NCTE cited financial difficulties, declining participation, and governance problems. These concerns appear to have been genuine, but CCCC responded to them. Its leaders proposed several new sources of revenue. When these were rejected, they proposed substantial spending cuts. Just before the dissolution, CCCC presented a budget that its leadership said closed the deficit. NCTE dissolved the organization anyway. There was also another problem. CCCC members had been pressing their organization to make a statement on Gaza. This came after NCTE had already experienced a bitter dispute when another constituent body issued a statement on Palestine that NCTE leadership withdrew. Then, shortly before CCCC was dissolved, one of its officers reports being told that the “culture” of CCCC threatened NCTE’s nonprofit status.

We do not need a confession from NCTE that Gaza caused the dissolution to see the institutional problem. An active group within CCCC wanted to use the organization to address Gaza, although CCCC’s own mission concerned composition, communication, writing, and literacy. Meanwhile, NCTE—not CCCC—bore the legal, financial, donor, and political risks of actions taken under its organizational umbrella. NCTE leadership had a fiduciary responsibility to notice this. It also had a powerful response available. NCTE could have said: Fix your finances and governance. Address generative AI as vigorously as you wish, since AI bears directly upon writing and the teaching of writing. But Gaza does not. NCTE is an organization of English teachers, not an organization for Middle East politics. If CCCC cannot respect that boundary, NCTE cannot continue to charter it.

That would have stated a principle that American academic life badly needs to recover. Consider the March of Dimes. Its officers and members undoubtedly have political opinions, and perhaps nearly all of them agree about some important political questions, perhaps the importance of a strong public health infrastructure. Yet we do not expect the March of Dimes to announce a position on Gaza. The reason is simple: that is not what the March of Dimes is for. Academics likewise remain citizens. They can write, march, organize, petition, vote, demonstrate, lobby, and create political organizations. None of this implies that every institution to which they belong should become a vehicle for their political commitments.

The distinction becomes clearer if we compare two organizations I know well: the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy and the John Dewey Society. SAAP exists to advance American philosophy. Its members study Peirce, James, Dewey, Royce, and many other American thinkers. Their scholarship inevitably intersects with democracy, race, religion, education, justice, and public life. SAAP should encourage such inquiry, organize sessions around it, and publish the resulting scholarship. But it does not follow that SAAP itself should become a general political actor. The John Dewey Society presents a revealing contrast. Many JDS members are also SAAP members, and JDS even holds sessions within SAAP meetings. The same people can therefore inhabit both organizations, sometimes at the same conference. The difference lies not in the people but in the mission.

JDS was created roughly ninety years ago in a political and cultural environment that bears uncomfortable similarities to our own. Its founders confronted growing anti-democratic and neo-fascist currents in American education and culture. They created an organization committed to using reasoned inquiry to address pressing public problems. Public engagement was therefore not subsequently grafted onto JDS; it was there from the beginning. JDS has since developed a substantial academic mission as well. It promotes Dewey scholarship and provides an intellectual community for scholars, while the two functions coexist comfortably. Ninety years after its founding, the Society remains active and financially healthy. This example answers one of the standard defenses of academic cultural politics. What should scholars do when they believe an urgent public problem requires collective action? They should organize. The alternative to capturing an existing academic institution is not hypothetical. American scholars faced that problem ninety years ago and created the John Dewey Society.

This brings us to the deeper problem with cultural politics inside academic organizations. It performs a kind of robbery. An academic or professional organization accumulates cultural authority slowly. Scholars produce excellent work, teachers improve professional practice, journals establish reputations, conferences become respected, and generations of members contribute time and money. Gradually the organization acquires prestige and influence. No temporary group of officers or activists created this stock of authority. They inherited it. When they use that authority for purposes unrelated to the institution’s mission, they are spending cultural capital accumulated by other people for another purpose.

Imagine that some members want to intervene politically on Gaza. They could issue a statement under their own names. They could create Scholars for Gaza, Scholars for Israel, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, or whatever organization expresses their purposes. They could recruit members, raise money, establish publications, and earn public standing. But that requires work. NCTE already possesses members, staff, publications, communications networks, a recognized name, and decades of accumulated cultural authority. A statement beginning “The National Council of Teachers of English declares...” therefore carries weight that a statement signed by twenty-seven English professors does not. That difference is precisely the temptation.

Institutional capture allows activists to acquire authority they did not create and use it for a purpose for which it was not accumulated.

It does not answer this objection to say that most members agree with them. Perhaps most NCTE members have generally liberal political and social views. Perhaps on some question they are nearly unanimous. Suppose every member of the March of Dimes agreed about Gaza. Gaza would still not become the business of the March of Dimes. The issue is not principally representation. It is jurisdiction: for what purpose was this institution created, for what purposes did it acquire its authority, and who is entitled to spend that authority? Creating a new organization forces its advocates to answer those questions openly. It also forces them to discover whether thirty thousand people actually want to join them or only thirty.

The John Dewey Society again provides the counterexample. Its founders did the work. They created an institution for public engagement, attracted people who wished to participate in that mission, established meetings and publications, and accumulated resources. Over ninety years, JDS acquired whatever cultural authority it now possesses through doing the work for which it was constituted. It did not borrow another organization’s name or prestige. It did not convert scholarly authority accumulated for one purpose into political authority for another. JDS did not rob an existing institution of cultural authority. It earned its own.

For several decades, the costs of academic cultural politics were easy to overlook. The prevailing winds within universities, foundations, professional organizations, and much of the surrounding culture blew in roughly the same direction. Political mission creep could therefore appear nearly costless and could even seem to strengthen an organization. The tailwinds concealed the loss. Worse, those who warned about institutional mission were often unable to get a hearing. An institutional objection was routinely converted into a substantive political objection: “Our professional association should not take a position on X” became “You oppose X.” Concerns about institutional authority, mission creep, or political risk were therefore often met not merely with disagreement but with hostility. Political expansion strengthened the people and institutional norms favoring further expansion, while the absence of successful opposition could then be mistaken for consensus.

But political winds change, and nothing in democratic politics is more predictable. The winds have now reversed with extraordinary force. Political leaders openly attack universities and the humanities. Humanities programs are being closed. New College of Florida has been radically reconstructed through direct political intervention. In Texas, political control has reached into the teaching of Plato’s Symposium. These interventions can be outrageous, and some are direct attacks upon academic freedom. Some of the people carrying them out plainly regard universities as enemies precisely because universities retain some capacity to resist political power. But the academy has also helped create its own vulnerability.

For generations, universities asked society for extraordinary protections: tenure, academic freedom, institutional autonomy, public subsidy, and substantial deference to scholarly expertise. Those protections rested partly upon an implicit bargain. Universities were institutions of inquiry. Their independence from immediate political power mattered because inquiry sometimes has to challenge political power. When universities and academic associations become political actors themselves, that distinction becomes harder to defend. Their political opponents can ask why organizations participating in political struggle should remain insulated from political struggle directed against them. The argument may be cynical, and those making it may themselves be attacking institutions precisely because they remain capable of independent criticism. The vulnerability they exploit is nevertheless real.

This reveals the deepest problem with the robbery of cultural authority. The stolen asset is consumed in its use. Academic institutions accumulated authority because people believed they produced knowledge, preserved culture, educated students, and provided spaces for serious inquiry. When institutional authority is repeatedly spent on cultural politics, outsiders gradually cease distinguishing the institution’s scholarly authority from its political commitments. The university becomes another political actor, and eventually the bill arrives. This is particularly tragic because the academy has problems quite apart from politics. The quantity of academic publication has exploded. Much of it is mediocre and much is unreadable. The best scholarship remains superb, but it increasingly exists within an enormous sea of work that adds little to knowledge or public culture.

Cultural politics compounds this problem. A work can acquire apparent importance because it addresses oppression, marginalization, exclusion, privilege, or some other politically charged category, even when its intellectual contribution is slight. Moral importance can begin substituting for scholarly importance. The result is an institution weakened from both directions. Its intellectual product commands less respect, while its political behavior makes its claims to institutional independence less credible. Then an aggressively hostile political movement arrives. At precisely the moment when the academy most needs cultural authority to protect its independence, it discovers how much of that authority it has already spent.

That returns us to CCCC. Generative AI threatens the practice around which CCCC was built. A student can now submit polished prose without having learned to construct the argument, organize the material, formulate the sentences, or revise the thought. The finished product can improve while the writer deteriorates. We urgently need composition scholars working on this problem. We need experiments, scholarship, new pedagogies, professional standards, and institutional advocacy. We need an organization with decades of accumulated experience devoted precisely to writing and the teaching of writing. We had one, and it lasted seventy-seven years. Now it is gone.

As political mission creep played an important part in the conflict that destroyed CCCC, the irony is nearly perfect. An organization accumulated cultural authority by serving the teaching of writing. Members increasingly wanted to spend some of that authority on general cultural politics. The resulting risks became part of an institutional conflict with the parent organization that actually bore those risks. Then the professional organization disappeared at exactly the moment when its original mission became extraordinarily important.

The answer is not to silence academics, make professors politically passive, or surrender universities to politicians. It is to restore a division of institutional labor. Let NCTE advance the teaching of English. Let composition scholars confront AI. Let SAAP advance American philosophy. Let universities protect scholarship, inquiry, and formation. When academics believe political and cultural circumstances demand organized public intervention, let them organize for it, just as scholars confronting a dangerous political culture created the John Dewey Society ninety years ago.

The Author is a former president of the John Dewey Society and recipient of the Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He actively opposes Israel’s war on Gaza.

AI DISCLAIMER: The Author has used generative AI tools as an editorial assistant to write this essay. All thoughts and ideas are his own.

*Cover Art: from C.S. Muncy for The New York Times: Professors in Trouble Over Protests Wonder if Academic Freedom Is Dying

These circumstances suggest a need to engage the underlying arguments for embracing democracy as a social and political form. Dewey’s reasoning in this domain—though limited in its ways and now dated in others—remains unparalleled in its depth, breadth, and coherence. Dewey also devoted himself, over his long career, to developing the implications of his claims for social and political life. As Deweyans, we need to learn, each in our own way, how to bring these arguments home.

