engleski

Möglichkeiten des Umdenkens Dewey-Bildungs-Prozess als einen Weg zur deliberativen Demokratie

John Dewey has been seen as a source of inspiration for notions of deliberative democracy, especially in works of contemporary philosophers. The roots of this claim start with Dewey responding to Sir Henry Maine’s (1822-1888) Popular Government in an essay »The Ethics of Democracy«. But we can find Dewey’s influence for development of theory of deliberation democracy in his other political works: The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry (1927), Old and New (1930), Liberalism and Social Action (1935), and Freedom and Culture (1939), but also in other, not only political, books, like Democracy and Education: an introduction to the philosophy of education (1916) and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938). The aim of this paper is to show how Dewey’s educational process theory can be taken as a way to deliberative democracy. His work in ethics, education and politics is an entity, which means it is fully comprehensible only if we are familiar with all its parts. In Democracy and Education Dewey claims: »Men have long had some intimation of the extent to which education may be consciously used to eliminate obvious social evils through starting the young on paths which shall not produce these ills, and some idea of the extent in which education may be made an instrument of realizing the better hopes of men. But we are doubtless far from realizing the potential efficacy of education as a constructive agency of improving society, from realizing that it represents not only a development of children and youth but also of the future society of which they will be the constituents.« (Dewey, 2011: 54) It is interesting how this viewpoint of Dewey’s theory highlights that schools should contribute to the development of democracy by raising interest in pupils about the societal questions and by focusing on how to make it possible for everyone to understand this kind of issues. It is this viewpoint that we have to have as a guiding principle for understanding Dewey’s concept of »community of inquiry«. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) is the creator of the concept »community of inquiry«, but we can say that participatory democracy, even deliberative democracy is a vital component of the community of inquiry developed by John Dewey and Jane Addams (1860-1935).

deliberative democracy; community of Inquiry; John Dewey; education

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