significantly, demonstrating momentum for this kind of leadership movement across higher education.

1 I am a professor at Rutgers University.

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Brown v. Board of Education, 70 years on, is both revered and unfulfilled

Washington Post-Ipsos poll: 1 in 3 Black Americans say integration has failed to help Black students

Seventy years after the Supreme Court delivered its landmark decision outlawing school segregation, Brown v. Board of Education ranks as perhaps the court’s most venerated decision. A Washington Post-Ipsos survey shows it is overwhelmingly popular.

That’s the simple part. Most everything else related to the decision — and to school segregation itself — is complex.

Nearly 7 in 10 Americans say more should be done to integrate schools across the nation — a figure that has steadily climbed from 30 percent in 1973 and is now at its apex. But a deeper look into the views of both Black and White people shows skepticism about the success of Brown and mixed messages about how to move forward.

In its unanimous decision in Brown , the Supreme Court ruled segregated schools were unconstitutional and “inherently unequal,” combining five cases in which Black students and their schools had far fewer resources than their White peers — longer commutes, lower-quality classes, overcrowding, fewer opportunities and less money. Yet 1 in 3 Black Americans now say integration has failed to improve the education of Black students, a companion Post-Ipsos survey of Black Americans finds.

Today, about half of Black adults favor letting children attend neighborhood schools, even if it means most students would be of the same race — which, given housing patterns, is often the case.

White Americans also sometimes hold conflicting views. Nine in 10 Whites say they support the Brown decision, and nearly 2 in 3 say more needs to be done to integrate schools throughout the nation. Nonetheless, large segments of the White population oppose strategies that would help make that a reality. Nearly 8 in 10 White adults say it is better for children to go to neighborhood schools over diverse ones.

“The Brown decision speaks to our highest ideals as a nation. It’s who we say we want to be as a country,” said Stefan Lallinger, senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes school integration, whose grandfather was part of the team of civil rights attorneys who appeared before the Supreme Court in the Brown case. “Where the rubber meets the road is where people’s personal decisions about where to send their kids to school clash with those ideals.”

The decision, which was issued 70 years ago Friday, continues to hold a special place in American history. On Thursday, President Biden marked the anniversary by meeting with some of the surviving plaintiffs and their families from the five lawsuits that were consolidated into the Brown decision. On Friday, he plans to address an NAACP event marking the milestone.

The Brown decision focused on the value of mixing children of different races. But for many integration activists — then and now — the case is about a path to fair and equitable educational resources. Those legal battles continue.

Today’s complex views about schools and integration come amid persistent segregation that has risen in recent decades, changes in the legal landscape and the complicated dynamics of education and race in America today.

Because of Brown , school officials may no longer deliberately separate students by race — but under more recent Supreme Court orders, they aren’t allowed to deliberately mix them by race either. Integration advocates today have stopped looking to the federal courts for help and are pursuing state lawsuits instead. And some Black leaders have concluded that the answer is not integration at all but more money and more opportunity for high-poverty schools serving students of color.

“It never worked the way it was supposed to,” said Candace Northern, 43, of Sacramento, who is Black. She had a mixed experience with integration as a child growing up in the area. Now, as mother to four children who went to or will attend public schools, she sees how the system keeps most poor students of color concentrated in certain schools and wealthy, mostly White students in others.

“The intention behind [ Brown ] was good, but it really didn’t make sense to integrate the schools if you were still going to have separate neighborhoods and then only give the resources to the rich people,” she said. “It was more of an appeasement — ‘Let’s give these Black people something so they’ll shut up.’”

The evolution of a landmark ruling

The Brown decision was deeply polarizing, with massive resistance in the segregated South, where federal troops were at times required to escort Black students into what had been all-White schools, and violence in the North, too, as some White parents angrily protested busing orders that federal courts began issuing in the 1970s. Shortly after the 1954 ruling, a Gallup poll found 55 percent of Americans approved of Brown , while 40 percent disapproved.

But it succeeded in diversifying schools, with segregation rates falling through the 1970s and ’80s . Integration peaked around 1988; then courts began lifting their orders, and segregation began to rise again. A majority of Americans wrongly believe that schools are less racially segregated today than 30 years ago, The Post-Ipsos poll finds; in fact, by multiple measures, they are more segregated.

