Reflections on the ways in which decisions about the foundation and organization of a small progressive public school exemplify the challenges and trade-offs of living in and with democracy. For the Mission Hill School, democracy was not only an aspiration, it was a way of conducting school life so that every community member felt a sense of…

This article details the demise of a small multicultural and democratic school in a large urban district. After a successful 25-year run, a public school built on principles of progressive and democratic education was dismantled and destroyed. The article attempts to expose the contradictions and untruths in the story of Mission Hill School's…

"Because Democracy Is Difficult and Dangerous" is an excerpt from "Woke Is Not Enough: School Reform for Leaders with Justice in Mind" (2022). Each chapter of the book focuses on a domain of school reform relevant to school leadership today: racial justice, democratic governance, restorative justice, student activism, and…

In light of decades of formal denouncement of Deweyan ideas in China and the increasingly authoritarian practices under its current leadership, the recent revival of engagement with Dewey's work among Chinese educators and intellectuals appears extraordinary as well as paradoxical. How is it possible that a project as ardently democratic as…

At a time when there are renewed expressions of concern about how our societies are organised and the health of our democracies, this paper focuses on the role of education in a democracy. Informed by John Dewey's and Martin Buber's accounts of what it is to be educated, and Homi Bhabha's concept of third space work, the paper presents the case…

Recognizing the importance of information literacy in defining the primary focus of library instruction, this paper suggests the potential utility of a complementary principle of information creativity. Employers and educators now increasingly stress creativity's value and teachability; this paper turns to the work of John Dewey to suggest that…

Using data from a case-study school as a springboard, this article explores how enactments of democratic education might both problematise and illuminate new possibilities for the way we conceptualise social justice in education. Nancy Fraser's tripartite framework of social justice is used to analyse in-depth interviews with students aged 14-16…

Two practices in education--community-based learning and deliberative democratic discourse--have been lauded as highly effective in instilling democratic values in students and preparing them to be active citizens. Both practices have the potential to facilitate the formation of publics in the Deweyan understanding--the building block of…

My essay aims to develop my authorial map-account of Martin Duberman's various educational paradigms manifest in his experimental seminars at Princeton University, Hunter College, and Lehman College CUNY, 1966-1971 (and beyond) that I abstracted from his claims about his innovative educational teaching. I tried to develop a terrain of educational…

This paper has as its focus the life and thinking of the educational theorist and schoolmaster J. H. Simpson (1883-1959), who was not only a reforming teacher at Rugby School but was also the first headmaster of the progressive Rendcomb College. His ideas around education were outlined in a number of books. At the heart of his thinking lay…

The American educational system, because it is based in behaviorist rather than progressivist philosophy, has not well-served the development of a citizenry capable of effective participation in the democratic decision-making process, the remedy being the progressivist methods described in the later chapters of Progressive Education for Democratic…

There is a steady line of academic discourse around the topic of controversial issues and how to approach them in and through education. In this line of discourse, discussion is widely seen as a primary method of democratic education that is especially suitable to foster its major educational aims, such as tolerance, reciprocal respect, or…

What does it mean to teach for human dignity? How does one do so? This practical book shows how the leaders at four urban public schools used a process called Descriptive Inquiry to create democratic schools that promote and protect human dignity. The authors argue that teachers must attend to who a child is and find a way to create classrooms…

This article analyses, mingles and blends divergent and complementary strands from the thinking of Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) and Sir Alec Clegg (1909-1986), two contemporaneous but different influential public figures and thinkers in the post-World War Two period. The paper uses these strands to construct a critique of the current colonisation of…

This article engages the question: In what ways and to what extent was William Rainey Harper's founding vision for the R.E.A. shaped by the rhetoric of American imperialism and its legitimation of violence against other nations? Using a historical methodology, this research explores how Harper's originating vision for the R.E.A. grew out of his…