Session Information
23 SES 12 C, Democracy and Education in Performative Regimes
Paper Session
Contribution
On the centennial anniversary of the publication of John Dewey’s Democracy and Education (1916), this paper takes this book as the point of departure for critically examining the transnational education policy that emerged from the agreement on the so-called Lisbon Strategy (2000) within the European Union (EU). The purpose of the present study is to analyse the EU policy documents, with a focus on compulsory schooling, through the lens of some core concepts from Democracy and Education, to explore whether, and how, the EU has managed to balance between the society’s need for cohesion and the market’s need for economic efficiency. This analysis is based on the assumption that Dewey’s ground breaking book still serves as an important starting point for a critical analysis of national as well as transnational education policies. The research question is as follows: How can we use the basic concepts of Dewey’s pedagogical philosophy on democracy and education as analytical tools for exploring the democratic potential in a transnational education policy within today’s European risk discourse?
European educational cooperation is not a new phenomenon; to some degree, there have always been influences across borders concerning education systems and policies. However, the Lisbon Strategy for fostering a competitive Europe and its OMC turned these influences into a more explicit cooperation between the EU member states, including establishing common goals and common monitoring of processes. The initial positive movements in terms of Europe’s ability to rapidly develop into a competitive and sustainable economy with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion transformed in 2005, when a theme of crisis emerged. Thus, the image of crisis, in turn, legitimized the need for radical change in terms of comprehensive reforms in the EU member states (Robertson, 2008). Today, Europe is experiencing several real crises—including Greece’s economic crisis, the influx of refugees feeling war and terror in the Middle East and parts of Africa, and the Russian incursion into Ukraine.
Dewey provided a way of knowing about the world that goes beyond the dualisms of mind–world and objectivity–subjectivity. By placing what we can know about the world at the center of the interactions—and later on, the transactions—between people, Dewey “moved” the center of the discussion about how to gain knowledge of the world from the mind to all indefinite interactions between living organisms and their environments (Dewey, 1916/2008, 1949/1991). The key concept in this change of the focal point for knowing is the concept of experience. For Dewey, the transactional view of experiencing always concerns the relationship between actions and consequences. According to Dewey, knowledge is both constructed and real (Biesta, 2014). Thus, Dewey argued for a “piecemeal realism” concerning the human actions involved in the process of inquiry. There are things that are existentially real, but they are not real in any essentialist way; instead, they are contingently real objects, not permanently real ones (Westbrook, 2005; Sleeper, 1986/2001). In sum, in Dewey’s concept of knowing, there is no gap between human beings and the world; knowing is in itself an activity concerned with conditions, relations, reflections, inferences, and consequences. It is from this view of knowing that we analyze the EU’s experiences of the problems in the region and their consequences.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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