Jackie Beckley was raised in a small town in Kentucky and saw it all up close. Her father had to walk for miles and then travel by train to reach the nearest Black high school because the closer, White schools would not let Black children attend. Born in 1961, Beckley was among the first Black children to be admitted to White schools.

It wasn’t easy for her.

“You’re very much aware of the fact that you’re not like everybody else. You’re different,” she said. She remembered not being chosen as a cheerleader in elementary school despite her excellent gymnastic skills. She knew the reason and if there was any doubt, a White classmate said it out loud: “They didn’t pick her because she’s colored,” he told the class. Students were usually nice to her, she recalled, but if there was an argument, someone might hurl the n-word.

Over time, the Brown decision took on a revered status, one both liberals and conservatives cite as among the Supreme Court’s finest moments. By 1994, 87 percent of Americans approved of the ruling, and the new Post-Ipsos poll finds it just as popular today. But support is lower among Black people — about 8 in 10 say they approve of the decision. Asked if integration had improved the lives of Black students, 75 percent of White people say yes, but a smaller share — 63 percent — of Black people say the same — down from 70 percent in 1994.

Beckley understands why. Her own son attended an integrated school in suburban Columbus, Ohio, where she now lives, but she thinks more funding for schools serving students of color — “so they are educating the kids to the same standard” — is more important than creating diverse schools.

Isaac Heard, 74, is also skeptical after seeing the entire history of school integration unfold before him in Charlotte.

When Heard was growing up in Charlotte, his segregated neighborhood elementary school was so overcrowded that students attended in shifts — either morning or afternoon. “They had decided basically they weren’t going to build any more schools in the Black neighborhoods,” he recalled. His parents sent him to a private Catholic school instead.

Heard returned to public school in ninth grade and the experience was better, though still segregated. His school was economically if not racially diverse, and he recalls the teaching as excellent; in his senior year, four of his teachers had PhDs. He credited the talented Black women who had few career options other than teaching.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C., school district did not fully desegregate until 1970, three years after Heard graduated and went off to Dartmouth College. But once it did, the district gained a reputation for running a successful busing program. In the 1990s, Heard’s own children attended the same district, and he said they received an excellent education.

“The biggest thing is they had role models, and resources were available,” he said. “If they were curious about something, they had access to it.”

Later, working in city planning in Charlotte, Heard saw things change again after the federal court order mandating desegregation was lifted in 1999 and the schools began to resegregate. While some wealthier Black families (including his own) now lived in diverse neighborhoods and attended racially diverse schools, lower-income Black and Hispanic families were concentrated in urban areas and their schools became segregated again .

Heard believes one answer is to spread affordable housing to wealthier neighborhoods, so the neediest students are spread out, but he said these proposals “raised the hackles in this community like you wouldn’t believe.”

Heard’s experience — segregation, integration, and partial segregation again — leaves him with mixed feelings about the impact of Brown . “There’s a generation of kids who really benefited from it, but it’s slowly receding in terms of its positive impact, particularly among lower-income populations,” he said.

A tangle of contradictions

The views of White Americans are also wrapped in contradictions. A wide majority says they support the Brown decision, but many oppose leading ideas for integration today.

Those include adding low-income housing in the suburbs and other high-income areas (43 percent opposed), redrawing boundaries to create more racially diverse districts (45 percent opposed) and requiring schools to bus some students to neighboring districts (70 percent opposed). Only one strategy enjoys support from a large majority (71 percent) — more regional magnet schools with specialized courses (24 percent of Whites are opposed).

Among Black Americans, there is majority support for all four strategies — with at least 7 in 10 backing the proposals for mixed-income housing, redrawing boundaries and magnet schools.

At the same time, nearly 8 in 10 White people say they support “letting students go to the local school in their community, even if it means that most of the students would be of the same race,” while 17 percent favor “transferring students to other schools to create more integration, even if it means that some students would have to travel out of their communities to go to school.”

Elaine Burkholder, 44, who is raising five children in a rural community in central Pennsylvania, did not hesitate when asked her views on Brown . “It was a good decision,” she said. “It’s definitely good to have integration, open the children up to different viewpoints and that sort of thing.”

She said she is not concerned about any segregation that persists today because the law is no longer barring children from going to school together.

