Education’s Hope: Transcending the Tragic with Emerson, Dewey, and Cavell

Abstract

Education today is so often tied up with images of gaining and rising that it is oblivious to the sense of loss that young people suffer in schools. In response to this tragic condition, this paper attempts to reexamine the potential of John Dewey's pragmatism in the light of Emersonian moral perfectionism, an idea of perfection without final perfectibility. In its middle way of living beyond the dichotomous choice between no ground and an absolute ground, Deweyan pragmatism with Emersonian perfectionism point us to education's hope, a hope that is geared towards remembering and releasing the intensity of living.