John Dewey and the Paradox of Liberal Reform

By William Andrew Paringer

Subjects: Philosophy Of Education, Education
Series: SUNY series, Global Conflict and Peace Education
Paperback : 9780791402542, 215 pages, July 1990
Hardcover : 9780791402535, 215 pages, July 1990

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Table of contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword
Betty Reardon

Preface

Introduction: Problem and Crisis

 

Reform and Schooling
Nuclearization
Ideology
Towards Social Justice
Educational Praxis

 

Part I. The Scientific and the Transformational

 

Democracy
Pragmatism
Individualism
Democracy and Education
Scientific
Ideology Critique or Educative Method
Social Justice

 

Part II: The Natural and the Historical

 

Nature and the Natural
The Functional
Development
Progressivism
History

 

Part III: The Personal and the Political

 

Experience
Praxis

 

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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