Democracy in Education: Crafting Vision, Policies, and Strategies

A Statement for the John Dewey Society

by

Kathleen Knight Abowitz, Harry C. Boyte, by Deborah Meier

March 2016

“It is the main business of the family and the school to influence directly the formation and growth of attitudes and dispositions, emotional, intellectual and moral. Whether this educative process is carried on in a predominantly democratic or non-democratic way becomes…a question of transcendent importance not only for education itself but for…the democratic way of life.” John Dewey, Democracy in the Schools

We face an avalanche of privatization of education at every level, tied to narrowing views which

radically shrink the meaning of democracy and of education. This avalanche increasingly

renders education as a ticket for individual advancement, not public purpose. Education is more

segregated by race and class than in the time of Brown v. Board of Education. Educators feel

increasingly powerless. At the same time education is under widespread attack, with efforts to

shape both K-12 and higher education by outside interests and policy makers, both liberal and

conservative, using marketplace and technocratic rationales. State government in many states

are defunding public post-secondary education. Costs put many schools out of the reach of poor

and working classes. All this contributes to the disempowerment of educators and students.

Internal changes as well as external forces erode the agency of educators and students.

Studies such as American Academic Culture in Transformation, edited by Thomas Bender and

Carl Schorske have demonstrated that research cultures have become increasingly detached

from community and the public culture in many fields in recent decades. Rankings fuel what

Lani Guinier calls the “testocracy,” narrow, individualist understands of merit and achievement

and erode earlier norms of cooperative and democratic excellence in both K-12 and higher

education (The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education). Colleges today,

ranked by how many students are denied admission, often game the system by increasing

applications. Prestige goes to institutions which place students in jobs with the highest pay and

prestige, regardless of public contribution. Sustained, deep attention to skills and habits of

agentic action crucial to a democratic way of life has been sidelined.

It is worth recalling how much agency - the human capacity to act with others to shape the world

around us - was central both to the original meaning of democracy and also to the concerns of

John Dewey. As Josiah Ober, the classicist and political theorist, has shown in a detailed

etymological study of classical regime types (“The Original Meaning of ‘Democracy’: Capacity to

Do Things, Not Majority Rule,” Constellations 2008, 7), democracy for the Greeks did not mean

rule by the majority. “Rather it means, more capaciously, ‘the empowered demos … the

collective strength and ability to act...and indeed to reconstitute the public realm through action.”

Though Dewey rarely used the term “agency,” it is worth recalling the close connection between

agency, individual and civic, and his view of democracy as an empowering way of life. In

Democracy and Education, he proposed that education involves cultivating “initiative and

adaptability” (MW 9, 93-94). Following Jane Addams’ call for educators to “free the powers,”

Dewey advanced the idea that democracy’s diversity of stimuli “secure a liberation of powers”

(Jane Addams, On Education, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994, 98; Dewey, MW 9, 93)

Emphasizing the relational qualities of development against atomizing intellectual trends, he

argued that “the new individualism was interpreted philosophically not as meaning development of agencies for revising and transforming previously accepted beliefs, but as an assertion that

each individual’s mind was complete in isolation from everything else” (MW 9, 315).

Drawing on the Deweyan tradition, many educators and scholars have begun to fight back and

also to re-articulate why the public matters in education and why education’s deepest purpose is

preparing students for a democratic society. In K-12 education, new programs help educators

to build students and their own civic agency and capacity. Deliberating in a Democracy helps

educators and students design lessons for deliberating difficult issues. The Discovering Justice

program helps elementary and middle school students explore meanings of justice and the law.

“Action Civics” movements and programs such as Public Achievement, Mikva Challenge and

The Freechild Project help young people to learn skills of effective civic action in schools and

communities, including learning and research about problems, everyday political skills, and

sustained reflection. Expeditionary Learning, The Algebra Project, and the Big Picture Company

tie learning to real world community projects and problems. The Coalition for Essential Schools

emphasizes democratic principles, as well as the “student as worker and the teacher as coach,”

shifting from education as something delivered.

