ABSTRACT
The problem is that diversity important enough to be worth protecting involves expressions of beliefs and patterns of behavior unsettling enough to invite suspicion, intolerance, even suppression, if steps are not actively taken to avoid such outcomes. Non-reciprocal behavior is anti-social, as when the more powerful use others without regard to their emotional or intellectual dispositions and without their consent. This chapter explores how the interests of life and the studies stemming from them can enrich our common experiences instead of dividing the people from one another. Education in a democracy so conceived substitutes ends-in-view for external ends imposed by authority, whether that authority resides in efforts to consolidate already existing power arrangements in contemporary society or to impose traditional ends developed in rigidly hierarchical societies of the past. Addams consciously and continuously seeks to empower the more marginalized members of society to actively engage in such social reconstruction. Memories selectively retain the accumulated values of past experiences.
