Dewey’s democratic deficit: education and democracy revisited2

Abstract

This essay is based on the interpretation of Dewey’s texts and part of the specialized secondary literature. It defends the position, not very usual among Dewey specialists, that, rather than the political conception, it is the social and moral conception of democracy that underpins how the American pedagogue thinks the relation between democracy and education. This “moral primacy” stems from the strong heritage that Democracy and Education received from the modern German tradition of Bildung. Although his notion of democratic education does not specifically address democracy or education, the strong influence of that tradition makes it possible to see education as a process of formation through engagement with culture. In this way, the justified link between education and culture not only allows Dewey to understand his theory of education as a theory of socialization, but also provides him with the conceptual tools to treat democracy as a way of life. In summary, by focusing on the moral primacy of the idea of democratic education, the essay allows recovering the “missing link” in Dewey’s intellectual trajectory, which goes unnoticed by most of his interpreters.