At the post-secondary level, recent associations such as Campus Compact, Imagining America,

the American Democracy Project, The Democracy Challenge and AAC&U, are developing a

new emphasis on higher education’s role in democracy as well as innovative approaches to

education for student agency. The Kettering Foundation’s Campus Conversations on

Democracy brings together presidents to recover their leadership as public philosophers of

education and democracy. Two national deliberations of the National Issues Forums growing

out of the American Commonwealth Partnership in 2012, celebrating the 150 anniversary of

land grant colleges, Shaping Our Future: How Can Higher Education Help Us Create the

Society We Want?, and The Changing World of Work: What Should We Ask of Higher

Education?, have involved several thousand citizens in every region of the country. These have

surfaced deep public concerns about higher education’s future and loss of public purposes.

Deweyan concerns with agency also form one inspiration for the new transdisciplinary field

called “civic studies,” founded by a group of seven engaged political theorists. The group,

including Elinor Ostrom, past present of the American Political Science Association and 2009

Nobel Prize winner, and future APSA president Jane Mansbridge, is organized as a framework

for civic engagement focused on themes of agency and citizens as co-creators of communities

at different scales. Tufts University hosts the website and an annual international institute. The

Civic Studies journal is The Good Society.

All these are foundations to build on. Yet the dynamic trends of privatization and technocracy

continue to gather momentum on campuses, in curriculum and in educational policy. How can

we reimagine a public educational ecosystem with revitalized democratic aims, and effectively

work to enact it in practice, policy, and law?

We are convinced that this is the time to work with others in organizing a democracy movement

of K-16 educators and students and our allies, reimagining education as crucial to a democratic

way of life for ourselves and for future generations, advancing policies that support democracy

education, and creating strategies to build broad publics. Here are several potential elements:

• Strategy, grounded in local, grassroots effort, needs to include state and national prongs of action, across educational sectors and in diverse coalitions of community and civic organizations. Many tools will be necessary for this work, including public deliberation, organizing, experimentation, research, and a robust strategy of what can be called “cultural organizing, stimulating wide public discussion in many media settings.
• Deliberations and organizing efforts need to be informed by research and scholarship that is transdisciplinary not simply interdisciplinary. This means recognizing that while academic scholars are creating new knowledge of great value we also need new patterns of collaborative knowledge-creation and infrastructures and reward systems which support them, recognizing the multiple kinds of knowledge needed for effective political democratic change.
• At local and regional levels, we need new strategies for deliberation and organizing action for change that builds new, deeper, more reciprocal relationships with scholars and schools, students, parents and families, civic groups and local governments, asking “why” and “so what” questions with new forcefulness.
• At the state level where much education policy is established, we need to “bring the public in,” creating citizen-based deliberations about the purposes of education at every level. Representatives and participants from schools, teachers unions, families, businesses, religious and civic groups, and community organizations as well as local governments will need to be involved.
• We also need ways to bring findings of public deliberations to new levels of public visibility through new media tools and through partnerships with sympathetic journalists and opinion-makers in the mainstream media. This will be essential to effect a significant shift from the narrow test-based accountability that lawmakers and others have devised in the last two decades.
• At the federal level, we need a variety of strategies to engage a new administration with the Deweyan vision of democracy as a way of life and education as its midwife.

A democratic education vision for K-16 publicly supported education in the U.S. and for policies

that strengthen the democratic purposes of private and liberal arts education will require

leadership in all sectors, from all corners of educational practice, policy, and research. How to

develop such leadership will require discussion and thought about what is the appropriate

organizing form and structure for such work. But the need seems unmistakable.

In our history, democracy had overtones of immensity. "A word the real gist of which still sleeps,

quite unawakened...a great word, whose history remains unwritten," as Walt Whitman put it in

Democratic Vistas.

It is time to awaken the possibilities of the word.

Just came across Ushahidi and am wondering how this "crowdsourcing" tool might support the kind of communication and community-building (read education) that Dewey -- and Jane Addams and others -- locate at the heart of democracy.  Remember, the cure for democracy is more democracy!   Anybody have ideas on how this came be used educationally?

"For now I see what is the matter with you, John Dewey": Dispatches from the Scudder Klyce files

One of the little known facts about Dewey is that he had an intense, frequent correspondence with a very strange ex-Navy man, Scudder Klyce (the image above is a postcard sent by Klyce in 1907, when he was on a naval posting in Nicaragua).

