Introduction: John Dewey’s Legacy for Philosophy of Education

It is my pleasure to introduce this special issue of Philosophical Inquiry in Education on John Dewey’s Legacy for Philosophy of Education. The articles in this issue provide six different and complementary perspectives on Dewey’s philosophy of education and its contemporary relevance. Each of these papers originated as contributions to the inaugural conference celebrating the reopening of the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, held in October 2023 on John Dewey and His Legacy for Education. These papers represent only a small selection of the variety of work presented at that conference, of particular interest to the readers of this journal and the members of the Society that it serves. John Dewey began publishing on education almost 140 years ago, and he died more than 70 years ago; nevertheless, in many respects his philosophy of education is as fresh today as it was during his lifetime. Dewey places schooling in a wider political context; in a time where schools are a particularly fraught focus of political contestation, his thinking offers us crucial insights and resources for a thoroughly democratic approach to education. Dewey also places the student into a wider moral context; to the perennial questions about what kind of students our schools shall produce, Dewey gives us power tools for conceiving the role of education in forming students’ moral and intellectual character. In a time where philosophy of education is sometimes seen as a secondary, applied field in philosophy, Dewey shows us both that philosophy as such is a general theory of education, and also that philosophy of education is deeply intwined with our philosophical understanding of religion, nature, art, ethics, and politics. The contributions to this special issue orient us towards all these insights of Dewey’s, with an eye on our current needs and problems. We begin with Sarah Stitzlein, past president of the John Dewey Society, on “Teaching Controversial Issues in a Populist and Post-Truth Context.” Stitzlein recommends a Deweyan pragmatist, inquiry-based pedagogical approach to teaching controversial, potentially divisive issues. In our contemporary political context, fraught with populism and “post-truth” concerns, this approach promises to create more effective, deliberative classroom discussion than traditional approaches to teaching controversial topics. Ryan Brooks and Laura Mueller continue the critical discussion of education and politics in “Democracy, Human Capital, and the Neoliberal Arts.” They argue that current attempts to defend the value of the liberal arts and to institute diversity, equity, and inclusion falter, due to the context of the neoliberal university; despite their seeming Deweyan spirit, they reproduce the very logic of the problems to which they are supposed to respond. Another look at Dewey’s theories of democracy, growth, and waste through an institutional lens allows them to provide a deeper critique of the neoliberal university that could foster more productive changes. Guy Axtell, in “A Deweyan Critique of the Critical Thinking versus Character Education Debate,” gets at the contribution of Deweyan pragmatism to philosophy of education by using it to critically assess the debate over whether education should aim to teach critical thinking skills or inculcate intellectual virtues. Axtell shows that Dewey provides resources for a nuanced take on this debate that shows we need not an either-or debate but rather a both-and (with caveats) integration of approaches. What’s more, Axtell shows how Deweyan pedagogy must embrace rather than avoid political contestation of the content of critical thinking and intellectual virtue. In “Education as Morals in Dewey's Philosophy,” Robin Friedman provides a synoptic reading of the relation of education and morals through more than two decades of Dewey’s thinking, from Democracy and Education (1916) …