It is by now increasingly apparent that life in the 21st century will be
lived without the comfort of old certitudes. The austere convenience of Cold War
peaceful co-existence, enforced by the threat of Mutual Assured Destruction, has
been succeeded by the growth of violent conflicts too numerous to count, waged
along lines that are ethnic, religious, territorial, and more. A world of
autonomous nation states, at one time a bulwark against agents of terrorism,
carriers of lethal viral strains, and the influx of conflicting cultural values,
has morphed into a new global village in which intercontinental travel is
routine and national borders are increasingly porous. Religious and moral
certitudes based on centuries of received tradition have begun to blink in the
glare of the new relativisms espoused by post-modernist cultural theories. Even
environmental factors such as global warming now appear to conspire against
confidence in the human future. At virtually every level of human social
interaction - in politics, religion, education, technology, and commerce -
change now appears to be the only constant.
Central Europe has proved to be a crucible within which many of these
combustible elements have combined. The opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the
"Velvet Revolution" in Czechoslovakia during the same year, the enlargement of
the European Union in 2004 to include the countries of Central Europe: such
events, momentous in themselves, continue to spawn new conditions and
circumstances which are still only imperfectly understood. What new forms of
democratic participation will emerge within countries long accustomed to
one-party rule? How will the next generation be educated, and by whom? How will
cultural clashes between East and West, rich and poor, religious majorities and
religious minorities be resolved?
For some, these new circumstances call for retreat into the securities of
ethnic solidarity, authoritarian political or religious leadership, or absolute
moral values. For others, however, including the contributors to this volume,
our new century is pregnant with great potential.
It is a working premise of the Central European Pragmatist Forum and its
participants that change is both unavoidable and the source of great
opportunities. The Forum's participants view their work as advancing a central
insights of a rich philosophical tradition in which this premise has been
paramount. Their work looks backward for inspiration to the work of pragmatists
such as Charles S. Peirce, William James, George Herbert Mead, F. C. S.
Schiller, and John Dewey, and forward to the difficult but exciting task of
applying their insights to the problems of contemporary men and women.
In the most mature public expression of this pragmatic tradition, truth is
understood as a social goal, not as dogma received from sources transcendent of
human experience. Far from being arbitrary or entirely a matter of convention,
however, truth is also understood as objective in the sense that judgments about
vital matters, whether of common sense or science, must be subjected to
experimental tests in order to receive their warrant. Truths are treated not as
absolute, but as tools to be utilized in the continuing efforts of human beings
to manage emerging events.
Within this tradition, democracy is understood not simply as a form of
government, but, more importantly, as a means of communication among individuals
and groups with different, often competing, agendas. Democracy is thus treated
as incapable of being exported, since the form it takes is governed by
historical and cultural context. The viability of democratic institutions, or
their lack thereof, will therefore depend on the energies and the commitments of
individuals and the various publics that they form, and that provide avenues for
their participation in the wider society.
Within this tradition, education is understood as more than the generational
transmission of social values, although it may be that. It is understood instead
as the cultivation of the tools of learning - of learning how to criticize and
refine received values in ways that yield new insights, new ways of living, and
new opportunities for the growth of individuals and communities.
Within this tradition, facts and values are treated not as separate, but as
intimately intertwined. Facts are understood as facts-in-context: as selected
from alternatives on the basis of interest, need, and historical and cultural
background. For their part, values that fail to be informed by facts are
understood to be marked by their failure to be reliable, which is to say,
valuable.
Perhaps most importantly, the contributors to this volume are committed to
the idea that philosophy has an important role to play within human life, and
that philosophers have an obligation to address vital issues. Consequently, they
have chosen to confront the future with energy and confidence. They relish
engagement with the problems and potentials of a changing social environment, in
all their complexity and uncertainty, because they relish the opportunities that
change brings for men and women of intelligence to enlarge the meanings of human
life.
Larry A. Hickman Center for Dewey Studies
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
PREFACE
Education for a Democratic Society is the third volume in the series of
conference volumes of the Central European Pragmatist Forum (CEPF) published by
Rodopi.1 CEPF is an association of scholars, primarily though not exclusively
philosophers. They are European, largely from Central and Eastern Europe, from
the United States and Canada, and one regular participant is from South Africa.
They work in various fields of the history of American philosophy, social and
moral philosophy, aesthetics, and political theory. The American philosophical
traditions of pragmatism and naturalism have long been of interest to
philosophers and others in Europe, though it has been rather a minority
interest. In recent years such interest has grown in Europe, particularly in
Central and Eastern Europe, thus the rationale for the creation of CEPF and its
conferences. This and the preceding volumes from those conferences attest to the
ways in which primarily European scholars, in conversation with their North
American counterparts, are thinking through the American philosophical
traditions.
This volume presents selected conference papers of the CEPF meeting held at
the University of Potsdam, Germany, in June 2004. The CEPF Potsdam meeting was
focused on the discussion of pragmatist educational theory, its philosophical
foundations, and its consequences for social, political, and educational
reconstruction.