In my most recent essay, I viewed Dewey’s entire project through the lens of a single tension: the choice between neglecting, using, and/or dominating some collection of others and that of interesting oneself in and caring about all others across differences we find challenging. As Dewey faithfully insisted, democracy as an ideal relies upon our interest in and concern for others: this universalist impetus is integral to the form.

As Dewey also discussed, such tensions surface in our lives in complicated ways. Relatively few of us move steadfastly in one of these directions to the exclusion of the other. Even those of us who are committed to attending to and caring for others will find ourselves extending ourselves more generously in certain types of situations than others based on a mix of personal and circumstantial factors, including our assumptions about those involved.

And yet, each of us tends to incline, as we develop, toward opening ourselves up to the unfamiliar challenges and uncomfortable concerns others may present or toward closing ourselves down to them, and this inclination takes on a defining role in our lives. As Dewey emphasized, it also shapes the character of the local communities in which we participate and the societies in which we live.

Dewey’s basic argument is that democratic social and political relations enable people to grow in every way that matters: they learn more about themselves and the world than they otherwise would and become more interesting and capable versions of themselves. This results from taking on the kinds of challenges that democracy presents within the supportive context that democracy provides.

As Dewey and many others since have argued, if we want to foster this quality of relations in our society, we need to do so within our school communities—within our classrooms, within our practitioner forums, and during our school board meetings. We need, as a society, to provide the kinds of structured and supportive social conditions that encourage all of us to grapple constructively with our differences.

For a long time, my guiding aim has been to get to the heart of Dewey’s project, to be able to talk about it in terms that would make sense to anybody. Originally, I just wanted to understand myself and then also be able to explain how schools could nurture students’ creative thinking while also immersing them in their inherited cultural understandings and practices.

Then, I also wanted to be able to offer a compelling set of counter proposals to those who find a need for the technocratic accountability systems that are increasingly structuring, even scripting, classroom life, thereby draining it of the spontaneity and situated responsiveness that keep things real and enable creative thought.

At this point, I am primarily focused on helping in whatever way I might to oppose and defeat the antidemocratic forces working to dominate our society. With Dewey, I view our ongoing struggle to provide practitioners (once again) with the time and resources to reflect and work collaboratively on the challenges that matter most to our society—and to their specific students—as one essential front in this larger fight. Learning how to think, being given time to think for yourself and with others, are among democracy’s greatest returns.

Though as scholars we have learned to speak in complicated ways about matters that are, certainly, complicated, we now need to learn to speak simply and powerfully of what we have come to understand, starting with the commitments that are organizing our work. Then, too, we need to connect those commitments to the practices we want to see in our schools. Finally, and as Dewey also argued, we need to be able to demonstrate the power of those practices to engage and excite our students and to construct inclusive and meaningful social and intellectual worlds.

We who have studied the philosophy and psychology and sociology of education, who have studied human development in its interrelated dimensions, simply must find ways to interest our fellow citizens in the messy, unpredictable, and profoundly sustaining project of educating for democracy. As the commitment to attending to and caring about unfamiliar others remains nonnegotiable in a democratic society, we need to provide all our young people with opportunities to experience the returns on leaning in that direction.

What Would John Dewey Do (WWJDD)?

Let me start with John Dewey himself. One might argue that Dewey is an exemplar of public philosophy. In addition to his extensive philosophical corpus, he also wrote for and spoke in public outlets about pressing issues. He even took action on an array of political issues, including backing the contentious Pullman railroad strike and breaking with many of his progressive allies to support the nation’s entry into World War I. Many philosophers interested in doing public philosophy today follow Dewey in their endeavors, some using his as a guide or model.

Embracing the Deweyan, problem-solving orientation, some philosophers doing public philosophy frame their work around the question, “What should we do?” This question acknowledges the deliberative nature of political issues, where citizens often need to understand them, discuss them, and then do something about them. Asking “What should we do?” invites citizens to reason and deliberate together, making the philosopher not an expert to be revered, but rather a helpful interlocutor.

There are so many examples where citizens are asking this question about pressing political and education issues, such as what we should do book bans, AI usage in schools, student protests, and declining support for public education. Public philosophers don’t just offer opinions, they illuminate the values and assumptions at stake and help citizens figure out what they should do.

Writing for Public Audiences

Public philosophers wade into the political fray, shedding light on how the political process works and seeking to guide it in defensible ways. Extending their audience beyond merely other scholars, public philosophers aim to help policymakers, educators, and citizens better understand those issues and problems, including their moral and political underpinnings. Public philosophers can clarify values and ideologies, including those operating behind popular political slogans or talking points. This informs the public and prepares them to take various forms of action, from voting to protest.

This work represents a way of doing “situated philosophy,” philosophy embedded in real-world contexts and responsive to the complexities of lived experience. It is to do so for, in, and often, with the public, rather than primarily other philosophers in the ivory tower. Public philosophers undertaking this work often don’t merely aim to push out their views for public consumption in public spaces, but rather seek to work alongside the public in discussion as they work through shared problems together.

Across an array of platforms, including Substack, public philosophers avoid jargon, translate complex ideas into accessible language, and use narrative to connect with audiences. Their goal is not to simplify, but to clarify—to make philosophical insights understandable, meaningful, and useful in public life. Though the Substack does not enable immediate and direct dialogue, public philosophers sometimes invite the audience into conversation, including through notes in response to our Substack posts.

In an era of suspicion of out-of-touch elites, we are reminded that genuine dialogue requires more than just good communication; it requires intellectual humility, a willingness to listen, and a tone that invites participation. The public is more likely to engage with ideas if they feel the philosopher is making a good faith effort to connect with them, including an openness to learning from them and not preaching at them.

One effective strategy is to tell stories of personal experiences to help convey sincerity and build trust. Acknowledging uncertainty of the limits of one’s knowledge can also help connect with the audience. This differs considerably from the norms of academic philosophy, where authority is often asserted through rigorous argumentation and quick rebuttals. Such a style may be counterproductive to connecting with audiences who experience those practices as arrogant or off-putting.

From Critique to Hope

Public philosophers often employ forms of skepticism and criticism that are trademarks of philosophers. These traits may be perceived as unhelpful or even condescending by non-academics. Public philosophers have to balance their critical bent with hopefulness. This means not only generating dissent, but also guiding it through to solution posing.

This sort of solution- and hope-building work employs storytelling. In this regard, though, stories are not merely rhetorical hooks to attract the reader or ways to build rapport with the audience. Instead, public philosophers tell new stories about how our world can be better.

Following Dewey, public philosophers have a responsibility to assess our ideas in the realm of experience to see if they actually work and enable people and communities to flourish. This means being willing to revise or abandon ideas that don’t work, and to value being “usefully wrong” as part of the process (a phrase I borrow from former JDS President, Barb Stengel).

I’ll close on a personal note. It can be rewarding for public philosophers to see their ideas taken up by wider audiences beyond academia, influencing real policy, practice, and political life. At the same time, it can be frustrating when the visions held for public life may be far from reality today. Yet, doing such public philosophy may be one way to channel those frustrations and act on them, rather than allowing them to fester into cynicism. Doing it in a public setting, like the Substack, can be an affirming way to connect with other concerned citizens.

Join the Conversation

Interested in learning more about this approach? Join us in Montreal for the discussion about our Substack at our annual conference on August 10, or check out a longer version of this post and others about doing public philosophy in Public Humanities.

What aspects of democracy or education keep you up at night? What issue to you wish the public could understand differently? Write about it. Join JDS and share it with us.

*Cover image Socrates teaching Perikles courtesy of Nicolas Guibal

As a scholar of Deweyan philosophy, I’ve noticed that the “we” in this question is both precious and precarious. Polarization increasingly urges us to draw tighter boundaries around who counts in that “we.” It limits our Great Community by leading us to push out those we distrust and circle the wagons around those we see as likeminded. Recently, the “we” has become even more contentious, as debates around immigration further delimit who is included and who is excluded in our country. Heading Dewey’s call that democracy must be remade anew with each generation, I offer an approach I call “courageous citizenship” as a path forward. A closer look at the efforts of Braver Angels reveals that courageous citizenship entails rebuilding a Great Community, a “we,” through civic humility, agency, and solidarity—a valuable lesson for all of us, not just those participating in the convention.

Courageous citizenship requires Deweyan-aligned democratic habits: the humility of acknowledging our limits, the agency of acting with others, and the solidarity of crafting a shared vision. Our polarized context makes us quick to assert our certainty, often by staking out positions that signal our alignment with our political tribe. It takes courage to do the hard thing of choosing otherwise. Rather than doubling down on our tribal loyalties, we must intentionally seek out the views of others, distribute the work of solving our shared problems, and build connections across differences. Rather than merely scoring points for our political team, we must take up the more difficult effort of crafting solutions that enable all of us to flourish. Here, I offer the Braver Angels Citizens Commission on Immigration as a compelling example of how some Americans are doing so.

Civil vs Civic Citizenship

When we talk about citizenship, we often refer to its civil elements, emphasizing one’s legal status. This understanding of citizenship is fundamental. But, drawing on the work of political theorist James Tully, there is another dimension that is worthy of attention: the civic element of citizenship, what we actually do together to shoulder the responsibilities of our republic. Civic citizenship compels us to volunteer in our communities, to attend public meetings to inform ourselves about issues, to testify at hearings, to take to the streets in protest, or to undertake work of many kinds, paid and unpaid, with public impact. Aligned with Dewey’s vision, civic citizenship embodies democracy as a way of life.

In our polarized era, we must develop our civic muscle as citizens, rather than rely only on legal architecture. Statues and documents may grant rights, but our practices determine whether we hold together by creating trust and building relationships. Emphasizing civic action may carry us through some of the challenges we currently face in our democracy.

We must affirm or revise rules governing civil citizenship as part of our debates over immigration as we craft immigration policies that are just. The Braver Angels Citizens Commission on Immigration has been doing this sort of work. It doesn’t adjudicate legal status, but it does bring people together to act as citizens.

Courageous Citizenship in Action

Let’s look more closely at the Braver Angels Citizens Commission on Immigration. The Commission brings together a balanced Red/Blue audience in a transparent and replicable structured deliberation to ask, “What should we do about immigration?” Participants share their experiences, values, and desires, and identify points of agreement.

