Session Information
13 SES 04 B, Democracy in Schools, Difference and Disclosure
Long Paper Session
Contribution
Within the context of the renewed interest in pragmatism in general, and in the writings of John Dewey in particular, there are two clearly differentiated lines of research in the fields of the philosophy and history of education. The first one stems from the premise that the processes by which theories and discourse on education are received always involve some type of re-interpretation, now at work in the detailed depth in which John Dewey’s ideas are being analyzed today. The second one lies between contemporary re-conceiving and contemporary revising of Dewey’s philosophy. In that way, in the context of re-reading what American pragmatism implies for education, this paper aims to study one of these potential contemporary updates of pragmatist philosophy.
The matter of democracy recurs throughout the different dimensions of Dewey’s work as a continuing thread, as it does with many of our contemporary social and political concerns. The centrality democracy plays (as an idea, a social system, a communitarian ethos) in Dewey’s thinking can be explained because it lies at the anthropological root he starts out from. There is no possible notion of the individual conceived in a pre-social state. Any claims of democracy being a form of government that is simply better than others mistakenly imply thinking of a social contract underwritten by a set of people who until then had had no social relationship at all. Along with that descriptive value, in Dewey human society also fulfills a clearly normative function. Even though Dewey never used the term “recognition” directly, but used “involvement” instead, we will see that Axel Honneth finds a powerful theoretical precedent to his own work. The ethical theory of recognition advocated by Honneth is based on the assumption that recognition is one of the chief regulatory mechanisms of the social being of people. As he explains, recent years have seen a major change in our normative conceptualization of political order, which has abandoned the categories of equality of material goods and evenly distributed wealth, to address instead issues of respect and dignity. The need for recognition would form the foundation of social structures and individual subjectivities along three different ways of interaction: love (characteristic in family relationships), law (characteristic of the legal spheres) and social valuation (characteristic in relationships of solidarity set in the communitarian spheres).
This paper aims to point out a contemporary pedagogic reconsideration of the social dimension present in educational processes. Specifically, it will argue for the importance of giving an answer that closely ties in with the learner’s need for recognition (in the various spheres of interaction, with special focus on school spaces) as well as the devastating consequences that may result from not doing so. Thus, this paper explores the pedagogical possibilities that arise from broadening the democratic dimension of education found in John Dewey’s philosophy of education with the studies by Axel Honneth on the ethics of recognition.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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