ABSTRACT
For the philosopher John Dewey, education is the means to the social continuity of life. In this, persons of older and younger generations play their part, both varying in what they bring to it and contributing to the conditions of common life from which further variation arises. For this combination of commoning and variation, I introduce the term ‘correspondence’. Dominant models of pedagogy, however, rest on a genealogical model of information transmission that separates the acquisition of knowledge from its application in practice. In this chapter I argue against the idea of transmission, showing how it continues to reproduce a dichotomy between reason and inheritance which places scientists, people of Culture and adults on one side and bearers of traditional knowledge, people in cultures and children on the other. With Dewey, I argue that the place to find education is not in pedagogy but in participatory practice, in the correspondences of social life.