“As long as you have the ability to move and stuff you can probably get your children into a decent school district,” she said. “It’s pretty well a personal choice at this point, where your children go to school.”

Burkholder, whose children attend a private Christian school, was not particularly concerned that some families cannot afford to move to another school district. “I’m a little more of a pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” Burkholder said. “I like to see people working to get where they want to go.”

The way forward

The contradictions inherent in public opinion have given rise to conflicting strategies about what should come next.

David Banks, the chancellor of the New York City schools, the nation’s largest school system, who is Black, attended integrated schools in Queens as a child but does not see integration as the answer for children in New York City today. Today, 24 percent of the students in the city schools are Black, and 41 percent are Hispanic. Just 15 percent of students are White. He said the path to a better education for a student of color cannot be sitting next to a White student; there aren’t enough White students to go around.

“I do not believe Black kids need to go to school with White kids to get a good education. I fundamentally reject that,” he said in an interview.

Instead of integration, Banks favors directing more money and adding programs to high-poverty schools serving students of color and providing more opportunities for advanced coursework in low-income areas.

But others say students of color will never get what they need if so many are isolated in high-poverty school districts. A new generation of legal advocates is now targeting the boundary lines that separate school districts, which drive most of the racial and economic segregation today.

They’ve also shifted legal strategy. Supreme Court rulings issued in the years since Brown make success in federal courts unlikely, they say, so unlike their counterparts from past decades, they are focused on state courts.

A lawsuit in New Jersey is challenging district boundary lines based on a provision in the state constitution. The parties have been negotiating for months in hopes of reaching a settlement. Another case challenging segregation in the Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn., schools has been working its way through the Minnesota courts for nearly a decade. A lawsuit in New York City relies on the state constitution to challenge admissions policies that place students into gifted and advanced programs, creating a two-tiered education system that hurts Black and Hispanic students.

A new organization called Brown’s Promise is looking for other potential lawsuits, possibly based on state constitutions that guarantee a “thorough and efficient” public education.

“Any meaningful definition of a ‘ thorough education’ has to mean learning to live, work and thrive in a multiracial community,” said Ary Amerikaner, co-founder of Brown’s Promise.

She pointed to research that shows the post- Brown integration years succeeded in raising achievement levels of Black students.

“We cannot keep concentrating poverty in a small number of districts and expecting the adults to work miracles,” she said. She said it’s worth fighting for more money for these schools — adding that a little more money probably won’t help, but a lot more would.

“But even that cannot create the sort of social capital that we know comes from access to communities that are historically more privileged.”

The Washington Post-Ipsos poll of 1,029 U.S. adults was conducted April 9-16 and included a partially overlapping sample of 1,331 non-Hispanic Black adults. The margin of sampling error among Americans overall and Black Americans is plus or minus 3.2 percentage points; among the 703 White Americans the margin of error is 3.9 points.

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ISU scholar lays out how autocrats steal democracy in new book

Nearly a third of the world's population [29%] lives in countries that are not free. Another 28% live in partly-free countries.

That's according to the nonpartisan think tank Freedom House . And the trend is not encouraging as more countries slide away from democracy, and autocracies replace existing governmental systems.

Illinois State University political scientist Ali Riaz has co-authored a new book that looks at how that happens, How Autocrats Rise: Sequences of Democratic Backsliding.'

Riaz and co-author Sohel Rana write there have been different waves of democratization and backsliding. In waves of democratization, one country or a set of countries has pushed for democratic ideals and other countries are swayed. In the most recent wave in the 1970s, Riaz said both the U.S. and Europe pushed for expansion of democratic rights.

Since 2005, the pendulum has swung the other way, with democratic practices and institutions eroding in several countries, he said.

How democracies fade

There’s no single reason to identify why each wave has happened. In each case, a complex set of factors played out, said Riaz. The process of backsliding is the theme of the book. Several factors lead to backsliding, including polarization of the electorate. Divisions based on ideology are common in democracies, but they become problematic, Riaz said, when polarization becomes emotionally fraught.

“Not only do I disagree with you, but you are my enemy. When we start to see this kind of pernicious polarization, that becomes the trigger point in some ways, or at least creates the environment within which we can see the rise of would-be autocrat,” said Riaz.

