Localizing Dewey's Notions of Democracy and Education: A Journey Across Configurations in Latin America (original) (raw)
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pdfThe approrpiation of Dewey´s pedagogy in Colombia as a cultural event.doc
A Hostile Culture: Versions of Modernity In the first half of the last century, pedagogy 1 was viewed in the country as the privileged practice for the attainment of the desired moral, political and economic ends of the nation by intellectuals and political actors with different educational agendas and versions of modernity. In 1923 Agustín Nieto Caballero, one of the most influential educational reformists, put it succinctly: "whatever the teacher is, that will be the nation". 2 This faith placed in schools for the attainment of "modern progress" turned pedagogy into a field of battle over the teacher's and the pupil's soul. This was not always an open battle: at times philosophical and political differences were underplayed in an effort to create a national consensus regarding educational policy and pedagogy. The idea being that in a country prone to political violence and with a people conceived as over-passionate, the sphere of education had to be protected from conflict. In other periods, this battle visibly pitted the Church against the state, Catholic against "modern" intellectuals, and the two dominant parties of the country: the Conservative and the Liberal party. Until the mid-thirties, the hegemonic discourse on "modernity" in Colombia, produced a number of what we have termed 3 filters of appropriation that effected a strategic cut in available knowledges and discourses produced in the United States and some European countries, that were linked to some of the most salient features of the national culture of the time: the deep divisions between the élite and the mass of the population; the great political and symbolic power of the national Catholic Church, one of the most conservative of the continent; and the fresh memories of political violence, the Thousand Day War (1899-1902) between the Liberal and Conservative parties. As López de la Roche 4 has pointed out, given the extremely close relation in the country between religion and partisan politics, political controversy acquired a strongly sectarian and intolerant character. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, religion had become the major dividing line between liberals and conservatives, and was used by the two parties for electoral purposes. Until the mid-thirties, there were three major filters that operated in the strategic selection of "modern" thought and pedagogical conceptions and practices. In the first place, a deep-seated mistrust on the part of the political, economic and academic élite towards the poor population, which was considered to be sick and degenerate. The poor masses were viewed as a passionate, primitive, animalistic and violent social body, riddled with physical, moral and intellectual abnormalities. This distrust towards the poor, that constituted the great majority of the population and were the almost exclusive target of public education, 5 privileged discursive appropriations that explained their "tragic" situation as well as medical and pedagogical prescriptions for their normalization and regeneration, and for the "defense of the race". 6 In the second place, there was a distrust towards those dimensions of the self, such as desires, emotions and the imagination, considered to be contrary to morality, social order and economic progress. During this period, educational reformists shared a civilizing 7 purpose: a PAGE 1
The paper deals with John Dewey's democratic concept of school and its international significance. The man of the XX century, John Dewey has made great impact on the development of world pedagogy. The masterwork «Democracy and Education» published in 1916 by American scholar and educational reformer is in the focus of attention too. The main elements of John Dewey's concept of child-oriented school are given along with the following three conditions: «democracy», «growth» and «experience». The author explains the reasons of Dewey's influence on educational thought and practice in the XXth century. The experience of old European countries such as Great Britain, France, Turkey, as well as Japan, Russia and Latin America is touched upon in the paper. It is stressed that cultural interpretations of Dewey's ideas and practices in different countries served as the instrument of modernization of the state and school reform stimulator. John Dewey's democratic ideas brought him international reputation of an outstanding philosopher and the best educator of the XXth century alongside with the other three:
Dewey's Thought on Education and Social Change
the Journal of Thought, 2018
Dewey published his article “Education and Social Change” in 1937. His preoccupation with this issue is a constant theme in his works, which are infused with ideas about the role that education and, most specifically, our school system have in the transformation of society. His thought has had a tremendous influence on the work of later educational philosophers. He believed in a more democratic, just, free, and peaceful world, where civil liberties and human rights are respected. Education’s main goal should be to create individuals who grasp the complexity and broader implications of social issues and who also feel empowered to engage with such issues and prepared to work toward developing real solutions: that is, individuals who fight for a society free of racism, intolerance, discrimination, and xenophobia. My intent is to provide a brief introduction and analysis of his views on these issues, point out specific points of contact with the theories of other educational philosopher...