Outside of the world of Dewey scholarship, Klyce is perhaps best known his book, Universe, to which Dewey wrote a forward. The opening lines of the book describe Klyce's ambitious project clearly:

1. a. This book is a brief description, and rigorous proof of the truth of the description, of the universe and all that appertains to it, both "spiritual" and "material." Hence, the book is religion, science, and philosophy. 

Since Universe is (as one would expect) rather heavy going, I will make no judgment here as to whether Klyce succeeded in this difficult task.

At any rate, Klyce was a bright man, but he was also an odd duck, as virtually all of his (extremely lengthy) letters to Dewey make clear.

Consider, for example, Klyce's comments in a letter to Dewey, dated July 31, 1927. Klyce has recently found out that Dewey's wife had died, and he takes the time to send the following sympathetic missive:

I am very sorry that your wife has died. And I thank you for telling me the circumstances. See JD to Klyce, 1927.07.27 (04803).     For now I can see what is and has been the matter with you. I am sorry that I have been bothering you when your mind was thus preoccupied. This letter of yours which I have just received (yesterday afternoon) is so confused and contradictory as to be substantially incoherent. And I state that simple fact without implying any sort of adverse criticism—I am rather inclined to consider it a positive merit on your part that you should have written such intellectuallly defective stuff.

And the letter does not stop here!

Mental and Moral Science

I just finished reading an obituary for the Jungian psychologist James Hillman who -- with Robert Bly and Michael Meade -- was a key figure in the "men's movement" of the 1990s. Two interesting points worth pondering today:

1) Hillman took seriously our "demons," urging that thoughts of death and suicide be thought of not as symptoms of mental "illness" to be cured, but as philosophical longings to be explored and understood. Parents who were trying to "manage" a mentally troubled son would be well-advised to to begin by NOT trying to change him. Counterintuitive? Surely but oh so sensible. This brought to mind thoughts of R.D. Laing's thesis in The Politics of Experience that insanity was just a sane response to an insane world. Why is THAT rolling around my psyche right about now?

2) Hillman graduated from Trinity College in Dublin with a degree in "mental and moral science," a phrase and a concept Dewey might have a good time with. Where could one study such things today?

Wisdom from Experience and Nature

A lovely remark in Experience and Nature caught my eye recently:

The "matter" of materialists and the "spirit" of idealists is a creature similar to the constitution of the United States in the minds of unimaginative persons. Obviously the real constitution is certain basic relationships among the activities of the citizens of the country; it is a property of phase of these processes, so connected with them as to influence their rate and and direction of change. But by literalists it is often conceived of as something external to them; in itself fixed, a rigid framework to which all changes must accommodate themselves. Similarly what we call matter is that character of natural events which is so tied up with changes that are sufficiently rapid...It is no cause or source of events or processes; no absolute monarch; no principle of explanation..." (p. 73)

It's meant to be a call to think about reality in terms of experience rather than in terms of underlying substance. However, there's lots of political food for thought here as well, particularly given the times in which we find ourselves, in which constitutional literalism is, rather surprisingly, stronger even than in Dewey's time.

Jo Ann Boyston: In Memoriam

We received word today that Jo Ann Boydston, a person whose contribution to the thinking captured here cannot be overstated, died this week. You can read her obituary at http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/thesouthern/obituary.aspx?n=jo-ann-boydston&pid=148158468.

Jo Ann Boydston edited The Collected Works of John Dewey, making it infinitely easier to document not only what John Dewey thought but also who John Dewey was. And it is who John Dewey was -- an American thinker in the tradition of Emerson for whom acting and thinking cannot be divorced -- that motivates the work of those who contribute to Social Issues.

So today I acknowledge Jo Ann's life and the work that lives on and continues to enrich us.

The Richness of Experiences

During her confirmation hearings last week, Sonia Sotomayor repudiated her now-famous earlier statement that “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life”. Of course, political pressure makes confirmation hearings no place to stick to a nuanced point, but I’m still sorry that Sotomayor had to back away from that point rather than explaining some things about experience, perspective, and education.

The key phrase is “with the richness of her experiences”. Experience is educational; judges who have had richer experiences are better educated and may therefore reach better, decisions than judges with less understanding of the way the world and people are. Hardly problematic, it seems to me. Whether the experiences of Latinas are indeed richer than those of White men would then become the question. Not always, I’d guess, but given the dynamics of race and social class probably true of most Latinas and White men who become judges.