Workshop groups are small and conversations are prolonged and often quite personal. They begin with sharing stories, then move toward identifying the beliefs, concerns, and policies on which participants can agree. Ideas that emerge from those conversations, as well as from immigration experts, are compiled to identify patterns of convergence. Some groups speak directly with members of Congress.

Notably, in the next step of the process, members of a roundtable will refine ideas citizens produce and test them to see if they are feasible policy solutions. They build new policies upward and outward, rather than pushing them downward from a handful of experts. Ultimately, a Report to the Nation will synthesize the suggestions and findings to provide policy guidance.

The Commission demonstrates three key components of courageous citizenship:

• Civic humility: acknowledging that, as individual citizens, we do not know all there is to know about immigration and that we can learn from others whose experiences with immigration may differ from our own.

• Civic agency: recognizing that responsibility for addressing shared problems should be widely distributed rather than limited only to policymakers or experts.

• Civic solidarity: establishing a fair and just “we” requires reimagining an American community, including its norms of membership and participation, and committing to stewarding it.

Civic Humility

Using humility, commission participants acknowledge their own partial knowledge and seek fuller and more accurate understanding together. Philosophers and political scientists have demonstrated that polarization makes us quick to assert certainty. But, employing the Braver Angels Way, humility commits participants to listening carefully, seeking to understand before reaching a conclusion. It starts with narratives, not theses, thereby grounding proposals in lived experience and expressions of values. Rather than trying to defend our political tribe or worldview, humility pushes us to question and challenge our own views as well as those of others. It’s a willingness to learn publicly from and with others. For Dewey, civic humility supports democratic social inquiry.

Civic Agency

Flexing their civic agency, Commission participants move beyond merely voicing personal views to working together to build viable solutions. Humility and listening clear the ground for civic agency because, when people feel heard and valued, they are more willing to act alongside those with whom they disagree. These serve as an antidote to worrisome findings from the World Values Survey showing that citizens are increasingly cynical about democracy and less hopeful that they can influence public policy. Civic agency recognizes that power is distributed amongst participants and does not merely reside with experts or elected officials. One participant at the southwest Ohio workshop summarized steps that build agency and move into solidarity by saying, “I think that workshops like this and groups like this, every one of us is going to go home and talk to his family. And then it’s going to get passed on from one person to the other, to a friend, to a neighbor. And this is how you start change.”

Civic Solidarity

Finally, participants build civic solidarity as they treat each other as partners aligned around a common mission, rather than as political enemies to be defeated. The Commission fulfills the four conditions necessary for successful interaction: all participants have equal status, their work is directed around a common goal, success depends on collaboration, and institutional authorities support the endeavor. Solidarity is not, however, unanimity that erases differences. In pragmatist spirit, it seeks to stabilize collaboration with a durable pluralism. Humility and civic agency help us see our previous opponents as co-authors of solutions. We become more willing to constructively imagine what could be together, all the while developing trust. Partnership may then become not just tactical for developing a particular solution to one problem, but worthy of commitment to carry out the proposed solution together, facing ongoing disagreement, and accepting shared responsibility as new issues arise.

The Courage to Redefine Ourselves

Citizenship is not only a status we possess, but is also something that we practice. Courageous citizenship is bolstered by civic humility, agency, and solidarity. Civic humility enables us to learn from and with each other. Civic agency empowers us to act together. Civic solidarity positions us to matter together—to not only influence public policies or practices, but also to experience life together as a “we.”

Courageous citizenship is not mere politeness, simple agreement, or avoiding conflict. It is taking up the difficult challenge of doing democracy even when disagreement is deep. Models like the Commission facilitate courageous citizenship that can be emulated in an array of other settings. They affirm that “we” can redefine ourselves, solve significant problems, and build a Great Community together.

As we at the JDS Democracy Initiative are ourselves looking to think and communicate more broadly about how what we know can inform the challenges of our time, we took an interest in this project and asked about sharing news of it on our Substack. The project’s editors, John Capps and Albert “Randy” Spencer, agreed and suggested that we might introduce their efforts with an interview of them, which follows below.

Democracy Initiative: Can you say a few words about how you view the relationship between Deweyan pragmatism and American philosophy?

Randy Spencer: Lately, I think of Dewey as the nexus of what became pragmatism because he combined the theoretical insights of the Harvard Pragmatists, i.e., Peirce & James, with the social analysis of the Chicago Pragmatists, i.e., Addams & Mead, and systematized it by applying the mixture to the traditional branches of philosophy: metaphysics (e.g., Experience & Nature), epistemology (e.g., The Quest for Certainty), ethics (e.g., Human Nature & Conduct) and more. It is in Dewey’s work that we find all of the key themes of pragmatism established and developed.

Pragmatism’s relationship to American philosophy in general is more complicated, given that it is a young tradition within the over twenty thousand year history of thought in the Americas. However, because of its deep commitments to fallibilism, pluralism, and meliorism it increasingly serves as a gathering space for a broader dialogue with other American philosophies, from ones preserved and reconstructed by Indigenous thinkers, like Vine Deloria, Jr. & V.F. Cordova, to philosophies born of struggle by Black theorists, like W.E.B. DuBois & Alain Locke, to those developed by Latinx philosophers in the United States and other settler-colonial nations, like Gloria Anzaldua & Enrique Dussel. Why even the traditions of Anglo-American Analytic philosophy enter the discussions through figures like Wilfrid Sellars & W.V.O. Quine, as well as Continental traditions like the Frankfurt School and sociological thinkers, like Michel Foucault.

I honestly cannot think of any other contemporary professional philosophical tradition with this much genuine curiosity and openness to such a wide variety of perspectives. The pragmatists sincerely see philosophy not as an attempt to discover truth through an antagonistic competitive process, but as an opportunity to learn from others in the hopes of creating a better world through collaboration. The best proof of this is either from one glance at any program from an Annual Meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy or by reading the interviews in this series. There are so many paths that lead to pragmatism, its global relevance continues to increase, and Dewey provides an excellent introduction.

Democracy Initiative: What first moved you to undertake this effort? Who were you hoping would read these interviews?

John Capps: We’re big fans of the American philosophical tradition. Back in 2020, I was also a fan of the interviews Cliff Sosis was posting at What Is It Like to Be A Philosopher? and the interviews Richard Marshall had been doing at 3:AM Magazine (now here).

So I had two ideas: first, to do interviews with people working in the American philosophical tradition and, second, to keep the interviews short and with the same questions every time. I thought this would make the interviews easier to do, so we could post them frequently, and also easier for people to read—you can read one over your morning coffee and still have time left over.

In 2021 I reached out to David Hildebrand and Steve Fesmire (SAAP’s President and Vice President at the time), they took it to SAAP’s Board, I got a green light, and then we started posting interviews a few months later. Our first interviews were with David Hildebrand, Anthony Neal, Marilyn Fischer, Erin Tarver, and Charlene Haddock Seigfried. They set the standard for all the interviews since. Early on Dan Brunson played a key role in posting the interviews. Since 2022, Randy has managed the website and social media.

Our goal is to promote the energy and breadth of American philosophy. There are tons of people doing new and important work in American philosophy. We take a big-tent approach by interviewing people around the world and outside university philosophy departments.

Basically, we want any- and everyone to read these interviews, learn something about American philosophy, and be inspired by the great work of those who say, “yes, I am an American philosopher.”

Democracy Initiative: What have you learned about the world of American philosophy and its practitioners through these interviews that has felt particularly significant for you?

John Capps: Face it: American philosophers are an interesting bunch! But one thing that stands out is how much people do alongside being American philosophers. Sometimes this comes through when people describe how they got interested in this area: the influences, the experiences, the relationships that made all the difference. And sometimes it comes through when they describe their other interests, passions, and commitments. I think American philosophers might be especially good at combining their philosophical beliefs with also doing meaningful work, work that makes a practical difference. That’s pretty significant.

Randy Spencer: As much as I love learning about my colleagues’ professional work and private interests through compiling these interviews, I feel the stories of their separate journeys to pragmatism are the most inspiring part. Most of their stories involve a teacher who encouraged them to first read the pragmatists and to take their ideas seriously. Usually, these mentors intervene either in a moment of professional crisis or when their student’s scholarship reaches a roadblock in the “mainstream” philosophical literature. That pattern is consistent with my own journey and I think it repeats because community is primary for nearly all pragmatists and for education as well, especially for those that study Dewey.

More importantly, these teachers were crucial for keeping pragmatism alive during its late 20th Century eclipse. Indeed, it proves that the ideas of the pragmatists were never disproven or debunked, but hidden, misrepresented, or ignored. Instead, pragmatism went dormant and patiently waited for the next generation of philosophers to rediscover its insights once the orthodox professional conversation reached the same dead ends that the pragmatists saw, anticipated, and avoided nearly a century prior. Thus, our teachers were ready to meet the moment when we, their students needed it the most, and the ongoing flourishing of pragmatism in the U.S. and abroad, as confirmed by these interviews, is the result of their loyalty, passion, and confidence in the value of these founding authors. Their examples of perseverance, survival, and inspiration give me hope as we face the daunting challenges of the 21st Century.

Democracy Initiative: In what ways have you been able to get a sense of reader interest and response?

John Capps: A lot of it is word-of-mouth, and it’s been incredibly positive. Many people use these interviews in class, to show the person behind a reading assignment, or to show what philosophers are like, how we get to where we are, and what makes us tick.

Throughout the book, a compelling subtext runs beneath the surface: children’s education and the future of American democracy are inseparable. This theme emerges fully in the final chapter of Schools of Tomorrow’s, entitled, “Democracy and Education;” it is worth noting that within a year, Dewey’s seminal Democracy and Education was published. And yet, it is also worth noting that within decades of the publication of Schools of Tomorrow, the progressive school movement had not only gained little ground in American education, it seemed to lose any traction it might have once had. Russia launched Sputnik and politicians increasingly prioritized a socially-efficient education that prioritized mathematics and science education, planting the seeds for what would eventually become the standards-based educational reform that characterized both the No Child Left Behind and the Every Student Succeed Act eras in American education. Educational historian Ellen Lagemann’s oft-quoted and admirably succinct assessment of the moment resonates: “One cannot understand the history of education in the United States during the twentieth century unless one realizes that Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost.” Thorndike, a psychologist and contemporary of Dewey’s, championed a scientific, behaviorist approach to education focused on measurable outcomes and standardized instruction, and it is easy to argue his was a vision that ultimately shaped American schooling far more profoundly than Dewey’s vision of democratic, experiential learning.