A second important social factor in the rise of an autocrat, Riaz said, is the strength of democratic institutions. When people think the institutions aren’t delivering services, particularly with respect to their rights, they become disillusioned and critical of democracy. At that moment, nations are vulnerable to an autocrat.

In the end, though, Riaz said when democracies fail, it is always a suicide because the people give away their rights in the hope of change for the better.

The book has case studies from Bolivia, Turkey, Hungary, and Bangladesh.

Each has different things that sparked deterioration of working democratic institutions. Most scholars agree the slide is not a single event, but an incremental shift that sets up the conditions for a coup, a takeover, or an election of an autocrat who then subverts the system to preserve him or herself.

Riaz said the book’s contribution is to lay out common themes of that process and why people accept it — at least at first.

“It is a slow process. It is not as if one fine morning you see the autocrat has arrived from somewhere,” said Riaz.

The power of speech

The context that leads to the rise of an individual includes the rhetorical position of the soon-to-be autocrat, who positions himself or herself as the final word, and the only solution for their followers.

“They are the savior. They are the ones who are going to do it. They cannot be criticized. They cannot be wrong,” said Riaz.

Riaz and Rana claim institutional and ideological drivers must act in tandem. They are dependent on each other because the population needs to be willing to give authority away. Riaz noted the mechanisms of winning an election, subverting the bureaucratic mechanism to keep oneself in power, forcing media to become more pliant, co-opting the judiciary, stifling competition by suppressing dissent, limiting opponents’ ability to communicate, and then stealing elections are well understood. A lot of scholarship focuses on those institutional levers.

“Executive aggrandizement. The executive branch captures the power. It makes the legislative body pretty much a rubber stamp. We have seen how they capture the judiciary, so to speak. And we have seen how they persecute opposition through legal and extralegal measures,” said Riaz.

His caution is how answering the question about how autocrats get there and how they keep their power, how they get people to go along with it is also necessary to explain what happens. And the answer to that varies by country, but always includes a rhetorical and ideological position.

“They have to sell this product, whatever they are selling. And they have to stay in power,” said Riaz.

Such cons happen on the left and right.

Evo Morales in Bolivia has justified seizing more authority on the populist basis of making sure everyone has a fair share in the economy. In the case of Hungary, Riaz said, it's an appeal to xenophobia and nationalist identity. In Bangladesh the justification is a sacrifice of rights on the altar of economic development. In the case of Turkey, Riaz said, Recep Tayyip Erdogan is talking about Pan-Islamism and restoring the Ottoman Empire.

The start of every autocracy is a suicide of a democracy.

“There are institutional aspects of course, but the most important thing to a democracy is that it protects the minority,” said Riaz. “And they have to have a voice.”

By slow steps, citizens give up that voice and then have more taken from them. In the 1970s, Riaz said autocrats tended to rule by fiat. The neo-autocrats arising more recently have put on new clothes.

“They have come up with various mechanisms. Most importantly, they use legal measures. They create the law, and then they use it,” said Riaz.

They pass laws that give rise to censorship and slowly silence the media. They pack the courts as in Hungary and Turkey. They hold elections, but the results are manipulated, so they don’t actually have to beat opponents to win, said Riaz. The process includes quashing opposition, hollowing out the judiciary and eliminating the legislative ability to contend.

“The executive power becomes so consolidated in one individual it becomes not only an autocracy, it becomes a personalistic autocracy,” said Riaz.

Social media is a two-edged blade in all of this. It can be used as a voice of dissent. It also can be a bludgeon to stifle dissent and spread propaganda. In either case, neo-autocrats are paying attention to it.

“In previous autocracies they didn’t care what people thought. Now they tend to at least pretend to,” said Riaz.

Second term inflection point

One key moment in the rise of the autocrat is the polarization and external conditions of upheaval — economic or cultural — that lets the prospective autarch win. More concerning to Riaz is the second term. He said this is true in Narendra Modi’s India, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, as well as in the four countries that are the main cases in the book.

“Every time when they come back for the second term, these autocrats become more lethal, more devastating,” said Riaz. “Because they learn. Their ideology has allowed them to create a following who will follow them to hell, so to speak.”

Counterpressure and optimism

The U.S. has some warning signs, a pronounced trend toward toxic polarization, the concentration of economic gains and control of the economic system in the hands of a small elite, and rising inequality, Riaz said.