The first CEPF conference, held under the auspices of the Slovak Academy of
Sciences in Stara Lesna, Slovakia in 2000, and the second meeting at
Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland in 2002, were devoted to the themes
"Pragmatism and Values" and "Deconstruction and Reconstruction" respectively,
and to a more general outlook on pragmatist philosophy in its internal
differentiation and its various ramifications. The third meeting at Potsdam was
focused on the specific topic of education. The Executive Board of the CEPF and
the organizers of the conference considered this focus on education not only
theoretically promising and philosophically rewarding, but to be of urgent
relevance to contemporary democratic societies.
The editors have organized the conference papers in four sections: I
-Education and Democracy; II - Education and Values; III - Education and Social
Reconstruction; IV - Education and the Self. Each section consists of papers
that elaborate various aspects of the topics. The final paper in the collection
is a special contribution from the conference's Keynote Speaker, John Lachs.
Some of the papers deal directly with education and its relation to democracy,
while others address questions and issues that have a bearing on the
understanding and problems of education. The most influential of the classical
pragmatist philosophers in the work of the contributors is John Dewey, but the
papers collected here also draw on the neopragmatists Richard Rorty and Hilary
Putnam, as well as others, from Jacques Derrida to Paolo Freire. Along the way
many of the more sustained philosophical issues are examined: community,
criticism, citizenship, individuality and individualism, oppression, experience,
ethical and aesthetic values, and individual and social development, all within
the context of as ongoing assessment of the means and ends of education.
The papers in Section I, Education and Democracy, concentrate on the
foundations of Pragmatist educational theory. At the same time all the papers
provide not only analyses of pragmatist, primarily Deweyan, educational theory,
but engage in comparative studies of Dewey and Derrida, of Dewey and Rawls, of
Dewey and Rorty, and of Dewey and Freire. Don Morse concentrates on the
necessity to instill habits of criticism as the "road to [the] release" of
creative activity. He argues that such criticism finds an illustration in
Derrida's concept of deconstruction, especially in light of the centrality of
"experience" for both Derrida and Dewey. Carlos Mougan Rivero is concerned above
all with citizenship. Dewey's concept of democracy, he argues, "supplies the
grounding for the development of a theory of citizenship education...." This, he
maintains, is especially true given the "moral meaning" Dewey gives to
democracy.
Alexander Kremer is interested in the implications for education and
democracy of Richard Rorty's writings, above all in the context of the
traditional questions "Who am I as an individual?" and "Who am I as a human
being?" With these concerns in mind, Kremer asks the question whether democracy
requires its own form of education. The answer he gives is "yes and no": "yes"
in so far as democratic society, for example in Rorty's vision, has needs that
other forms of social life do not, and "no" because education cannot be wholly
unique since it must address the more ongoing character of what it means to be a
human being. Jane Skinner, for her part, has a more social concern, one that
deals with the social problems generated by the disparate distribution of wealth
and the exacerbating contemporary process of economic globalization. She
explores Dewey's approach to education and democracy in comparison to Paulo
Freire's, and argues that both have an understanding of the nature of education
that takes seriously the problems of social oppression, though Freire can add
something that liberal approaches, including Dewey's, typically lack. In this
respect they offer preferable alternatives to much of contemporary education and
schooling, which in neither form nor content pays serious attention to this
prominent feature of contemporary life.
Section II, Education and Values, is devoted to two different sets of values:
two papers address the bearings of pragmatist thinking on moral and political
philosophy, while two papers deal with questions of aesthetics. Sami Pihlstrom's
paper deals with pragmatic moral realism through Putnam and the Wittgensteinian
tradition. Dirk Jorke's paper reads Dewey against the background of current
debates between communitarianism and liberalism. Dewey, he argues, offers a
model of community that goes beyond standard liberal and communitarian
conceptions. Education is, then, one of the necessary means by which such
community is accomplished and sustained.
Lyubov Bugaeva traces the stunning similarities between Dewey's aesthetics as
developed in Art as Experience and the theoretical views of the leading Russian
Constructivists of the 1920s, especially Ilya Erenburg and El Lissitzky. Among
other common traits, art is in both traditions didactic, and didactic in similar
ways. Bugaeva's paper suggests the interesting question how it is that these two
disparate traditions turned out to be so similar in detail, especially since one
is forged in a social revolution and the other, while perhaps revolutionary in
implications, is interested more in reconstruction than in revolution. In her
chapter, Krystyna Wilkoszewska demonstrates the remarkable relevance of Dewey's
non-contemplative understanding of art for reflecting on the interactivist turn
in contemporary fine arts. She is interested in the importance of understanding
the aesthetic dimension of the pragmatist, especially Deweyan, concept of
experience. In so far as education, as Wilkoszewska puts it, "penetrates all
spheres of life," the aesthetic dimension of experience is no less pertinent for
education than for any other social process.