But Dewey’s vision wasn’t lost everywhere. In recent decades, attention has turned to an Italian approach to early childhood education that Peter Moss has called an “alternate narrative” of what education might be. The Reggio Emilia educational project is a system of publicly funded preschools and infant-toddler centers in the northern Italian city of Reggio Emilia, which has captivated early childhood educators around the world. The approach gained widespread international attention at least as early as 2001, when Reggio Emilia’s preschools were featured on the cover of Newsweek as among the best schools in the world. In Reggio Emilia, Dewey’s democratic vision is not a historical footnote — it is alive and still developing, continuing to draw visitors and scholars from across the globe.

Last month Great Britain’s Princess Kate Middleton visited the city of Reggio Emilia for an in-person look at its world-renowned preschools and infant/toddler centers. Princess Kate has spoken of her passion for children’s issues and her belief in a society that prioritizes the care, education, and rights of its children. During her visit, CNN had live coverage, with a reporter on the ground in Reggio that periodically broke into the day’s coverage of the war in Iran and the erosion of voting rights in the U.S. to report from one of the city’s central piazzas. My social media algorithm fed me coverage of Princess Kate’s video to Reggio Emilia all day, across all the platforms, an easy calculation given my decades-long passion for what has come to be known as the Reggio Emilia Approach.

In the preschools and infant-toddler centers of Reggio Emilia, there is an explicit effort to ensure that a life of relations and of personal and collective organization is made real through choices made in the daily life at the school. The Reggio Emilia project was conceived from its very beginning as a conscious resistance to fascism.

Loris Malaguzzi, the educator who became the intellectual heart of the Reggio project, spoke in 1982 to a group of teachers about the view that “participation and democracy are not facts of nature, which are given and complete [but are instead] specific forms of a life of relations, of personal and collective organisation.” This spirit is reflected in the origin story of Reggio Emilia’s preschools and infant-toddler, where a vision of participatory democracy fed the roots of the educational project. In Brick by Brick: The History of the XXV Aprile Municipal Preschool of Villa Cella, Renzo Barazzoni describes the opening of the XXV Aprile, the first preschool in what developed into a system of preschools, as an explicit effort to resist the re-emergence of fascism following the liberation of Italy in 1945:

Everyone wondered how to erase every trace of this dark past from our consciousness and from our institutions; the answer was democracy, to be built from the ground. . . . The period after the war, therefore, was one of the sunniest moments in our history. A fever of resurrection, of renewal infected just about everyone, in the conviction that from the ashes of the war progress, justice and democracy would rise up.

This vision and hope for a democratic future was developed with a spirit of solidarity and participation that characterized those who survived Italy’s fascist occupation, citizens that Barazzoni described as “men and women whose ideals were still intact, who had understood . . . that history can be changed, and is changed by taking possession of it, starting with the destiny of the children”

John Dewey had a meaningful influence on Malaguzzi conceptualization of early childhood education. Dewey’s ideas about democracy and progressive education were especially influential in the emerging design of schools for young children in Reggio Emilia. In the 1950s, Dewey’s writings, which had been forbidden under Mussolini’s fascist rule, were re-translated into Italian and studied by Malaguzzi during his time as a student of Italian Deweyan scholar Bruno Ciari at the University of Bologna. The enduring influence of Dewey on Malaguzzi’s thinking is evident. In a set of lecture notes from the late 1970’s, Malaguzzi wrote, “I remember…that after 1950, in around 1956 and 1957, Italian journals were discussing Dewey in some way…and perhaps we need to rediscover him again today.” The school Dewey described was one inspired by inquiry that was designed for experimentation and for the evolution of theory and practice. Malaguzzi spoke of Dewey’s concept of school as laboratory, as one in which there was “the need to look at educational solutions in the spirit of research.” This school-as-laboratory sensibility remains a visible expression of the theory of teaching and learning in Reggio Emilia.

As I consider the meaning of Reggio Emilia for this moment in U.S. history when democratic norms seem to erode further by the day, I keep returning to Malaguzzi’ s words of caution about teachers that “assume themselves to be democratic [but] their behavior is still too often dominated by undemocratic teaching strategies [that] include directives, ritualized procedures, systems of evaluation . . . and rigid cognitive curriculum packages.” The threat Malaguzzi identified hasn’t diminished. The ongoing threat of neoliberal ideology, which privileges values like standardization, meritocracy, and competition, has resulted in the kind of undemocratic teaching strategies of which Malaguzzi warned, has made exactly these kinds of undemocratic practices the dominant approach at every level of education, including for the youngest children.

Against that backdrop, Reggio Emilia offers a different possibility. It points toward an education that, in Malaguzzi’s words, “recognizes and enacts the needs and rights of children, families, teachers, and school workers, actively to feel a part of a solidarity of practice and ideals.” For those of us who resist an approach to education that reduces children, teachers, and families to data points or units of economic productivity, Reggio offers something rarer than a model; it offers genuine hope.

American author, educator, and theorist bell hooks wrote about educators who “understand that democracy thrives in an environment where learning is valued, where the ability to think is the mark of responsible citizenship, where free speech and the will to dissent is accepted and encouraged.” Reggio Emilia has created such an environment for its youngest citizens, an educational context that is characterized by participatory education and democratic engagement, the embryonic community life of which Dewey wrote.

*Cover photo: AP Photo/Antonio Calanni

I fear that the clear sensibility of Dewey’s project has been obscured for many due to the dimensionality and dynamism of his worldview. Dewey was always looking to complicate our understanding of ourselves and our circumstances—to persuade us to abandon dichotomies and certainties and to resituate ourselves within the observable and often reliable and yet ultimately tumultuous and unfathomable movements of the natural world.

So he can be hard to follow. Yet, at the most basic level, Dewey was simply calling on us to reckon with the unavoidable implications of our historic arrival, as a species, into a culturally and spiritually fractured world. He understood that to regain a sense of coherence we would need to reorient ourselves to a baseline set of values. We would have to lighten our hold on the things that had forever defined us and cleave, first and foremost, to a shared set of commitments.

For when it comes to having to live with all kinds of unfamiliar others, there are really just the two opposing directions toward which one might tend. One might tend—either mindlessly or intentionally—toward neglecting, using, or dominating others in pursuit of various narrowly constructed self-interests or one might tend toward caring about and for others across our often deep and imposing differences.

Democracy, as Dewey understood it, was the sociopolitical form of first and last resort for those in the latter camp. Founding commitments to freedom, justice, and equality for all entailed deliberate efforts to cultivate and address the primal human desires of all for a sense of social inclusion and of personal merit and meaning. In a riven and polyglot nation, this would, in turn, require people to learn to how build relationships across the nation’s internal divides. Common understandings would have to be constructed methodically, in accordance with respected practices and parameters.

Democracy would never be easy nor always pretty nor even always achievable. As a form of sociopolitical relations, democracy would always represent a reach. And yet, there were just the two options: one could hoard power for a select few and sequester oneself from the cares and concerns of others or one could distribute power in hopes of learning how to respond to the cares and concerns of those external to one’s known world.

Throughout this same historic period, influential figures were claiming (they still claim) that narrow self-interest is the more—or even only—truly reliable human impetus. A great deal of operative theory, particularly in economics, has been built upon that assumption. This theory has, in effect, invested in our least democratic impulses and has therefore led in the direction of autocracy.

Some think of Dewey as naïve, and by now some of what he says can feel dated. Dewey also, somehow, managed to avoid addressing race, his country’s most brutal cultural chasm. But Dewey did understand that democracy would always represent a reach. That it was something you had to want and for which exceptional efforts would have to made. Which has hopefully become clearer at this point to many more of us as well.

The overhaul of AI in the college classroom, ongoing world conflicts, and mental health challenges make me pretty pessimistic. When I feel pessimistic, or when the reality of the present day in the United States hits particularly hard, I feel like I’m at a standstill. Hopeless. Useless, even. I know I am not singular in feeling this way. Pulling myself out of this debilitating state is difficult, but I have learned it doesn’t have to be impossible. I have learned how to take action to push past the standstill. That is, I keep learning, reading, going, hoping. American culture emphasizes grit for overcoming obstacles, but I would argue that pragmatic hope, rooted in habits and experiences, offers a more effective framework for navigating uncertainty.

Pragmatic Habits of Hope

In Experience and Education, John Dewey contends that education should be structured according to the principles of experience, and with that he emphasizes how educative experiences should reflect the development of habits and continuity. Habits, according to Dewey, are characterized as experiences that do not happen in isolation, but rather as they are enacted that undergo modification and affect subsequent experiences. In his words, the continuity of habits means “every experience both takes up something from those which have gone before and modifies in some way the quality of those which come after.” In simpler terms, this definition of habits means our experiences build on every other experience we have.

For Dewey the basic characteristic of a habit is more than a repeated way of doing things, “it is that every experience enacted and undergone modifies the one who acts or undergoes.” In other words, habits are temporal and construct the continuity of our experiences. Past experiences modify my present experiences which will modify my future experiences and so on.

Sarah Stitzlein’s Learning How to Hope: Reviving Democracy through our Schools and Civil Society argues that pragmatic hope is cultivated through habits of curiosity, critical thinking, and collaborative action. Adopting this kind of hope is how we foster a flourishing society. When it comes to learning, our past, present, and future experiences shape the habits that inform every action. And Stitzlein notes that temporality is crucial to pragmatic hope as we rely on acknowledging the past to envision a better future. This conception of a habit, for Dewey, “covers the formation of attitudes, attitudes that are emotional and intellectual; it covers our basic sensitivities and ways of meeting and responding to all the conditions which we meet in living.” So when we think of the phrase “habitual nature,” those words truly mean a sustained disposition of hope and agency.

Temporality and Meliorism

As a graduating senior, the concept of continuity, or temporality, has been on my mind. I keep asking questions like: What brought me to this huge milestone of earning an undergraduate degree? What comes after I walk across the stage at graduation? Who has been here along the way and who will be here after? I ask because I know I cannot understand the present or plan for the future without understanding the past. Through understanding and applying my position in time and space, within my own life experiences, I am hopeful that my actions will be for good.