“We’re in a difficult spot,” said Riaz. “We’re in a very crucial stage in terms of preserving the democracy. There is a responsibility not only for the people of the United States, the citizens for themselves, but also for the global state of democracy that they have to make a clear choice as to whether this is the path they want to go.”

He said there is reason to believe polarization and disparity in the U.S. could cost not only the U.S., but the global state of democracy as well.

Yet, Riaz said he remains an optimist. Each wave of democratic backsliding in the last two centuries, has been followed by a re-assertion of the value of democracy that spreads from an initiative by one or several countries.

The ability of the U.S. to affect this global calculus is unclear. Riaz said U.S. policies sometimes do not live up to the nation’s stated ideals. If the U.S. falters, he said, Europe could be another option to stand up for democracy. Some smaller countries offer him hope as well.

“It is not only the large countries, but in the smaller countries in which democratic erosions are taking place, there is resistance to it,” said Riaz.

How Autocrats Rise: Sequences of Democratic Backsliding,' by ISU political scientist Ali Riaz and co-authored with Sohel Rana of Indiana University is published by Palgrave Macmillan.

The Power of Independent Thinking

In Ilya Somin’s excellent new book Democracy and Political Ignorance , the public is ignorant; their ignorance is a problem for American democracy, and it “poses a very serious challenge to democratic theory” (p. 6). In the same general vein as Bryan Caplan’s wonderful book The Myth of the Rational Voter (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), Somin blames the problem of ignorance on the lack of weight any one person’s vote carries on electoral outcomes. When a person’s vote has little bearing on an electoral outcome, most citizens devote little time to acquiring political knowledge, and we get ugly electoral outcomes. For Somin, the old computer science saying “garbage in, garbage out” seems to apply to politics, and a great deal of garbage is being inputted into the system thanks to a general lack of incentives.

Ignorance is a problem our founders worried about, and mechanisms were put in place in 1787 with the hope of protecting Americans from themselves. But, for Somin, the problems of ignorance are even worse than our founders could have imagined: people take shortcuts when voting; they are biased; and they rely on inaccurate information when making decisions over politicians. The birthers who insist President Obama prove he is a natural-born U.S. citizen, for example, have gained a great deal of traction because people do not process political information with any real objectivity. Politics is like sports for Somin, and, like sports fans, the public plays up their team’s strengths and “downplay[s] anything that cuts the other way” (p. 79).

The strength of Somin’s book is in the quality of the writing and the up-to-date evidence he provides the reader with on the scope and scale of voter ignorance. It is one of the more recent books illustrating how little Americans know about politics and why it matters, and such contributions are vital.

Somin does not get bogged down in theoretical issues related to political ignorance versus rational irrationality, which is good for his intended audience. But this absence of theoretical grounding does make his use of the word ignorance a bit elastic and a departure from Anthony Downs’s description of rational ignorance in his 1957 book An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper & Row). For Downs (and for about fifty years of public-choice economics), rational ignorance among voters has led to an implicit cancelling out of bias: for every million ignorant people in favor of trade protections, for example, another million or so favor free trade.

The ignorant mob, moreover, because of the logic of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs, as outlined in Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), has little incentive to organize. This ignorance and the power of entrenched interests—industries wanting protections in the case of trade—have secured the results wanted by the entrenched interests. Ignorance was rational in the Downsian story, but the bias described in Somin’s (and Caplan’s) work has played no major role in the resultant policy outcomes.

Although using the term ignorance throughout, Somin is explicitly influenced by Bryan Caplan and seems to be talking more about irrationality. Calling irrationality “ignorance” is fine and good for the sake of reaching a larger audience, but there are important theoretical lines separating the two, thanks to Caplan’s work. Throughout his book, Somin seems to be dancing between the two concepts.

After discussing ignorance and irrationality, and after walking readers through a great deal of evidence on the depth of our political ignorance, Somin turns his attention to possible solutions to the problem of ignorance (chapters 5 through 7). Here Somin is at his best—breaking new ground. In his final chapter (chapter 7), which would have worked better if placed ahead of his two big “solutions” chapters, he says there is little hope for increasing political knowledge through education and greater deliberation or through changes in media coverage. Restricting the franchise and delegating politics to experts, meanwhile, are unpopular solutions and have their own problems. Thus, maybe the best solution to the ignorance problem is for us to reduce the number of decisions controlled through democracy and return as much as possible to more local levels of authority.

