Dewey on Democracy, Education, and Growth

Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (1916) is Dewey's single most comprehensive statement of his educational philosophy, and it explicitly ties that philosophy to a distinctive conception of democracy itself. Dewey rejects any account of democracy that reduces it to a mere mechanism of voting, elections, and constitutional procedure; instead, he defines it as "more than a form of government," calling it "primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience." On this view, a genuinely democratic society is one whose members share increasingly numerous and varied points of contact, and whose institutions, education chief among them, cultivate the habits of open communication, shared inquiry, and flexible readjustment that such an interconnected common life requires.