Stitzlein writes, “hope is not mere wishful thinking, but rather happens in the development of pathways toward achieving our goals, motivation to act on those goals, and believing that we can be effective in doing so.” She gives readers a plan for pragmatic hope: develop communities of inquiry, nurture communication and deliberation, foster criticality and dissent, cultivate imagination and storytelling, view citizenship as shared fate, and build trust. To me, these core elements emphasize intentional planning toward shared goals through clear communication and collaboration. It is more than wishful thinking. It is actionable.

Meliorism is the philosophical theory that human effort can improve our world; and humans, according to meliorism, are more than capable of that action. But such action doesn’t just happen once. It is habitual. For example, my university invested over $100,000 into a contract with OpenAI to provide students with their own, unfettered access to ChatGPT. And while we are at a time where it feels like AI is vehemently here to stay, it doesn’t have to consume our lives nor do we have to invest monetarily in the tools. A group of students who are opposed to university funds going toward AI have formed their own coalition that is pro-human intelligence. They have organized a petition for the institution to not reinvest for the upcoming school year and have garnered hundreds of signatures. Their voices are not going unnoticed.

Human action is powerful. The ways my campus community has acted in response to institutional endorsement of AI is exactly what Stizlein would describe as meliorism. We are here for each other, acting collectively towards a common aim, knowing that we are all capable of goodness and practicing that goodness for the purpose of making change for the better is what hope looks like as habit.

Pragmatic hope includes this habitual disposition and our education is responsible for forming these habits. Dewey, Stitzlein, and I believe that schools should be environments for reflection, collaboration, and purposeful action.

Meliorism in the Liberal Arts

How can we promote meliorism to society at large? The answer, almost always, lies in education. Dewey and Stitzlein both agree that education should promote meaningful experiences of communication and collaboration. Stitzlein writes, “communication is an act of collaboration that forms not only beliefs but also relationships.” If collaboration cannot happen alone, how can we expect purpose to be deemed meaningful without others?

Citizens who have practiced habits of critical thinking as young people bodes well for a strong, democratic society. For example, when my peers and I disagree in course discussions, we are expected to explain our positions. This has helped prepare me for life outside of the classroom, as differences of opinion and worldviews are a part of living. Having held leadership positions in student organizations and working as a writing center tutor has taught me what it really means to be a part of a team, a group. Most of all, my liberal arts undergraduate education has taught me that collective effort is worthwhile. My voice definitely matters, but when it’s joined by others’ it is even more meaningful, and rewarding to be heard.

In a time where technology feels like a threat, where the political landscape feels destabilized, and the words “mental health struggle” feel like white noise, the liberal arts curriculum has a responsibility to continue to teach students how to engage in critical dialogue, collaborative communication, and all under the goal of pragmatic hope. Following Dewey and Stitzlein’s foundation of education through experience and habit is essential to achieving such. As my peers and I enter into uncertain futures, curiosity and collaborative hope will allow us to not just feel like we can make the changes we want to see in the world, but actually do so.

What has gone wrong? It is clear the workers don’t understand the meaning of work.

Work is service not gain. The object of work is life not income. The reward of production is plenty, not private property. We should measure the prosperity of the nation not by the number of millionaires, but by the absence of poverty; the prevalence of health; the efficiency of the public schools; and the number of people who can, do read worthwhile books.

Toward all this we do strive but instead of marching breast forward, we stagger and wander thinking that food is raised not to eat but to sell at good profit; houses are not to shelter the masses but to make real estate agents rich; and solemnly declaring that without private profit there can be no food or homes. All of this is ridiculous. It has been disproven centuries ago.

The greatest thinkers of every age have inveighed against concentration of wealth in the hands of the few and against the poverty, and disease and ignorance in the masses of men.

We have tried every method of reform. A favorite effort has been force by war. But the loot stolen by murder went to the generals and not to the soldiers. We tried through religion to lead men to sacrifice and right treatment of their fellow men, but the priests too often stole the fruits of sacrifice and concealed the truth.

In the 17th century, of our modern European era we sought leadership in science and dreamed that justice might rule through natural law but we misinterpreted that law to mean that most men were slaves and white Europeans were the right masters of the world.

In the 18th century, we turned toward the ballot in the hands of the worker to force a just division of the fruits of labor among the toilers. But the capitalists, happening on black slavery and land monopoly and on private monopoly of capital, forced the modern worker into a new slavery which built a new civilization of the world with colored slaves at the bottom, with white serfs between, and the power still in the hands of the rich.

But one consideration halted this plan. The serfs and even the slaves had begun to learn to think. Some bits of education had stimulated them and some of the real scientists of the world began to use their knowledge for the masses and not solely for the ruling classes. It became more and more a matter of straight thinking.

What is work? It was what all must contribute to the common good. No man has a right to be idle. It is the bounden duty of each to contribute his best to the well bring of all, of what men gain by the efforts of all have a right to share, not to the extent of all that they may want, but certainly to the extent of what they really need.

You must let the world know that this is your simple and unwavering program: the abolition of poverty, disease and ignorance the world over among women and men of all races, religions and color; to accomplish this by just control of concentrated wealth, and overthrow of monopoly to ensure that income depends on work and not on privilege or change; that freedom is the heritage of man, and that by freedom we do not mean freedom from the laws of nature, but freedom to think and believe and express our thoughts and dream our dreams and to maintain our rights against secret police, witchhunters or any other sort of a modern fool or tyrant.

The four freedoms come not by slavery to corporations and monopoly of the press, cinema, radio and television but by united social effort for the common good so that decently fed, healthy and intelligent people can be sure of work, not afraid of growing old and hold high their heads to think and say what they damn please without fear of liars, informers or sneaking FBI.

Power, Peace and Democracy

Last semester in my course on peace education we centered many of our discussions on positive peace, which is the presence of justice. So often peace is presumed to be present when there is an absence of conflict (negative peace), but not having conflict does not mean a society is experiencing justice. For that, we must look at what is present in that absence of said conflict. In the absence of conflict is there presence of poverty or prosperity? In the absence of conflict is there presence of hunger or satiety? In the absence of conflict is there presence of illiteracy or education?

My pedagogical style in class lends itself to an open forum where the teaching and learning that happens might be facilitated by me, as the professor, but the direction we go is up to my students. During the semester the topic of power consistently came up, and the conversations on power often ended up being the most fruitful, at least from my vantage point. It didn’t matter if we were reading MLK, Malcolm X, William James, Maria Montessori, or Nel Noddings, we kept coming back to questions like, what is power, who has power, what can power do, and so on. There was much disagreement, with students convinced that getting the bag was the primary source of power and that no other type of power could beat those with the bag. On the other hand, some students were willing to recognize the power of the masses, or the power we have as laborers, voters, organizers, or the power we can generate as a community. And I even tossed it out there for consideration, conceivably there is power in knowledge (this was met with a mixture of scoffs and inquisitive nods). It was a challenge, however, to argue against the power of the bag when we are constantly fed an algorithmic worldview of success that is measured in one’s own material wealth.

Rather than argue against the importance of money and power, I turned to the lessons from Maria Montessori’s Education and Peace in which she argues education is the best weapon for peace. But if we want peace, as a collective of humans in this country, on this land where we live together, our country would have to collectively agree and devote ourselves “to the cultivation of [our] own human members in order to find therein the practical solutions to social problems that today seem insuperable.” In other words, there is power in coming together to take action towards a common aim. That said, Montessori argues that if we ever want to achieve actions that get us closer to these aims, we must start with our children and the education our young people receive. For she reminds us that “it is absolutely certain that the secret of future human power lies hidden within humanity as it develops - within young people.”

Additionally, in Dewey’s The School and Society, he writes that what one parent wants for their own child, so to must the community want for all children, because “any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon it destroys our democracy…here individualism and socialism are at one. Only by being true to the full growth of all the individuals who make it up, can society by any chance be true to itself.” In terms of peace, power, and democracy, if we want our neighbors to thrive in prosperity, it is our responsibility to reduce and remove barriers that as they exist - barely allow humans to survive.

Unfortunately, we are currently under the control of a faction of leaders in our society who represent the billionaire class, and it’s fair to say that the presence of any democracy is hampering their style, because if there were justice, their unfettered wealth accumulation would be hindered. Within this faction of leadership there is an amalgamation of racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia, with all the fear, bigotry, and loathing. In sum, they do not operate with the best interests of our pluralistic democratic society in mind. Rather they are an instrument of wealth, acting for their own interests and protections for themselves and their closest allies.

Towards Positive Peace: Caring about Justice

Returning to the words of DuBois, Montessori, and Dewey, I often find myself baffled, reading the great thinkers of decades and centuries ago, who are speaking the same ideas of labor, freedom, education, peace, democracy, and human dignity that we speak of today. I have to believe some modicum of progress has been made in the last hundred years, but I cannot claim or claim to believe that what bit of progress may have been made is substantial or even stable. So how is it that we are still fighting for the same damn things after all this time? Perhaps the billionaire class is just that good at duping the masses into believing they care about our wellbeing. And perhaps there are lawmakers who have always functioned in service to the elite, paying only lip service, in lies and broken promises, to the masses.

So what do we do? Well that is a complicated question, with complicated answers, and no single correct response. But the most concise way I can respond is that before anything else, we need to care - we need to care more, care hard, and care loud - about having a society that is not just absent of conflict, but where justice is present and our people are free from poverty, disease, and ignorance (as DuBois said).

For example, on May 7th Tennessee lawmakers jumped on the Supreme Court’s recent gutting of the Voting Rights Act to effectively eliminate the only district in their state with Democratic representation, which also happens to be the only majority Black district in the state. These actions cannot be described as anything but racist and in service to a billionaire, authoritarian regime. But I don’t live in Tennessee so why should I care? At risk of sounding cliché, because “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

I’m assuming those reading this essay probably already do care, so maybe our challenge is to reach those who claim indifference. But this also may be an inflection point for our educators, to do our part and educate our youth in a way that shows them how and why it matters to care about justice and peace.

In the meantime, it is up to me to educate myself, educate others, and speak up against actions that take us further from a just society, where all people may finally experience a life of dignity that is a given, unearned.

Look up. Stay strong. Resist.

