Can democracy be learned? The election of Donald Trump has reinvigorated debates about the practice and process of democratic governance. It has highlighted the ways in which political behavior and ideologies are rooted in different cultures and geographies, and, in our new Gilded Age, the effects of the increasing polarization of the wealthy few and the 99 percent. These conditions make it an opportune time to reexamine earlier social critics who pointed to an array of institutions to combat political and economic inequality. Pragmatist thinkers, John Dewey foremost among them, considered the electoral process only one facet of a democratic ideal that citizens would need to strive to realize in the economic, social, and cultural realms. “Democracy” described not only a political system, but also an egalitarian “mode of associated living.” Such a way of life did not take place exclusively in the realm of formal politics, but in any instance of communal activity. Most importantly, democracy was a learned disposition: a form of egalitarian human organization that could only emerge if individuals developed the right habits of mind and used their shared intelligence to build inclusive communities of mutual flourishing.

A century after its publication, Democracy and Education remains relevant and influential far beyond its original context. This essay explores the breadth of its relevance through a study of the use of Deweyan methods and ideas at a community high school in a small, impoverished township 50 km outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. Through this example, we learn that the relevance of Dewey's ideas are not limited either to his time or to his place, but instead fit seamlessly in a context as different from Dewey's as we can imagine. In a modern world in which most children outside of the world's wealthiest countries receive an education woefully inadequate for both the professional and civic responsibilities they will face as adults, this successful example begs the question of how modern school systems around the world might become more successful by harkening back to the ideas expressed in Democracy and Education.

Only a few years following the publication of Democracy and Education, from May 1919 to July 1921, John Dewey traveled and lectured in China. He arrived an already famous American psychologist, philosopher, and educator; but over the course of the years after his departure, that fame diminished, turning to infamy in the 1950s and 1960s, only to be somewhat restored in recent decades. The changing attitudes of the Chinese to Dewey and his ideas are associated with the changing, and often tumultuous, cultural and political context for education in China from the time of his visit through the following century. Hu Shi and Tao Xingzhi, PhD students of Dewey at Columbia University, were prominent Chinese educators who adapted Dewey's educational concepts to the Chinese environment, and their work continues to influence educational debate in China today. While there is desire among many contemporary educators for educational reforms that would be in line with Dewey's principles, there are equal or greater pressures for maintaining systems focused on examinations and memorization.

Though John Dewey had considered education and democracy separately in his early career, he came to understand them as essentially linked concepts during his nearly ten-year collaboration with Ella Flagg Young at the University of Chicago. This intellectually gifted women, who eventually became superintendent of Chicago’s schools, connected education and democracy as well as theory and practice, essentially showing Dewey how democratic schools might work. This article briefly traces Dewey’s developing ideas of education and democracy in the context of his relationship with Young.

Exploring John Dewey's hopes for play reveals much about the key role he thought it played in education in a democratic society. Placing Democracy and Education in the context of Progressive Era controversies over play in the kindergarten movement and preschool education illustrates Dewey's view that teacher-guided free play could reconcile the dilemma of the need for individual agency and social discipline. Dewey built upon and critiqued the scripted play pedagogy of kindergarten founder Friedrich Froebel. Drawing in part from progressive kindergarten teachers, Dewey constructed his own notion of play that he argued fostered experiential learning, voluntary participation, and social order. For Dewey, play and work were naturally linked in ways in which the needs of the child and society coalesced. Analysis of sources from the kindergarten movement and the Sub-primary Department at the University of Chicago Laboratory School provide background for interpreting some of Dewey's writings on play, which influenced modern contests over how young children learn and should be taught.

In one of the most significant debates in U.S. intellectual history, John Dewey and Randolph Bourne attempted to redefine the relationship between democracy and war in the midst of World War I. This essay argues that the Dewey-Bourne debate is not just a vital dispute over the United States’ role in the war and the world, but that it also must be seen as a crucial moment for understanding fractures in progressive politics and debates over projects that presume to cultivate an educated citizenry. Focusing on Dewey and Bourne's developing ideas from 1914 through 1918, with an emphasis on concepts evolving in and from Dewey's Democracy and Education and Bourne's cultural criticism, the essay explores their core disagreements about the relationship between education and progressive reform, the role of intellectuals in the state, the consequences of intervention in the war and the use of force, and democratic citizenship in national and international contexts. This essay provides insights into the boundaries and pitfalls of liberal politics in the early twentieth century; it argues that this debate reveals a central ambiguity in Dewey's thought, and shows how wartime expediency and potential for progressive influence derailed aspects of the Deweyan project of democratic education.