In chapter 5, Somin discusses the role that “voting with one’s feet” can play in constraining government and protecting us from ignorance. He argues for more decentralization because jurisdictional competition assures accountability and decisive outcomes: each person who moves has, in effect, cast a decisive “vote” about the desirability of one set of policies and politicians over another. Somin encourages us to imagine greater decentralization, and he also takes us back to earlier periods in American history when more decisions were handled locally and people could move from one place to another if they were unhappy.

In chapter 6, Somin (a law professor at George Mason University) argues for judicial review over more democratic decisions. Judicial review, although defensible because it leads to far superior economic outcomes in countries with more of it, has fallen out of vogue in America. In part, the shift away from judicial review is because it is perceived as antidemocratic and elitist to let judges override the wisdom of the democratic crowd. But Somin, of course, takes issue with the idea that democratic outcomes are good and wise. Democratic decisions are, in fact, often arbitrary, sometimes stupid, and most definitely grounded in ignorance.

Somin’s analysis is on the mark throughout, and it quite rightly opens up with a quote from James Madison about popular government being a “farce” if lacking in information. Like Madison’s project, Somin is interested in the incentives generating widespread ignorance on the one hand and ways to constrain ignorance on the other.

But therein lies one of the biggest challenges for Somin and others concerned about ignorance and America’s democratic failure: the genie is out of the bottle, and there is no obvious way to turn back. Judicial review, for example, has been pushed aside in favor of majoritarianism—as well as in favor of referendum voting on the one hand and activist judges on the other. The Tiebout competition highlighted in Somin’s menu of solutions has been kicked aside in favor of greater and greater concentration of power at the federal level. And, as Somin makes clear, there is absolutely no hope left if we leave things to the American voter.

We are left, then, with a failed American democratic system, one that will wobble along for decades, if not centuries to come. Somin’s work is a fine testament of where we have gone as a country and how the strong incentives we face to be politically ignorant have driven our decline. His work also offers plausible solutions to our modern-day problems, but I am skeptical about greater decentralization or a swing back toward more judicial review happening any time soon.

Somin’s analysis sheds a great deal of light on America’s democratic failure, but the issues of transitioning from “here” (i.e., an American tending toward an idiocracy) to “there” (an America where some checks and balances are restored) are not made clear to the reader. Transition issues are messy, so it makes sense that Somin tends to sidestep issues involving the implementation of reform.

Along with the issues of transitioning, Somin’s work also downplays the role of the political entrepreneur in putting our country on a different trajectory. The simple version of Democracy and Political Ignorance , as I read it and stated earlier, is “garbage in, garbage out.” Ignorant voters have bad information and rely on flawed heuristics in the political domain. When garbage is going in, it is no surprise, therefore, to see bad political outcomes being spit out.

Though the Somin story is a persuasive one, other factors matter at the margin. Leaders, for example, matter, and every now and then countries have moments whena politician or set of policies come along and result in a significant departure from current political opinion. The “shock therapy” experiences in eastern Europe, for example, were one such moment when, despite the broad-based social welfare preferences of voters in the region, economic liberalization for the better occurred. Franklin D. Roosevelt, in contrast, is an example of an entrepreneurial politician who overstepped the median voter’s attitudes during the 1930s, and we all are the worse as a result. Programs such as airline deregulation of the 1970s, financial market liberalization in the 1980s, and progress on free trade in the 1990s stand as examples of political entrepreneurs outmaneuvering the mob. Such examples suggest there exists some slack in the system, which Somin acknowledges but downplays. Slack in the system that allows for entrepreneurs to step in may very well be our only hope given the ugly realities of America—realities Somin so carefully and so clearly opens our eyes to one page at a time.

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I’m an educator and grandson of Holocaust survivors, and I see public schools failing to give students the historical knowledge they need to keep our democracy strong

Assistant Professor of Journalism, Penn State

Disclosure statement

Boaz Dvir does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Penn State provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation US.

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The Florida Department of Education announced on April 10, 2023, that it had rejected 35% of the social studies books publishers submitted for approval and use in the state’s public schools. The move was based on a determination the books contain references to social justice issues “and other information” not aligned with Florida Law .

