Dewey’s Democracy and Education in the age of digital reason: the global, ecological and digital turns

Abstract

Dewey was perhaps the foremost theorist and advocate of participatory democracy as an ethical ideal based on a belief and faith in human experience as a general theory of education that would generate the requisite aims and methods for what he called ‘organized intelligence’ and what we might call today ‘collective intelligence’–that is, as he says, ‘faith in democracy is all one with faith in experience and education’. In this paper we revisit Dewey’s Democracy and Education. An introduction to the philosophy of education (1916/2001) in order to evaluate the growth and development of democracy against the decline of social democracy in the West. We identify the three turns which separate democracy of Dewey’s times and democracy of today–the global, the ecological, and the digital turn–and relate them to changing notions of citizenship. We analyse complex interplay between the turns, and show that they cannot be understood and / or analysed in separation. While the identified turns have indeed significantly changed circumstances in which Dewey produced his understanding of democracy, we conclude that his work still carries a lot of value and call for its reinvention in and for the age of digital reason.