As 2016 is the centennial of Dewey's most famous work, Democracy and Education (1916), it is imperative to consider Dewey's role as a public intellectual. In reflection of how he framed his most famous work—as an instrument for helping people think about democratic reform—the authors examined John Dewey's beliefs about the importance of peace as applied to the American view. This essay journals Dewey as an important contributor to the American peace movement in terms of both thought and activity, especially in the post-World War I period. Dewey argued that the responsibility of schools in a democratic society is to teach cooperation and understanding and not simply rely on notions of patriotism and allegiance as often presented in schools. His World War I experience alerted him to the need for transforming schools as seminaries of patriotism into instruments for global understanding. The authors also offered specific examples as to how his instrumentalist philosophy, including his involvement in the Outlawry of War campaign in the 1920s, has been a cornerstone of peace education efforts in the United States over the past one hundred years and what has been their effectiveness.

Democracy and Education was Dewey's magnum opus on education, the work in which he pulled together decades of research and thinking on schooling in a democratic society. It was also the work in which Dewey explicitly and implicitly affirmed his theories on race and cultural development. In this intellectual history, the author argues that Democracy and Education represented a transition in Dewey's thinking on race and culture, away from his previous concerns with psychological-sociological stage theory toward his expanded focus on cultural pluralism as an essential component of democratic life. As a result, Dewey presented a contradictory perspective on race and culture that both depicted nonwhite societies as previous steps in the universal stages of development, but also valued racial and cultural diversity as necessary elements of his theory of cultural pluralism. The juxtaposition of Dewey's pre-1916 concern with genetic stage theories and his post-1916 concern for cultural pluralism created a paradox in his views on race and culture, one with which educators are still struggling today.

In this essay we consider how the principles evident in Dewey's Democracy and Education would have been evident in response to the civil rights movement that took shape shortly after his death, and to the major educational reform movements of today. While acknowledging that Dewey's views on race and human development were inevitably influenced by his social and intellectual context, we maintain that he was fundamentally opposed to racist ideology and related popular beliefs, and that his deep commitment to democracy as a social process would have made him a staunch supporter of the civil rights movement and associated demands for racial equality. We likewise argue that Dewey would have had deep misgivings about the standards-driven assessment regimes that underlie current national reform efforts. In the end we suggest that Democracy and Education still has much to offer students of education today, and can serve as a helpful guide to those who would seek to change educational practice for the better.

Democracy and Education appeared amid intense debate over the relationship between school and work. This debate revealed a stark contrast between Dewey's idea to educate young people to understand the complex relationships of modern industry and the ideas of educators who equated vocational education with training fourteen- to sixteen-year-olds for maximal productivity, a view written into the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917. Whereas Dewey favored integrating vocational education with “a new kind of general education,” his antagonists assailed advocates of the “general” or “academic” curriculum as reactionaries who infected public education with impractical theories that only served those with time and money to indulge their interest in cultural values detached from daily life. Significantly, Dewey did not respond with a defense of theory over practice but with an assertion that his opponents’ thought was permeated by theories, ironically drawn from some of the same sources that influenced mainstream advocates of the “new” education. Understanding how combatants could derive conflicting conclusions from the same sources illuminates the paradoxes and aids in explaining the timing and scope of the Progressive movement.

This essay examines three schools in New York City—the City and Country School founded in 1914—and two founded in 1974 and 1984—Central Park East Elementary School 1 and Central Park East Secondary School—with respect to how they reflected Deweyan pedagogic practices and Dewey's belief in democratic education.1 It analyzes whether such pedagogic practices can be maintained over time. City and Country, founded by Caroline Pratt, reflected many of Dewey's ideas and remains true to its founder's vision today. CPE 1 founded by Deborah Meier with five teachers reflected the progressive ideas of its founder, many of which were consistent with Deweyan philosophy. It remains progressive although there have been recent attempts to make it more traditional. CPESS, founded by Deborah Meier, reflected both Deweyan philosophy and the ideas of Theodore Sizer. After Meier left in the 1990s, the school became less progressive and eventually was closed and then reopened as a traditional high school. These histories indicate that Dewey's work on education was at the core of all of these schools’ philosophies and practices. Although there have been uneven successes in keeping Dewey's progressive practices alive, they demonstrate that Dewey's work is relevant and is being practiced today.