The papers in Section III, Education and Social Reconstruction, examine the
significance of pragmatist thinking for bringing about deliberate change in the
state, society, and education, as well as for exercising political power within
"thin" and "thick" democracies. James Campbell examines the principal
contribution social pragmatists, principally Dewey, but also George Mead and
James Tufts, made in developing the intrinsic, inseparable relationship between
education, school, and democracy. As the title of his paper suggests, Campbell
is concerned with the central role of education for democratic social
reconstruction. As he puts it, "education and democracy [are] virtually
synonymous." This fact has implications for the form and content of education,
as well as for the structure and organization of educational institutions
themselves. Gert-Riidiger Wegmarshaus stresses Dewey's notion of democracy as a
way of life. He illustrates the bearing of such a view of democracy on education
through the discussion of an educational program under way in Germany called
"Learning and Living Democracy." The program aims at actively teaching democracy
in schools by establishing close and strong working connections among the
students, teachers, neighborhoods and local communities.
John Ryder discusses both logical and practical limitations of the
sustainability of a democracy that is based on the pragmatist principles of open
inquiry, experimentation, and the pooling and sharing of experience vis-a-vis
the growing danger of anti-democratic behavior and religious fundamentalist
beliefs. He explores the question whether the methods of social reconstruction
developed within the pragmatist tradition can reasonably be expected to achieve
their own ends. The focus is on the problem of promoting certain democratic
social ends without having recourse to the non-democratic, and therefore
non-pragmatist, practices of manipulative social engineering. In other words, is
the "thick" democracy of pragmatism and the forms of education it promotes in
fact possible? Michael Eldridge develops the concept of "intellectualizing
practice" to address the potential problems Ryder has raised, and in so doing
expresses a less skeptical attitude towards the possibility of participative
democracy, even under hegemonic and rather militarist policy approaches as
currently demonstrated by the Bush administration. The commitments and practices
that constitute pragmatism are indeed capable of addressing social problems,
including that of large scale dissent, even if such problems are not solvable
entirely, i.e. even if a "thick democracy" is not achievable in a given context.
Thus, rather than "thick democracy" we may well be content with "pragmatism
lite."
Section IV, Education and the Self, consists of papers that deal in various
ways with the individual. Richard Hart is directly concerned with an
understanding of education that can properly address the needs of individual
persons. Education in its most meaningful sense is a cooperative interaction of
persons engaged in a mutual process of development. In defense of this view and
its implications he appeals to Dewey, as well as to Socrates and Martin Buber.
Thus understood, many contemporary forms of schooling, including the current
uses of instructional technologies, fall well short, indeed dangerously short,
of appropriate educational ideals. Erin McKenna is also interested in the
person, and like Jorke she explores Dewey's ideas in relation to liberalism and
commumtarianism, in this case in relation to the general concept of
individualism. Education is to be understood in part in this context, i.e. as a
component of the process of the development of the individual and of the
community.
Vincent Colapietro is interested in the concept of growth and with the role
of education in fostering growth. In the process of examining this question he
invites us to rethink the assumption commonly made, and one certainly relevant
to education, that immaturity represents a lack. Rather, he advises that we
consider immaturity in its experiential richness, and that we develop an
understanding of growth and education accordingly. Kathleen Wallace's
contribution takes up the question of the autonomy of what she refers to as the
interactional, plurally constituted self. Autonomy, she argues, is enabled
through reflexive communication, a concept that itself draws from the work of
Josiah Royce and Justus Buchler. Though not generally thought of as classical
pragmatists, Wallace points out that Royce and Buchler both made clear that they
drew heavily from the pragmatist tradition, especially from Peirce, James, and
Dewey. If autonomy is an important goal of individual development,
Wallace argues, then education is to be understood in part as a process that
contributes to its achievement.
The final paper in the volume is a contribution by John Lachs, who gave the
Keynote Address at the Potsdam conference. Lachs argues that education too often
is focused on learning about the actual, and thereby leaves little room for
exploring possibilities. This is particularly bothersome in relation to social
improvement and the criticism of institutions, for only by envisaging the
possible can we move toward the better. Further, talking about possibilities is
ineffective without taking steps to enact them. This imposes a huge
responsibility on teachers: they must have the courage to show their students by
their actions what is necessary to convert possibilities into actualites. If
this is taken as a standard of good teaching, many of us fail.
Taken together, the papers collected in this volume provide a glimpse into
ways that Europeans are taking up pragmatist and neopragmatist themes, and the
potential of an ongoing conversation between European and North American
specialists. The Central European Pragmatist Forum will continue to hold its
biannual conferences to foster this conversation. The editors would like to
thank all the participants in the Potsdam meeting for contributing to an
atmosphere of serious intellectual engagement and collegial conversation. The
editors would also like to thank Larry Hickman for contributing the Forward to
this volume; James Campbell for his invaluable assistance in preparing some of
the papers for publication; and John Shook, general editor of the Studies in
Pragmatism and Values special series, for his ongoing support and editorial
assistance.
John Ryder, Gert-Riidiger Wegmarshaus
NOTES
1. John Ryder and Emil Visnovsky, eds., Pragmatism and Values: The Central
European Pragmatist Forum, Volume One (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2004); John
Ryder and Krystyna Wilkoszewska, eds., Deconstruction and Reconstruction: The
Central European Pragmatist Forum, Volume Two (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi,
2004).