I hear Sotomayor echoing Dewey’s argument about growth and burglars. Cliques of all sorts, including the company of elite lawyers, and the educational situations in which many law-school bound students grow up, are inimical to education that reaches beyond the limitations of school. Rather than criticize Sotomayor for this point, we might all want to think again about what factors enable White men to lose touch with the wider experiences of humanity. And not only White men, of course, or all White men -- there's no need to slide into an essentialism that I don't read in Sotomayor's original comment. Richness of experience matters. That's the main idea.

An Early Modern Prophet?

“From the respect paid to property flow, as from a poisoned fountain, most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the contemplative mind.”

Thus wrote Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) in 1792—expressing a radically critical outlook that could hardly seem more appropriate to study this month. She merits inclusion in school social studies curricula, for which purpose I strongly recommend Miriam Brody’s beautifully illustrated, well researched, and engaging Mary Wollstonecraft: Mother of Women’s Rights, published by Oxford with a washable cover!

Most famous for having written A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, thanks especially to Jane Roland Martin’s acknowledgment of that work’s significance for philosophy of education in Reclaiming a Conversation (1985), Wollstonecraft authored also various educational novels, treatises, manuals, and stories—collected by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler in seven volumes. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft (1989). Scarcely schooled herself, Wollstonecraft advanced one of the most substantial early modern arguments in English for universal, government-funded, sex-desegregated day-schooling, and initiated a substantial tradition of thought on coeducation by authors such as Louisa May Alcott, Anna Julia Cooper, John Stuart Mill, Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Dale Spender, Martin, and bell hooks. Indeed, John Dewey’s 1911 argument for coeducation reiterates the main points of Wollstonecraft’s plea to educate children through the “jostlings of equality.”

Emma Goldman once observed that even if Wollstonecraft had never written a line, “her life would have furnished food for thought.” Janet Todd’s massive, thorough, and candid Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life and Lyndall Gordon’s more recent Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft both make clear that Goldman was right, as do her letters collected by Todd. A survivor of child abuse in an unstable alcoholic home with six siblings, she resolved early to live as an independent woman, educated herself with help from generous neighbors, and tried the few means other than prostitution by which women might work for their living in Georgian England. Her husband, philosopher William Godwin, has written a rich Memoir of their remarkably egalitarian friendship, from which men and women may learn much even today. Their daughter Mary Shelley, orphaned just a few days after her birth, educated herself by reading her mother’s works, whose influence upon her own mythic educational novel Frankenstein is unmistakably strong.

The fifteenth volume of the 25-volume Continuum Library of Educational Thought, edited by Richard P. Bailey (2008)—Mary Wollstonecraft: Philosophical Mother of Coeducation—introduces her life and ideas to educators. In it, I have chronicled her revolutionary self-education as a woman-loving woman, a teacher of children, and an early modern writer; I have formulated also her critical concept of monarchist miseducation and her normative concept of republican coeducation, traced her work’s reception and influence on subsequent thought about coeducation, and examined the contemporary relevance of her as yet incomplete philosophical project. Researching and writing this book with the purpose of inviting a new generation of educational thought on Wollstonecraft, I have thought especially about what we might learn from her about how to approach a comparable coeducational critique of global-corporatist miseducation—a critique that recent events make all too obviously necessary. For she seems almost prophetic in her 1796 Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, regarded by literati as her best work:

“A man ceases to love humanity, and then individuals, as he advances in the chase after wealth; as one clashes with his interest, the other with his pleasures: to business, as it is termed, everything must give way; nay, is sacrificed; and all the endearing charities of citizen, husband, father, brother, become empty names . . . These men, like the owners of negro ships, never smell on their money the blood by which it has been gained, but sleep quietly in their beds, terming such occupations lawful callings; yet the lightning marks not their roofs, to thunder conviction on them, ‘and to justify the ways of God to man.’”

Citizen Journalism

The website Helium is partnering with various public interest groups to sponsor awards for citizen journalism on a number of topics of interest to members of JDS.

