Theoretical in orientation, our paper explores the philosophical resources John Dewey and Jürgen Habermas each provide for furthering our thinking regarding the aims and approach of the Council of Europe’s (2016) Competences for Democratic Culture. We begin by acknowledging the justifications Dewey and Habermas offer for the practices and dispositions reflected in the competences and then move to the resources these philosophers provide for imagining and enacting deeper levels of pedagogical shift than those explicitly articulated in the framework. We close with a preliminary consideration of the qualitative cultural shifts the visions of Dewey and Habermas can be seen to imply and a call for further development of curricular frameworks and means for promoting these more profound reorientations.

Many have analyzed the related concerns and in some ways related approaches of Habermas and Dewey over the years (see, for example, Selk & Jörke, 2019). As Rosenthal (2002) has noted, Dewey and Habermas were both “concerned with community solidarity within the context of pluralism and diversity[,] … view political deliberation as beginning in concrete problematic situations, and believe the way communication functions in contemporary society is of vital concern …” (p. 210). Both therefore interested themselves in the enculturation of all people into the kinds of reflective and collaborative forms of discursive practices that Habermas characterizes with his concept of deliberative democracy.

 As Rosenthal (2002), McAfee (2000), and others have also noted, however, Habermas conceptualizes the developing self in rational and linguistic terms, in contrast to Dewey and his colleague Mead, upon whose interactionist conception of the emergent self Dewey relied. As a result, Habermas has approached the nature of the democratic relation through the lens of discursive entailments. Famously, Habermas (1981/1984, 1981/1987) has distinguished between system and lifeworld and characterized the forms of rational deliberation required to nourish a rich quality of human experience within the lifeworld, which is animated through the presuppositions and integrative function of communicative action (Wirts, 2014).

 Dewey’s more anthropologically grounded conception of the developing self arguably opens onto broader fields of human engagement. In addition to his focus on rationality and the scientific method, Dewey also explored the unspoken and subliminal dimensions of knowing and the ways in which educators can harness these to support the emergence of self-possessed and democratically disposed selves (Dewey, 1925/1958, 1935/2004; Johnson, 2007). Dewey’s (1916/1944) arguments for democracy as a mode of human engagement indeed begin with what he viewed as its potential for providing singularly satisfying psychosocial returns: democratic values and practices, when generously realized, would enable each of us to shape original and meaningful subjectivities within affirming and pluralistic sociocultural contexts.

 Progressive philosophers, theorists, and practitioners of education can fruitfully draw direction and inspiration from the resources born of both projects. In attending sensitively to the intersubjective and reciprocal dimensions of classroom encounters, teachers can demonstrate something of what it might mean to invest personally and collectively in the lifeworld of their classroom community (Habermas, 1992/1996). In providing opportunities for young people to employ practical cultural tools and means of creative expression in the course of realizing collective and personal aims, teachers can also foster the qualities of intersubjective awareness and interest that animate democratic relations as Dewey framed them (Dewey, 1916/1944).

While the authors of the European Council’s Reference Framework have made a valuable contribution, the rhetoric of standards and competences they employ risks being interpreted within schools in instrumental terms: deliberative competencies are to be demonstrated through an understanding of and adherence to the “rules of engagement” in deliberative speech situations. Such rules, however, can only ever represent behavioral regularities; the nurture of democratic values and sensibilities proceeds at deeper levels which also must be recognized and engaged. Habermas (1985/1987) has powerfully argued that the “communicative potential of reason,” which can serve both to affirm and expand the lifeworld, “has been simultaneously developed and distorted in the course of capitalist modernization” (p. 315). Schools sit at the crucible of this dynamic because they offer both the promise of developing “the arts of communicative action” upon which the quality of situated relations among emergent selves depends and the peril of being vulnerable to the instrumental logic of administrative and economic systems (Kemmis, 1998). Rhetorically situated within the lived experience of those who labor in schools, Habermas’ penetrating lifeworld/system analysis might provide an effective conceptual tool for unmasking and exploring this inescapable tension. Our exploration of Habermas’s contributions therefore focus on his “discourse-theoretic” model of democracy (Habermas, 1994), his explication of a discourse ethics (Habermas, 1983/1990), and the important distinctions he draws between the communicative reason that characterizes the integrative function of the lifeworld and the instrumental, strategic forms of reason that characterize administrative and economic systems (Habermas, 1985/1987; Wirts, 2014). Our exploration of Dewey’s contributions focuses on his anthropological conception of human beings as makers and doers and on his pragmatist conception of shared understandings and values as those constructed through joint and motivated efforts of various kinds (Dewey, 1922/1936; 1925/1958). Dewey believed that it was in undertaking practical activities in the service of shared aims that humans could most effectively extend the natural ties of kinship to encompass others. Based on these primal psychosocial considerations, the relevance of which is increasingly recognized beyond the bounds of classical pragmatism (Bernstein, 2010), Dewey argued for directly and collaboratively engaging the natural curiosity of young people in the means, materials, and purposes of their current sociopolitical worlds (1916/1944).). Such explorations were to draw upon all forms of human meaning-making, including the arts, and to tap students’ existing, often inchoate, understandings and to stir their imaginations.

The potential of democratic relations is enlarged when interlocutors share not only specific capacities and dispositions, but also distinctively democratic values and purposes. At a time when democracy faces serious challenges on the world stage, educational philosophers, theorists, and practitioners are called to the work of conceptualizing and developing effective means for increasing a sense of personal alignment with and investment in democratic ideals among all who work and study in democratic schools. Due to their distinct and yet mutually informative points of departure, Habermas and Dewey have provided what can be viewed as complementary conceptual resources for transcending an instrumentalist approach to the work of nurturing democratic discursive capacity in classrooms. Habermas decenters instrumental reasoning as the locus of democratic processes in favor of a situated intersubjectively constructed rationality; Dewey dislodges reason itself as the ultimate source and expression of intersubjective understanding. Both moves can serve to complicate and enrich our understandings of all that democratic commitments may be seen to imply. In theorizing the discursive and psychosocial dimensions of democracy as a mode of human relations, these two prolific philosophers of democracy have, in effect, invited educators into relationship with the greater philosophical—and so, pedagogical—questions at stake in our confrontations today between democratic and authoritarian political orders. Both philosophers challenge us—Habermas implicitly and Dewey explicitly—to consider the ways in which such reflections might enlarge our visions of and inform our thinking about the multiple dimensions implicated in the work of creating robustly democratic school and classroom cultures.

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