The decision garnered a great deal of media attention. But it was just the latest in a series of efforts around the country to limit students’ access to books, lessons and courses about certain historical and societal topics, often dealing with race.

At least 36 states have halted or are seeking the legal means to stop teachers from examining racism in their classrooms.

School districts around the country have banned books about issues ranging from racism to the Holocaust to the LGBTQ community . Parent groups have campaigned to restrict the instruction of such difficult topics as slavery.

Moms for Liberty , and other groups and individuals opposing the instruction of some of these topics, say they’re protecting children from divisive, identity-shaming, indoctrinating and pornographic material.

In my view, some segments of American society are turning their backs on history.

That comes at a cost. I’ve seen it firsthand. I direct Penn State programs – the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Education Initiative and the Hammel Family Human Rights Initiative – that give my colleagues and me a real-time glimpse into the vulnerable state of K-12 instruction about difficult topics.

Many educators have been shying away from sensitive issues . The 2022 American Instructional Resources Survey , a survey about teachers’ views on what they can teach, by Rand Education and Labor , which focuses on school and education issues, shows the new and proposed state laws restricting the instruction of difficult topics made a quarter of the country’s 4 million teachers hesitant or downright scared to teach those subjects. This was true even when the educators taught in a state that had not at the time proposed or enacted such a law.

As a result, research shows, students may be deprived of vital lessons such as the global persistence of crimes against humanity and the factors that give rise to genocides .

As a documentary filmmaker and assistant professor of journalism, I often discuss difficult topics with students. After a rough-cut university screening of my forthcoming documentary “ Cojot ,” which tells the story of Holocaust survivor Michel Cojot’s 1970s quest to kill his father’s Nazi executioner, two college students approached me apologetically, saying, “We’ve never heard of this.”

To spare them embarrassment, I noted the protagonist’s obscurity. That’s why I’ve made this film , I said.

Shaking their heads, the students stressed they’d “never heard about any of this.”

They were talking about the Holocaust.

As the grandchild of Holocaust survivors , I felt disturbed. As an educator, I wondered if we’re failing to give students the knowledge and insight they need to sustain and thrive in a 21st-century democracy.

Costly ignorance

Many Americans born between between 1981 and 2012, according to a 2020 Schoen Consulting national poll , lack “basic knowledge” of the Nazis’ murder of 6 million Jews and millions of people with disabilities, homosexuals, Romani and members of other oppressed groups. About two-thirds of respondents grossly underestimated the number of Hitler’s Jewish victims and knew little to nothing about the world’s largest-ever death camp, Auschwitz .

Ignorance plagues other difficult topics, as well.

In May 2023 , the National Center for Education Statistics released a report showing eighth graders’ grasp of U.S. history and civics has reached a historic low.

The report revealed that in 2022, only 13% of eighth graders understood historic U.S. events such as the Civil War, a 5 percentage point drop from 2018.

Few children and adults realize Europeans enslaved millions of Indigenous people throughout the Americas. Comprehension of African enslavement runs nearly as shallow. Nine out of 10 high schoolers who filled out a 2018 Southern Poverty Law Center survey failed to recognize slavery as the Civil War’s central cause.

Most of the survey’s adult respondents urged better preparation for those who teach students about slavery.

K-12 educators agree. They recurrently told my colleagues and me they need intensive training and strong support to teach sensitive subjects effectively.

Book bans right and left

Since it began keeping tally in 2021, PEN America, which focuses on free speech in literature, has counted more than 4,000 instances of book banning in the U.S.

Its March 2023 report showed a year-over-year jump of 28.5% in the number of books banned across the country.

Banned books range from Toni Morrison’s “ Beloved ,” a fictional tale of freed enslaved people, to Anne Frank’s “Diary of a Young Girl ,” a nonfiction account of a Jewish girl’s life under Nazi occupation.

Although book banning may seem like a product of our polarized period, it dates back to Colonial days . These bans were last popular in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was president.

Classroom constraints

Efforts to restrict what’s taught in the classroom also include bills blocking or restricting the instruction of certain sensitive issues .