*Photo courtesy: W.E.B Du Bois Collection, Special Collections and University Archives, UMass Amherst Libraries

The title of an online interview Why Measuring Everything Ruins Everything caught my attention a while back since measuring has drained the life from a lot of our schools, especially at the elementary level. Art, recess, social studies, and rug time have been swapped for test preparation exercises: in far too many classrooms, children are learning to second guess the testing companies rather than to think for themselves.

Yasha Mounk and his interviewee, the philosophy professor C. Thi Nguyen, were not talking about elementary schools, and only certain of their observations apply. For example, Nguyen had recently written a book called The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game. Yet the vast majority of U.S. children have no choice but to play the game of school. It is all that is available and is required by law.

Everyone though, past and present, who thinks or has thought very seriously about what democratic schools should provide for young people agrees that schools should not rank their intellectual performance according to a single thin measure and then make a big deal about it, as though those at the top are “doing better at school” (and are probably just smarter in general).

This is ironically—tragically—the very opposite of what democracies should want for their children.[1] Democratic societies should want to foster their young people’s capacities to excel in a multitude of forms, including artistic expression, never singling out any one form as the one that really matters—certainly not test taking. They should want to teach them to think creatively and independently, to reason cogently, and to employ available evidence in a fair-minded manner.

Democracies should want to support all of their young people in feeling, not only valued, but also interesting and intelligent, each in their own way. Because if people grow to feel worthy and smart as adults they are less likely to need to think poorly of others. Young people who have been expected to listen to and learn from their classmates are more likely to listen to and learn from others throughout their lives.

Nguyen tells Mounk that he has matured (my word) from thinking all metrics are evil to thinking that they need to be fashioned and employed with care. It is worth taking a moment to reflect on this admission. Here we have a thoughtful scholar who has devoted a good portion of his life to reflecting on this matter acknowledging that even he, at one time, viewed metrics as an all or nothing proposition.

It seems we humans really do tend to start off thinking in such terms. We ask whether something is good or bad rather than asking what something might be good for and in what situations, with what caveats in place. State and federal policy makers do have a stake in the character and quality of the public school systems under their authority: standardized tests are cheap and easy. But so do local educators, who have infinitely greater resources available with which to determine a fuller range of what their students might need and desire and to see that it is provided for them.

As Nguyen, who was tasked with reporting “learning outcomes” for his philosophy department noted, “[i]t’s very hard to report what you actually care about in philosophy. There’s not a lot of good standardized tests that are accessible and understandable and obviously legible.” The same, need I say, goes for many of the aims we should hold for our high school graduates.

Standardized tests can only ever work as a rough measure of even very straightforward types of performances. They can flag potential areas of concern for further investigation. They should never have been made an end in and of themselves. On this point, Nguyen makes the following two observations regarding large-scale metrics:

One is that when the demand is that they are highly usable at scale and highly public, they systemically eliminate high-expertise and high-skill judgment. The other is that, given that they have to be applied in a stable way, they are systematically bad at highly variable phenomena.

Both features have skewed our perspective on and current practices within our schools in ways that have harmed our students, hamstrung our teachers, and arguably placed our democracy itself at risk. At a time when our elected representatives are reliably failing to demonstrate the integrity, fair-mindedness, and capacity for compromise and creative problem-solving that democracy requires, we must find the vision and courage to begin again in our schools. The critiques and analyses have been written; [2] it is time to forward a political program capable of delivering us from the standardization scourge.

[1] Here we have our intersection with the work of Dewey, who wrote the book (many books) developing this claim.

[2] See also Cara Furman’s related DI piece on teaching to fidelity.

Two weeks ago, Michael Roth, President of Wesleyan University, published a Guest Essay in the New York Times (March 4, 2026) entitled “This Summer, Students From Hundreds of Colleges Will Heed One Urgent Call.” The essay goes on to detail the 2026 answer to the Freedom Summer of 60 years ago. Called Democracy Summer, this nationwide program aims to educate college students developing into knowledgeable citizens and to enable them to act to protect our elections in the coming year.

Roth makes a great case for why this kind of program is legitimately in the purview of university’s attempts to educate their nearly-adult students in civic responsibility and I urge you to read it.

My point in elevating this essay is to suggest that one thing educators, philosophers, and citizens can and should be doing right now (whatever we think about the current turn toward the authoritarian in the West, and especially in the US) is to create democratic experiences for ourselves and others.

(If you think democracy is not a good idea, a social framing that isn’t worth promoting, I would suggest reading Thom Hartman’s post on Substack and ’s comment about why Dewey might agree. But here at the JDS Democracy Initiative, we maintain that democracy is the only path forward in the world as it has evolved today.

The Hartmann Report

Democracy Is Nature’s Survival Strategy—So Why Are Republicans Fighting It?

FCC Chairman and apparent Goebbels fanboy Brendan Carr is suggesting the radio and TV broadcasters he regulates should begin airing more “pro-America” content. What he means, of course, is pro-Trump…

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6 months ago · 253 likes · 16 comments · Thom Hartmann

What Roth describes is just such a democratic experience, asking college students to engage in diverse communities in a range of ways. Each participating campus and organization can choose how to structure this student engagement. But it’s clear that dialogue is central to the effort. By the way, take a look at Kate Polson’s post here on JDS Democracy Initiative to get a flavor of what happens when we engage university students in this kind of work and thinking!

The JDS Democracy Initiative

Campus Conflict: Antidialogical Action as Antidemocratic

I have been a contributor to my university’s student newspaper, The Rambler, for nearly three years. My curiosity led me to find passion in journalism—a passion I now fear losing…

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5 months ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · Kate Polson

I invite readers to post other forms for creating democratic experiences across the lifespan in the comments below …

This year, our newspaper began to change. A seasoned journalist joined on as our faculty advisor, bringing structure, professional expertise, and a renewed vision of student journalism uniting members of the organization. Contributors were proud of the work they were producing. Participation grew. Articles were polished and relevant. Students from across the social strata were coming on to publish essays written in their writing workshop classes.

With this shift came conflict over what the organization should embody. Some leaders argued that the newspaper had a moral obligation to be a social refuge for students who felt excluded from the predominant fraternity and sorority life on campus. Many contributors, including myself, thought the opposite: a student newspaper funded by the university should serve as a guide for how journalism actually works, including editing, accountability, and thoughtful critiques.

What started as a character clash over editorial semantics between student leaders and our faculty advisor escalated into much worse. There were factions, strained relationships, and an indefinite shutdown on all newspaper-related operations. The mission of real journalism was under threat and the call was coming from inside the house. I found myself writing to our academic dean because such a blossoming part of our institution was falling apart.

The disagreement itself is not the issue; the issue is how it was handled.

Conversations ensued separately, never altogether. Editors reached out to other editors and writers recruited other writers into conversations. We became accustomed to “the liberal arts 360,” an act of looking over your shoulder for fear of someone within the campus bubble overhearing. Meetings were complaint sessions and everything became personal, not logical.

By arguing for a community united by the same goal of professional student voices in the media, we had created what we were criticizing: factions. We framed leadership as disloyal. Leadership framed our advocacy as insensitive. Both sides thought they were protecting the organization, and for the same reason.

I began to consider Paulo Freire’s arguments in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In the text, Freire says that institutions operate in one of two ways: dialogically or antidialogically.

He writes, “in antidialogical action, manipulation serves the ends of conquest; in dialogical action, daring and loving witness serve the ends of organization” (177). Antidialogical action depends on domination through division, manipulation, and cultural invasion. It denies the chance for liberation by the overtly oppressed group. Dialogical action relies on cooperation, curiosity, and equality. Without dialogue, domination overtakes.

Upon reflection, I can identify many antidialogical patterns in this conflict.

We were divided. Freire says “in dialogical theory, at no stage can revolutionary action forgo communion with the people. Communion in turn elicits cooperation” (171). The communion, and subsequent cooperation, he refers to was nonexistent within our conflict. Questions about roles and communication expectations were unanswered long before things came to a head between contributors and leadership.

Conversations that should have taken place altogether were happening in small groups, which created a massive game of telephone. It was prideful and created more partitions. Concerns regarding the rigor of the editing process were spun into arguments about inappropriately induced stress. Necessary critique and revision were portrayed as harassment by the faculty advisor onto the student leaders.

The newspaper’s purpose was redefined according to a singular individual’s vision. Was this an organization responsible for social refuge? How could everyone agree on such a thing when the leader is spearheading this goal. The organization’s culture was spinning from the start.

We, as contributors, labeled leadership as egotistical or controlling. Leadership failed to get contributor input, and when we spoke up, we were labeled as traitors. There was no good intention anymore. We disagreed on fundamentals. What was the student newspaper even for?

Freire noted that antidialogical action is dehumanizing. My reaction to this conflict was vehemently similar to that of an oppressor. Instead of coming together as the organization that we were and declaring a fresh slate, I advocated for singular individuals to be removed and other individuals to take their place. According to Freire, “the oppressors do not favor promoting the community as a whole, but rather selected leaders” (143). I was adding fuel to the antidialogical fire without realizing it.

What we really needed was dialogical action through:

• Transparent editorial meetings with accessible agendas

• Contributor input on all major decisions

• Clear definitions of faculty advisor and editors

• Training in professional communication within a student organization

Zooming Out—Freire and Democracy

In my own aspirations of becoming a lawyer, I have written about my “why” in applying to law school. I am interested in gaining the tools needed to help rebuild a relationship of trust between us and the institutions that serve us. I hope to learn how the legal system operates across various sectors—education, public health, media, government—and work within that framework to make meaningful progress to the goal of mutual trust.

We as a society often feel disconnected from many of these institutions due to a lack of transparency and trust in how they operate for the betterment of the whole. People want to know: Where is their voice? This question came to me through the fallout with our student newspaper. It prompted another question: How can students graduate college not knowing what democracy truly is?

Reflecting and practicing dialogical action is democracy and Freire’s concept of praxis in action.

My experience within my microscopic liberal arts college bubble was mirroring a wider societal problem—the antidialogic, antidemocratic problem. In an antidialogic society we see polarization, distrust, and confusion about what it means to belong. For example, in today’s polarized climate people cut ties with friends and blood relatives because of who they vote for and their political affiliations. We tend towards distrusting our elected officials if they are from “the other party.” And when the U.S. Immigration and Custody Enforcement (ICE) is targeting, detaining, and harming hundreds of people based on their skin color or accents, what does it mean to belong?

