Three Deweyan Ideas for the Age of Diasporas

• In Event: New Ways of Seeing Dewey

Abstract

We live in an era of diasporas - populations involuntarily living away from homelands. The risks generating the diasporas - poverty, war, pandemics, climate destruction - feed off of each other; to produce a new set of challenges.
The United States absorbed such diasporas in the mid 19th to the early 20th centuries. John Dewey, working alongside Jane Addams, advanced educational ideas and practical school programs to ameliorate their problems.
This paper asks whether Dewey’s ideas from that period might be useful today. I survey Dewey’s work and selected three key ideas: the school as a social center, the activity curriculum, and the laboratory method in teacher education. This paper explains these ideas and accounts for their current relevance.

Author

• Leonard J. Waks, Temple University