Most of the bills enacted by or making their way through 36 state legislatures vow to punish educators and districts that teach prohibited topics through disciplinary actions, funding cuts and criminal charges. Florida’s 2022 Parental Rights in Education law , for example, cautions educators to avoid teaching K-3 students about racism and sexual orientation or risk imprisonment.

Some of the new efforts are unlikely to have a practical effect on K-12 schooling. Although 49 state legislatures aim to prohibit the teaching of critical race theory , school districts have rarely incorporated the graduate-level academic concept into their curricula.

However, some such legislative prohibitions may widen the gap between what democratic citizens need to know and what they learn in school. For decades, many experts on democracy have argued democracy suffers when officials impede the instruction of difficult topics and profits when they back it:

• Studies published by The Social Studies , a peer-reviewed journal, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization demonstrate the price of schools failing to teach the Holocaust. That failure may rob students of such imperative lessons as how propaganda can mislead, grow and wreak havoc on democracy, as well as how societies and institutions can fall apart.
• An American Civil Liberties Union report indicates putting a lid on the exchange of information about difficult topics diminishes free speech – democracy’s lifeline – and boosts discrimination – which is hazardous for a healthy society.
• UCLA’s Public History Initiative maintains the future of democracy demands a citizenship fully informed about its past .

History has demonstrated – and, in recent years, so have citizens themselves – that democracy suffers when they are uninformed. We need look no further than the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. People who lacked an understanding of the American electoral process participated in such acts as riots, seditious conspiracy and more while attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

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News coverage of Evan Low

Evan Low, 40, was elected to Campbell City Council in 2006. He was the first Asian American to serve on the city council. In 2010, Low became the youngest openly LGBTQ mayor in the country at 26. Since his election to the Assembly, Low has led efforts to create a guaranteed income in California and a constitutional amendment to protect marriage for LQBTQ couples .  Low has a degree from San Jose State. His brother is a San Jose police officer . 

Bill Activity

For this session year, this legislator initiated 67 bills: 8 passed, 12 failed, and 47 are currently pending.

Money Tracker

In the last session, this legislator received 11.0% more than their colleagues and at least $273,750.0 from the 'Labor' donor group, which represented 17.86% of their contributions.

This feature tracks three sources of money intended to help a candidate win election: 1-Money given directly to a candidate’s committee, 2-Money given to an Independent Expenditure Committee, 3-Money given to a political party. (NOTE: Senators are elected every four years. Twenty of the 40 Senators are on the ballot in even-numbered years, so Senators may do little or no fundraising in the first two-year session of their Senate term).

This display shows money given directly to the incumbent’s campaign committee (NOTE: The industry categories for donors come from Open Secrets , a nonpartisan research organization for campaign finance. Some contributions are “uncoded,” meaning they have not been assigned to an industry sector. As a result, the total for each sector is also an estimate).

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36.0% higher than the average legislators

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97.0% lower than the average legislators

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64.0% lower than the average legislators

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11.0% higher than the average legislators

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Legislators are not allowed to accept gifts of more than $10 per month from registered lobbyists. Gifts from any other single source are limited to $590 in a calendar year.

Gift Received Rating

This legislator is ranked 36th highest for the amount of personal gifts received.

Bills Authored by Evan Low

Committee: Assembly Standing Committee on Transportation

Committee: Assembly Standing Committee on Public Safety

Committee: Assembly Standing Committee on Rules

Most of the policy work in the state Capitol is done in “Standing” committees. Legislators also work on budget subcommittees. There are also “Special” and “Select” committees with a more narrow topic focus. And there are “Joint” committees with members from the Senate and Assembly.

Assembly Standing Committee on Business and Professions

Assembly standing committee on elections, assembly standing committee on governmental organization, assembly standing committee on higher education, assembly standing committee on rules, interest group rankings.

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No Bills Identified

County recorder.

Political Reform Act of 1974: Investigation and Complaint Resolutions.

Crimes: assault.

California State University: University of California: Lunar New Year holiday.

Public postsecondary education: waiver of tuition and fees: California Conservation Corps.

Multiunit residential structures and mixed-use residential and commercial structures: water conservation.

Property taxation: low-value exemption: possessory interests in publicly owned streets and sidewalks.

Vehicles: financial responsibility: self-insurance.

Employment Development Department: disclosure of wage information: qualified third-party vendors.

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