If we cannot practice dialogue at the undergraduate level, in its entirety, it is no wonder that we cannot do so within our society and in the government. The crisis of democracy is not just about elections or legislation, it’s about the inability to dialogue and the dehumanization of our neighbors who hold different beliefs and perspectives.

Liberation, a key aspect of democracy, comes out of revolutionary action that Freire describes as “human, empathetic, loving, communicative, and humble” (171). Liberation requires dialogue with accountability, listening, and humility; and we do not practice this nearly enough in schools or society.

Freire says that “true revolution must initiate a courageous dialogue with the people” (128). It takes courage to be critiqued, to be wrong, and to listen to an opposing party. In the case of our editorial team at the school newspaper, though many contributors were frustrated with our leadership team, it is important to recognize their courage in their eventual decision to step down from their roles.

Antidialogical action is harmful, and I am not immune to it. Experiencing this has informed me of how easy it is to fall into bad habits when feeling under attack. The next step is breaking these habits. Through practicing humble dialogue, even when it may be uncomfortable, we can establish trust and unity to achieve liberation in any context. When conflict arises, it is important to follow Freire’s guide of praxis. You cannot know the present without looking at the past, if you don’t then history will repeat itself. If we want our democracy to survive, and thrive, we must always exercise critical reflection to carry out transformative action.

Deweyans:

An invitation that is also an opportunity... our colleague Harry Boyte and the Braver Angels Civic Scholar Council invite your (writing) participation:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1MSz0bn7lVaC0pE06npX5n1rXY2HhxcBdBLPTgOgQYCY/viewform?edit_requested=true

They are looking for short (4000 word) essays in advance of the 2026 Braver Angels National Convention. Proposals due FEBRUARY 16th (soon!!) but then several months to finish the essay. Read the Call attached here.

Go to the Braver Angels website to learn more...

And if you write something inspiring, we’d love to feature it on the JDS Democracy Initiative Substack!

DOCS.GOOGLE.COM

Braver Angels Civic Scholars Council 2026 Call for Papers

In advance of the 2026 Braver Angels National Convention (1776–2026: A Pledge Renewed) the Civic Scholars Council invites short papers that explore courageous citizenship as a framework for democratic renewal and convey stories of such citizenship at the 250th anniversary of the American experimen...

Let me take up one (often ignored ) dimension of creating new systems by which to organize our lives. Other than the occasional nod to "the best educations" we seldom award the actual education and upbringing of children the attention it deserves. I believe it is critical that we rethink virtually everything about how we educate young people, starting with the pervasive systems of testing, grading, and ranking students (the perfect model for a capitalist society) to understanding how the academic disciplines, taught in isolation, and with scant attention paid to children's interests, and with even scanter attention paid to helping young people learn ways of "surviving and thriving" through the perfect storm we sadly envision, perpetuate the status quo. Teaching about economic democracy and equality is not about indoctrination (we have all had plenty of that). And let's face it - Civics education, for all but a narrow slice of interested kids, is taught in hopelessly boring, irrelevant ways. As my favorite ancient American philosopher John Dewey insisted, democracy must be a 'way of life' - a life informed by inquiry, collaboration, problem-solving, love, and social action to create a better world. In our Neohumanist education movement, we believe, in addition to this moral social dimension of teaching that is is necessary to support the psychological expansion needed to move humans beyond their narrow self-interests, hence the inclusion of personal development (the holistic approach to integrating body, mind, and spirit). And a commitment to the idea that homes and classrooms must operate on the very principles we envision for a more healthy, sane, and sustainable world.

Posted January 31st in reply to Ronald Allen’s (@CrisisTransition< https://crisistransition.substack.com/p/the-final-battle/comments) discussion of HCR’s provocative question about what we can and will do when we get over the “Trump Hump”: “Ok, these changes are great. How are we going to make sure we never backslide again?” A worthy question for Deweyan’s for sure!

Renewing Democracy: Transatlantic Challenges and Opportunities

Our intention at the JDS Democracy Initiative has been to consider the state of democracy in our world and how we, as students of John Dewey and the philosophy of pragmatism, might better serve in strengthening and preserving it. How might Dewey’s ideas about living and learning in pluralistic democracies help in advancing the fight against the aspiring and established autocrats and fascists of our time?

Dewey wrote a great deal both on the reasons why we should want to live in democratic societies and on what doing so asks of us personally and implies about how we need to organize ourselves. Our hope and aim here has been to make these ideas feel more accessible and relevant to more people. One thought has been that by synthesizing and summarizing Dewey’s contributions and by recasting them in view of the insights and challenges of our time, we might support the efforts of other democratically minded souls to grow more confident with respect to their own ideas regarding these crucial matters.

As Barbara Stengel has emphasized, we are proceeding in a spirit of Deweyan experimentalism—experimenting with sharing what we have long discussed in schools and academies on social media platforms, with treating what we have come to appreciate as an elegant web of philosophical constructs in ways that might touch the lives of unknown others. We are trying to move beyond what we have done in the past because it now feels as though more is needed.

All of which makes us hopeful that this effort will grow to be dialogical. As philosophers who think about democracy and the work of schools, we Deweyans often strive to speak across the academy-school divide. We have learned that thoughtful efforts are required. Because people do speak in different ways in their different worlds. Which means that speaking across those worlds requires us to develop new ways of speaking—to learn to listen for and lift up what resonates and to sort through and ask about what confuses.

Dewey’s hope was that all of us would come to feel comfortable experimenting creatively together as our times required. His science was a science of all people imagining and exploring new possibilities collaboratively from their various human vantages as various types of challenges arise. And if we can be entirely clear about anything in this historical moment, it is that we all need to be talking and working together in new ways. So please, should a thought or a question occur to you, do not hesitate to join the conversation.

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If you are interested in learning more about what or how to contribute to the JDS Democracy Initiative, or would like to submit an essay, please contact Erin Scussel (erincscussel@gmail.com).

Europe has a dark history of nationalism, which has led to two world wars. During World War I, John Dewey wrote about the good and the evil side of nationalism in his text Nationalizing Education. Nationalism, Dewey says, “is a matter of ideas, of emotions, of intellectual and moral disposition and outlook.” He described the American nation and democracy as being the same thing, and emphasized that democracy means “amity and good will to all humanity (including those beyond our border) and equal opportunity for all within.” The evil side of nationalism is characterized by hostility and dislike. Dewey argues that “skillful politicians and other self-seekers have always known how to play cleverly upon patriotism, and upon ignorance of other peoples, to identify nationalism with latent hatred of other nations” (p. 202). So how can nationalism be viewed from a Nordic perspective?

What I think defines the self-perception of the Nordic countries is that they are secular liberal democracies. Being secular does not mean denying the importance of religion but leaving religion outside the sphere of the state. Besides having free and fair elections, liberal democracies are characterized by independent societal institutions, free media, protection of minorities and equal rights. What may distinguish the Nordic countries are gender equality with access to childcare for all so that all adults can be economically independent. But can these liberal values count as nationalism? Do we not need strong feelings, a common distinguishing narrative, and a shared religion to feel national belonging? Yes, some of us admittedly do. There are nationalist/populist parties represented in all the Nordic countries. However, equality and equal rights have not been achieved without struggles and strong feelings. They will be mobilized again if such foundational values become threatened.

The most pressing question today is how a “good nationalism” in the form of democracy, as Dewey proposed, can defend itself against authoritarian forces and nations that seek to impose their own aggressive ideals and norms on others? This is a question that, of course, has no easy answers. But one answer can be to remember that while authoritarian forces are based on the power and violence of a few, democracy is based on the values of the many, which has a potential to make democracy resilient in a longer perspective. Therefore, it is important to strengthen cooperation within and between democratically founded nations and international associations, such as the United Nations and the European Union. We must also actively resist rhetoric that categorizes people as weak and strong, us and them. What democracies can do to mobilize against authoritarian forces is the many people, the shared norms of human dignity, and a refusal to accept an authoritarian language permeated with superiority and claims to power for personal or national gains.

Not only is social life identical with communication, but all communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative. To be a recipient of communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience. One shares in what another has thought and felt and in so far, meagerly or amply, has his own attitude modified. Nor is the one who communicates left unaffected. (p. 5)

We grow when we encounter others. Conversely, growth is hindered when people speak only with those most like them, when their speech is sanctioned, or when they self censor in fear of retaliation (Ben-Porath, 2023). Democracy and equity demand we go beyond the “single story” to hear many voices.

Much attention has gone into promoting discourse around controversial topics in spaces of learning (https://www.justiceinschools.org). This work is important and needed. Attention too has gone into challenging book bans (https://www.aclu.org/artistic-expression-banned-books). This is needed too. Yet, an anti-democratic undercurrent, teaching to fidelity, has perniciously slipped under the radar.

I have written previously about how fidelity has harmed the teaching profession and children in classrooms (Furman, 2024; Furman, 2025). Without rehearsing that writing, let me stress that I have no problem with the word fidelity. In fact, education benefits from teachers who are faithful to ethics, care, and their students (Noddings. 1986). Fidelity in teaching though has come to mean something very particular: following a scripted curriculum without deviation (Furman, 2025; https://strikehot.morecaucusnyc.org/the_myth_of_higher_state_test_scores_and_the_cost_of_curriculum_mandates). Teachers are regulated down to minute gestures and punished when they do not follow scripts.

Here I emphasize the harms of fidelity to democracy. Dewey (1922) describes habits as actions that go unreflected upon. Conduct consists of these habits. The more one acts in a particular way, the deeper they are conducted into that pattern of action. Classrooms dictated by fidelity will not have much discussion. A teacher can’t stay on a script and follow where a conversation leads. Fidelity daily builds the habit of soliloquy and silence. Fidelity to a curriculum mandates that everyone read particular books set by the guide. In this way, fidelity quietly does the work of book banning. Fidelity normalizes one curricular story. Pressure to comply with curriculum, leads to more rigid expectations on children. Some children are silenced and others act out. In the seemingly innocuous guise of fidelity as “best practice” teachers are daily practicing the silencing of voice, personal accountability, and diversity of perspective.