As it is the prime mission of the Commission on Social Issues to encourage citizen journalism among JDS members, this project should have special interest.You may remember Dewey's abortive collaboration with Franklin Ford, his complaint that the mainstream media were mostly scandal sheets failing to get behind lurid stories to the social processes responsible for them, and his complementary desire to bring more of the newspaper business into philosophy. So here is one already organized outlet.

Here is the lead from Helium:

Are you a real citizen journalist?
Helium's Citizen Journalism Awards cover a broad spectrum of issues: technology against world poverty, presidential candidates' health records, protecting animals by eating stem-cell-grown meat and the conflicts along Columbia's borders.

Show us your skills and get recognized by publishers, news outlets, journalism institutions and peers.

Here is more:

The time has come to rethink what it means to be a journalist. If you have what it takes to research topics and issues, lend an objective voice and write compelling articles, then you are a citizen journalist. Helium is bringing together the worlds of traditional news reporting and community-based journalism to create a site that citizen journalists call home.

Are you ready to report and write? Helium encourages you to report everything from local issues happening in your town to pressing global and environmental issues. As a citizen journalist writing at Helium, you’ll get recognized by publishers, news outlets, journalism institutions and peers. Here’s where to build a diverse portfolio of top-quality articles to help jump-start your career.

The Kings of New York

The Kings of New York: A Year Among the Geeks, Oddballs, and Genuises Who Make Up America's Top HighSchool Chess Team by Michael Weinreb should interest all progressive educators and members of the John Dewey society.

The Kings is a profile of the national championship winning chess dynasty at Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn, New York. Murrow is a magnet school for gifted kids that provides a lot of protected space for its students to 'do their own thing'. The founding principal, Saul Bruckner, transferred to Murrow from John Dewey High School in Coney Island, a school with a project-based curriculum, where the students did not receive grades. Murrow went even further in the 'progressive school' mode, providing lots of free time by having each class meet only four days a week and looking the other way if kids hung out in the school yard or smoked in the bathroom, or even cut classes for weeks on end. As the principal of this school for its first thirty years, Bruckner became something of a cult figure in New York high school circles. Surprisingly, Diane Ravitch has praised the school, perhaps because of the great achievements of many of its students.

The chess coach, Elliot Weiss, had a scouting system for chess talent that makes major league sports look, well, minor league. By placing himself on the board of the organization running chess tournaments in the New York region, he had early notice of promising elementary school kids. And even though competition for admission to Murow was very stiff, Weiss could get these kids into Murrow even if their academic performance through Junior High was terrible. And chess prodigies, obsessed by the game, are notoriously poor school students.

An organization called Chess in the Schools (CIS) had funded chess instruction at several New York elementary and middle schools, and one, PS 318, had become a chess dynasty because its instructors were high ranked master players. 318 became, in effect, the farm team for Murrow.

Kings chronicles a couple of years in the life of the team members as they pursue their national championships. The players include Russian and Lithuanian immigrants, Puerto Ricans, Haitians, and African-Americans. Each is a kind of troubled genius with a fascinating life story.

What stands out is how a considerable number of selfless heros (I do not use this word lightly) including Bruckner, Weiss, the funders of Chess in the Schools, the chess instructors, and a few private benefactors, made this incredible story possible.

Even when you add up how much they all had to give in time and effort and money so that a bunch of misfit geniuses could develop their unusual natural gifts, however, you realize that a rich country like this could provide something as wonderful for everyone needing it and capable of gaining from it. If, that is, the entire culture were not so slanted to selfishness and greed and if accountability schemes would stop driving them out and destroying schools like Murrow.

The book documents the steady changes in Murrow school brought about by No Child Left Behind, as well as by draconian school security measures imposed by the Bloomburg administration that have eliminated free time, hanging out, and cutting classes.

Dewey's Experimental Logic and the Scholarship of Engagement

John Dewey's experimental logic is neatly outlined in the three chapters on the stages of thought in Studies in Logical Theory. These three stages are useful in thinking about the scholarship of engagement.

On Dewey's account, actors are caught up in the stream of human events. Some of these are moving along without much friction, and thought is primarily qualitative and intuitive. Others are meeting with resistance or generating conflict. At this first stage, thought is more or less effortless and it not itself the main focus of consciousness. (Dewey will later call this stage that of primary experience).

