John Dewey and the Paradox of Liberal Reform
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Description
This book provides a fresh critique of John Dewey and the progressive tradition and warns against the superficial renaissance of Deweyan philosophy present in many of today's modern liberal educational reform movements. Challenging the four pillars of Dewey's pragmatism — science, nature, democracy, experience — Paringer argues for a critical or radical education praxis that more sensitively comes to grips with the difficulties of the nuclearized, postmodern world.
William Andrew Paringer teaches Philosophy and Educational Theory at the CUNY College of Staten Island and at Montclair State College.
Reviews
"Paringer's critique of Dewey's key concepts of democracy, science, nature, and experience are genuinely fresh and insightful. There is power in his call for a radical structural analysis to show the limitations of Dewey's theory of democracy, and the need to supplement or replace it with the concept of social justice." — Arthur G. Wirth, Washington University
"This work makes Dewey accessible to a new generation. Dewey finally gets demystified here when his central conceptions are explored against a set of 1980s social theory concerns." — William D. Taylor, The Ohio State University