The school as an arena of political contestation: education policy from a post-Marxist perspective
Praktyka Teoretyczna, 2013
the school as an arena of political contestation: education policy from a post-marxist perspective Marxism was and still seems to be a dominant theoretical perspective within critical education policy analysis. Author describes distinctive "images" of the school present in marxist theory and criticised for their economic determinism and class reductionism. Drawing on the works of Ernesto Laclau, author proposes alternative theoretical frameworks, which can be used in critical research of education policy production and implementation. From this perspective, school and education policy are interpreted as spaces of political contestation and struggle for hegemony.
Sisyphus 8(3), 2020
Dewey's argument for education is predicated on how, as free and intelligent beings, we have the power to develop dispositions. However, in a context where democracy is neutered by anti-politics, reading Dewey now comes with an urgent need to revisit his argument for an experiential and experimental approach towards the world. Revisiting Horkheimer's critique of Dewey, which reveals two opposed notions of instrumentalism, this article argues that unless Dewey is reassessed from the non-identitarian character of his pragmatism, his philosophy of education risks being lost to an alignment with social constructivism. This exposes the Deweyan approach to what Maxine Greene calls a disjunction in the culture between everydayness and reason, where the "integrations" that Dewey achieved with his concentration on experience vanish. Historically framed, this paper draws on Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin's discussion of a democracy that is more akin to a "burning house" than an associated form of living. K E Y W O R D S disposition; instrumentalism; anti-politics; democracy; education; race; the arts. SISYPHUS J O U RN A L O F E DU CA T IO N
The school as an arena of political contestation: towards a post-Marxist account of education
The object of this paper is to lay the foundations for a new critical perspective from which social science can research into education. The critical study of education has been dominated by the use of Marxism as a theoretical base upon which theorists can construct their own images of the school. I aim to show initially how such Marxist images of the school are locked into a problematic dualism in Marxist theory between the necessity of economic determinism and the political contingency of class struggle. I argue that the development of Marxist educational theory since the 1970s reveals the inescapable tendency for theorists to fall back on essentialism and determinism at the expense of analysis of the political-contingent nature of educational space. In response, I propose a moving the analysis of education into a post-Marxist terrain, where concepts in Marxism such as ideology, political struggle and hegemony are rearticulated in an anti-essentialist ontology. This involves recapturing the importance of relations of power and domination from within the historical context of political struggles over education at the discursive level. At this level, education is no longer perceived as an already existing structure of the state which is filled with ideology. The discursive formation of education marks the very constitution of educational structures through the process of hegemonic articulation - the attempts of political actors to determine the meaning and form of “education” through particular political discourses. The paper ends on some important implications for methodology, showing how a post-Marxist perspective can be utilised both in the analysis of education policy articulation, as well as in the ethnographic study of its implementation, subjectification and contestation within the education sphere.
This is a chapter of Popkewitz´s book Inventing the modern self and John Dewey : modernities and the traveling of pragmatism in education. two different appropriations of Dewey's work that ha ve taken place in Mexico. The first can be located in the 1920s and is closely related to a revolutionary atmosphere; the second reading can be placed in the 1970s and is embedded in the increasing visibility of Marxism in Latin America. produce an image of Dewey as an indigenous foreigner based on two theses: His educational ideas are altered in the very process of articulation with local discourses, and in this process they are occupied and colonized thus fabricating a Dewey who is more and less than John Dewey.
OVERVIEW Despite more than a century of intermittent progressive policy rhetoric, schools in Latin America still marginalize the children ofindigenous groups, of rural populations, and of the poor. This paradox of a resilient conservative school practice and progressive education policy rhetoric is explained by conflict among policy elites, first on the priority of educating the children of the poor at high levels more generally and second on the purposes of schooling, and by the ensuing discontinuities in policy and weak implementation of progressive aspirations. Because educational results take time (it takes a while to build new schools, to change curricula and print new books, and for teachers to learn new ways), and because the linkages between policy rhetoric and policy implementation and outcomes also rake time, the conditions in Latin American educational institutions reflect the tensions between two comper-ing education ideologies and the cumulative influences ofpast projects. One ideology, a series of progressive ideas and projects, espoused that schools should build an inclusive and democratic social order, whereas another ideology , a series of conservative ideas and initiatives, saw the purposes of schools as supporting an authoritarian and exclusionary social structure. This chapter examines these time lags, tensions, and coexistence of contradictory ideologies in school practice to explicate why education policy