But hesitation from resistance or conflict brings thinking to the center of consciousness. Thought sets out to map the situation, define problems, establish inquiries, gather data, consider the relevance of on-the-shelf knowledge, and draw and confirm conclusions. (Dewey will later call this secondary experience).

This second stage ends when thought knows where it stands. The third stage begins as the results of thought are placed back on the table of primary experience, along with other factors considered relevant by actors in the situation, as resources for finding a way beyond hesitation, beyond resistance and conflict. The results of thought can then be evaluated as instruments in restoring balance, in restoring the flow of experiernce.

In Logic: the Theory of Inquiry, Dewey considered the institutional setting of thought. The research university is the primary institutional home of the second stage of thought. In disciplined inquiry thought generates its own problems, which generate new lines of inquiry or even entirely new disciplines. Logic, epistemology, statistics, research methodology, are all among these tertiary contexts of thought -- thought serving those other areas of thought that serve primary experience.

The ramifications of thought within the university are vast and unpredictable. However, the results of these tertiary disciplines must be judged by how well they open up and contribute to work in e.g., sociology, psychology, and geography. Just as sociology is the study of society and its problems and conflicts, logic is the theory of inquiries in the various fields and disciplines. And the results of thought in these secondary disciplines must similarly be judged by how well they contribute to restoring the flow of primary experience by aiding actors in moving beyond hesitation and getting on with their affairs without resistance and conflict.

As Dewey puts it, the test of thought lies outside of thought. That is, work within university disciplines is subjected to a double test. First it must meet the staandards imposed by the approved methods within the discipline. The work does not yield "results" until that happens. But then these results themselves must be tested in the flow of experience that lies on the other side of the second stage of thought. It is in this sense that knowledge is good only if it works in experience.

This framework assigns two roles for the scholarship of engagement.

On the input side, problems framed for inquiry must be sensitive at some point, and in some way, to the real world needs that give rise to disciplined thought. There must, in other words, be a scholarship of engagement at the input point, at the border between the first stage of thought and the second, that influences the research agenda. Scholarship regarding the economics of the world food supply, in other words, must be alive to the doubts, hesitations, resistances and conflicts which make the food situation unbalanced or disturbed. There must be scholars in the field, so to speak, with in-person, face to face knowledge of farmers, hungry people, refugees, multi-national corporate decision makers, non-governmental organizations and social movement activists.

There also has to be a scholarship of engagement at the output side. This is a scholarship of translating academic knowledge into knowledge resources for practical ends, working with knowledge users, discovering what is useful and what is notin practice. And then communicating those discoveries back into the academy in such a way as to modify the research agenda so that subsequent academic work won't remain sterile and irrelevant.

The test of primary experience does not apply to each and every inquiry within academia. At the input stage it is the research agenda that is subject to this test. At the output stage it is the collective results of a field that are tested in this way. Within academia, that is, within the second stage of thought, there are all manner of internal inquiries, which may arguably be necessary to take up the problems of the world and move towards potentially useful conclusions confirmed by accepted methods. But if academic knowledge is to be more than a sterile game, it requires a scholarship of engagement to test its worth in primary experience and redirect it if it fails that test.

The Commission on Social Issues

The Commission on Social Issues is a committee of the John Dewey Society.

John Dewey (October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer, whose thoughts and ideas have been greatly influential in the United States and around the world. He was one of the founders of philosophical Pragmatism, and the father of functional psychology. He was also the leader of the progressive movement in U.S. schooling, and his thought continues to inspire educators and influence contemporary educational projects.

Founded in 1935, the John Dewey Society exists to keep alive John Dewey's commitment to the use of critical and reflective intelligence in the search for solutions to crucial problems in education and culture. The Society subscribes to no doctrine, but in the spirit of Dewey, welcomes controversy, respects dissent, and encourages the responsible discussions of issues of special concern to educators. The society also promotes open-minded, critical reconsiderations of Dewey's influential ideas about democracy, education, and philosophy.

The Commission on Social Issues exists to encourage and support communications among members of the John Dewey Society and concerned publics on current social, cultural and educational issues.

The web log 'Social Issues' is one avenue of communication for members of the Commission for Social Issues and the John Dewey Society.

Members of the John Dewey Society are encouraged to join the Social Issues team.