ABSTRACT
John Dewey’s Democracy and Education (the centenary of its publication being celebrated in 2016) has been widely influential in the practice and organisation of education – for good or for ill, depending on who is making the judgment. It was seen, for example, as a positive influence on the primary education by the Plowden Report (1963), but as a negative influence by those who saw its emphasis on a more child-centred approach to undermine the main purpose of education. The paper, therefore, endeavours to identify the key philosophical issues at the heart of the disagreement by analysing the defining aspects of what Dewey and others referred to as his philosophy of ‘pragmatism’ – in particular, the false dualisms between ‘child-centred’ and ‘traditional’ education, the significance of experiential and practical knowledge, the nature of knowledge, truth and enquiry, and the essentially social and democratic context of educational development.