Challenging a habit demands having the movement interrupted by an obstacle or, as the opening quote suggests, another person (Dewey, 1916). When someone reflects upon the obstruction and considers it, they have an experience and this, in turn, can lead to growth and change. Without interruption, habits persist and deepen. In fact, the more one trods in a particular groove, the less one might imagine other paths (Ahmed, 2017).

Conducting a deep dive on the term fidelity, I find the word appeared on the educational scene out of nowhere (Furman, 2025). A literature review yields surprisingly few discussions of why teach to fidelity nor empirical evidence that fidelity supports learning. Yet, fidelity is often presented as an uncontested good: acting with fidelity will yield particular outcomes. In other words, fidelity seemed to smoothly slip into educational discourse and ways of practicing without much evidence, attention, reflection, and challenge.

Fidelity has unquestionably changed the tune of schools. Conducting interviews with practicing teachers, the confines of fidelity were addressed in nearly every conversation (Furman, 2024; Furman, 2025). I also found teachers undermining fidelity at every turn so they could look out for their students. In movies, a protagonist shows superhuman strength to lift a car long enough so that others can slide through. Listening to experienced teachers talk about their practice, I hear such strength as they push back the tides of fidelity that crushes speech, innovation, and responsiveness. They do this amazingly well but shielding their students takes up time and energy that could be spent on more meaningful components of their instruction. This Herculean effort takes a tremendous toll on the teachers.

Hannah Arendt (2006) calls for outright resistance – citing when large groups of people directly challenged the Nazis, the Nazis sometimes stopped and changed. To shift away from the paradigm of fidelity demands first noticing and naming the pernicious and chilling effect of fidelity on curriculum, learning, and democratic habits. As a new chancellor steps into place in New York City where I teach, the clamor around curricular mandates has already started up. To this clamor I offer firmly that curriculum is a useful tool and any curriculum ought to be interrogated along many fronts. That said, no curriculum is ever enough. In a democracy we need multiple voices. Classrooms can and should be a place in which we practice this many voiced song (https://www.beacon.org/In-Schools-We-Trust-P294.aspx). To sing democratically, demands the input of children, their teacher, other teachers, families, and external supports like curriculum.

School is where a nation builds the habits of the people. Let’s make sure it’s democracy that we practice each and every day.

As sometimes happens at academic conferences, we had a small audience but a great discussion. Thanks to Tom Rickards, a philosophy and religion teacher at Penn Charter in Philadelphia, Zachary Woodman, anindependent scholar and self-proclaimed anarchist, and Andrew DeLunes, a lecturer at San Jose State University, we were able to think and talk about what we are trying to accomplish, how better to do it, and what Dewey might think about it all.

After looking over my notes on the session, I realized that much of our conversation focused on what Zachary called “legible feedback systems.” No matter what question we posed or issue we considered—practical (increasing visibility and readership) or substantive (why is this kind of effort so needed in this moment?)—we came back to specifying and understanding the “trying and undergoing” that promoted the formation of helpful democratic habits, reversing the current breakdown of democratic structures and infrastructures. What’s the cycle of Deweyan inquiry and what makes that cycle make sense?

So when Zachary suggested that we “seed” conversational dialogue by 1) inviting a couple of folks to respond to each other, not just to a quote from Dewey, or 2) offering a $20 bounty to writers with a track record of producing thoughtful content, or 3) organizing online seminars, we were off and running, imagining how these actions might expand our effort for the better.

When Tom talked about his work with upper level students at Penn Charter, noting that he was looking for opportunities to involve his young folks in public dialogue, we could imagine ways that inviting them to post their thinking, perhaps by pairing them with the university-level students many of our team are teaching, could be a win (more content)—win (more authentic writing opportunities for high school students both gifted and game)—win (future teachers slipping into teacher mode with youngsters) situation: more participants, more conversation, more readers, more visibility. In short, we could maximize our efforts to make democracy and in the process, make democracy make sense.

When Andrew (citing Dewey’s Art as Experience) asked whether the arts might be an important modality we were neglecting to integrate, we were pulled up short. We didn’t have an answer for this one. But it certainly seems worth considering.

We agreed that the collective national “we” had dropped the ball, stopped practicing “democracy as a mode of associated living” and that this meant a shared responsibility to revive our practice. Being on the “right” side of some political debate wasn’t going to restore democratic society. If there has been an overrun of what Habermas designated as the life world by systems thinking, how might schools address this imbalance and promote the reconstruction of democratic practice?

(We acknowledged all the historical, political, and policy-based impediments to getting back on track, but insist—as good pragmatists—that there is always something to be done to make this moment better.)

Perhaps what educators most usefully bring to this effort is curiosity, the desire to know and understand, even when what we get back is not what we expected. And we want to share our curiosity with students, to invite them into full participation in an inquiry that is crucial to democratic communication, even when what they bring to the conversation challenges our taken-for-granted and/or deeply held answers. Zachary noted that, in his experience with blogging, young people are not generally put off by those who don’t agree with them; they already know how to do something that older adults seem stuck on. Tom noted that a group of teachers at Penn Charter are finding they want and need to be in honest conversation with each other about the dilemmas of being a teacher in this politically-polarized moment. Andrew admitted that we can change our minds as we get older, noting his early rejection of Dewey’s experimental ethics and his current appreciation of the wisdom of that view.

What are the ideas that “move” us to change and growth? As Dewey would be the first to insist, it’s not the ideas by themselves that change minds, hearts and habits. It’s ideas enacted and tested, tempered by feedback (the whole process of inquiry) that frees us to act differently. That’s what we hope this Substack does. If you want to join us, to contribute to this collective effort in the service of living democracy, please contact Barb Stengel (barbara.stengel@vanderbilt.edu) or Erin Scussel (erincscussel@gmail.com).

It comes as no surprise that hope is a key part of pragmatism given that this philosophical perspective arose largely in late 1800s America—a land founded and sustained on hope. While pragmatists were writing in France, Italy, and England by the early 1900s, pragmatism seems to align with the American spirit, if such a thing can be captured. Pragmatism emphasizes facing difficult conditions and responding with inquiry to understand them, ingenuity to experiment with improving them, and vision to craft a better future. Its roots trace to the American revolution, where an outlook of experimentation and dissent was taking hold in our new country. Historian William Goetzmann points to Thomas Paine, who arrived in America and magnified its budding personality. “According to Paine, America was God’s country of the future. The spirit of revival, constant regeneration, and future-oriented habits of pragmatic thinking had already become basic to American thought. Paine, as myth-maker, used it to build an intercolonial self-identity intended to bind the colonies together in a common cause and a new utopian nation.”1 In the image of Paine, being an American meant building social and political life anew, breaking away from old routines and their injustices, and seeking to create new and freer ways of living.

On his heels, Ralph Waldo Emerson described America as an event that was unfolding in accordance with the visions and actions of its citizens, rather than longstanding foundations of church or nature.2 Emerson believed that the future of America could be better through people shaping and enacting democracy together—a message that later hit home with twentieth century pragmatist John Dewey, who called Emerson “the Philosopher of Democracy.^”3 Indeed, Emerson’s focus on possibility and human agency, without need for firm foundations, seems to have also impacted Dewey’s classic pragmatist peers Charles Sanders Peirce and William James.4 That uncertain and vague future, dependent on our actions, led Americans to invoke hope as they searched for the best ways to create and sustain freedom.5 In reaction to the Civil War, many Americans sought reconciliation by rejecting divisiveness in favor of a more open and experimental worldview; pragmatism fit the bill. Its embrace of science and change also aligned well with the development of new technology and industry across the country. Pragmatism complimented the late 19^th and early 20^th century mainstream social imaginary—how we understood ourselves, our relation to each other, and our role in the world. But, importantly, pragmatism also was not a simple form of idealism; instead, it focused on real constraints. Even as it celebrated human agency and efforts to improve the world, pragmatism calls us to recognize that agency and effort have long been restricted due to factors such as one’s social position as a member of a racial minority or one’s lack of economic and cultural resources.6

Walt Whitman, whom Dewey dubbed the seer of democracy, also influenced the classic pragmatists.7 Whitman celebrated America because of what it might become and noted our responsibilities to one another as we shape that future together. Whitman’s poetry, which put forward visions of what might be, sparked action. Some pragmatists, like James, followed Whitman’s aesthetic approaches to breaking down simplistic dualisms that cast people and things in clearly competing categories without the complexity needed to fully understand or transform them. Others, including much more recent American pragmatists like Richard Rorty, picked up on a sense of social hope operating in Whitman.8 Whitman looked to the future, the consequences of one’s actions, and the ideals shaping them to assess their worthiness.

While pragmatists generally followed this formula as they developed their theory of truth, their focus on the future also led to discontent. In other words, seeing that the present world did not stack up to the visions they had in mind, they were led to criticize the status quo and generate new possibilities. American historical essayist Louis Menand explains, “Pragmatism belongs to a disestablishmentarian impulse in American culture—an impulse that drew strength from the writings of Emerson, who attacked institutions and conformity, and from the ascendancy, after the Civil War, of evolutionary theories, which drew attention to the contingency of all social forms.”9 Pragmatism perpetuated the spirit of dissent in the American Founders, encouraging citizens to speak out against unsatisfactory conditions and put forward alternatives. Progressive Era pragmatists later turned the romance of Emerson and the aesthetics of Whitman into a way of life entailing dissent, vision, creation, and action—a burgeoning form of hope.

Pragmatism fell relatively silent in the mid 1900s, as new forms of analytic philosophy took hold. Moreover, the social imaginary of the country was challenged and reshaped, as American optimism was shattered in the face of the atrocities of World War II and Vietnam abroad and racism at home. Following World War II and into the Cold War, some social leaders feared the ramifications of a philosophical practice seen as subversive and activist. At a time when stability and authority were desired, the contingent experimentation of pragmatism appeared dangerous to some.10 As those fears declined in the late 20^th century and new thinkers gained the spotlight, pragmatism once again came to the fore, spurred by the work of a few key scholars.

Contemporary pragmatist, Colin Koopman, rightly concludes, “If pragmatism is American, this is because America, like pragmatism, is an emblematic vision of hope. Pragmatism is thus best understood as a philosophical practice corollary to the experiment of American democracy.”11 While that’s not to say that all Americans are hopeful or that hope has been consistently present in America, pragmatism has worked hand-in-hand with hope as a lasting and significant part of our history and national identity.