One of the reasons for the revival of Deweyan pragmatism is that it now seems fairly clear that the positivistic philosophies of the early and middle portions of the 20^th century have failed to engage life as it exists outside narrow academic circles.  Much of current Anglo-American analytic philosophy, in its attempt to preserve aspects of the earlier positivism and most specifically its attempt to present philosophy to university administrators as a rigorous science, continues to demonstrate very little interest in the types of  issues that are of concern to ordinary men and women.  Unlike American pragmatism and much of so-called "continental" philosophy, it does not even attempt to be a Lebensphilosophie. 

This is a point that Richard Rorty made during his presidential address to the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in 1979.   His lecture, which later appeared in print under the title Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism in his 1982 publication The Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), concluded with the thinly-veiled charge against analytic philosophy that it had become irrelevant to the lives of most men and women.  William James and John Dewey, on the other hand, he said, "offered what very few philosophers have succeeded in giving us: a hint of how our lives might be changed."(p. 175) 

What are the philosophical issues that Dewey and the other pragmatists thought important, and whose identification and clarification can change lives?   They can of course be characterized broadly in traditional philosophical terms as problems of knowledge and valuation.  More specifically, however, they include issues such as the methods of inculcating basic skills without dampening the learner’s native curiosity, the place of ethics in the schools and the workplace, the means and methods of constructing and maintaining the life of communities of interest, and the means of assessing the human impact of developing tools and techniques.  They are reflected in the titles of some of Dewey's most influential books: The Child and the Curriculum, The School and Society, Democracy and Education, How We Think,  Experience and Nature, Art as Experience, and of course Ethics.  For Dewey and the other pragmatists, these issues lie at the core of the philosophical enterprise.  

One of the works we recently edited at the Center is a two volume anthology of his published works entitled The Essential Dewey.  That title is ironic, and intentionally so, for Dewey was an ardent opponent of the type of super-naturalist and extra-naturalist essences such as those postulated by Plato and favored by his heirs of the medieval, modern, and even contemporary periods of thought. 

But the title is nevertheless descriptive.  First, Dewey did not abandon essences all together – far from it.  He merely functionalized and operationalized them.  By this I mean that along with his friend William James, he argued that essences are selected or constructed by the human organism in the process of adapting to its environment.  They are neither just discovered as fixed and finished, perhaps delivered to us from a  platonic heaven, nor are they the result of random associations of sense data or ideas, perhaps invented as a part of post-modernist literary criticism. 

As Dewey demonstrated in his classic 1896 essay, "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology," essences are selected, or perhaps better put, they are constructed on the basis of the interests and aptitudes of the organism as it interacts with experienced environing conditions.  Thus, even though those functionalized essences become real as they are used to settle some difficulty, it would be fallacious either to say that they exist prior to cognition or to take them as the last word on the ultimate structure of this or any other world. 

Essences are, as William James wrote, teleological weapons of the mind.  Or, to employ a somewhat less aggressive metaphor, we might say that they are the tools that human organisms utilize as they go about the business of adjusting to the changing conditions of their physical and social environments. 

This novel treatment of essences was an important plank in the instrumentalist platform that Dewey and his students, including the psychologist and sociologist George Herbert Mead, developed and articulated at the University of Chicago during Dewey's decade there, from 1894 to 1904.  Dewey's instrumentalism was, moreover, the first attempt by a professional philosopher to develop a comprehensive critique of technology. 

His critique was comprehensive because it included accounts of education, the arts, a theory of inquiry, social and political philosophy, a philosophy of religion, and social psychology.  To my knowledge, no other writer before or since has cast his net as broadly as did Dewey in terms of his analysis and critique of contemporary technology and his proposals for the ways in which technology can contribute to social reform. 

His account anticipates by several decades the work of Martin Heidegger, whose important book Sein und Zeit, published in 1927, is still widely regarded as the first serious attempt to construct a philosophical account of technology.  But whereas Heidegger was at that time – prior to the period of his Rectorship and his disastrous affiliation with the National Socialists – primarily interested in a phenomenological analysis of tools and artifacts, Dewey related technology to the role of education in democratic societies. And this was just one of his many interests. 

The key to understanding Dewey's work as a contribution to the philosophy of technology – and therefore his social vision – is an appreciation of his contention that all inquiry, or deliberation, or problem solving, is a reconstruction of problematic situations that involves tools and artifacts.  And whether those tools and artifacts are abstract or concrete, tangible or intangible, inquiry is therefore instrumental.  In other words, inquiry is the study of our habits and techniques insofar as they have broken down or become problematic.  Technology, as its name implies, is therefore the logos or study of our habits and techniques – and this in the same sense that biology is the study of, or inquiry into life forms.  Techn-ology is thus for Dewey linked to his famous method of inquiry as it was articulated in his little book How We Think and elsewhere. 

Dewey’s anti-essentialism, and his theory of inquiry, including his critique of technology, thus play an central role in his social vision.  They allow him to avoid two extremes that have vitiated much social theory and practice.  The first is an essentialism that attempts to impose fixed and finished norms and ideals on human experience.  This is the view that ends should dominate means.  The second is the type of relativism popular in some post-modernist quarters, a relativism that replaces referentiality with reflexivity, texts with textuality, and that honors means – which in many cases means style – over ends.   

So Dewey’s root metaphor was technological.  He argued that technology involves more than just tangible tools, machines, and factories.  It also involves the abstract thought and cultural practices that provide the contexts for such things and make them possible.  His view of this matter was based upon his broad characterization of technology, that I have formulated as the invention, development, and cognitive deployment of tools and other artifacts, brought to bear on raw materials and intermediate stock parts, with a view to the resolution of perceived problems. 

This is my gloss on thousands of words that Dewey devoted to the subject of technology.  It is also quite close to his own statement that "'Technology' signifies all the intelligent techniques by which the energies of nature and man are directed and used in satisfaction of human needs; it cannot be limited to a few outer and comparatively mechanical forms.  In the face of its possibilities, the traditional conception of experience is obsolete." (LW.5.270) 

It might be objected that this characterization begs the question, or commits the fallacy of circular argumentation, by identifying technology with "intelligent techniques."  But what Dewey in fact accomplished by putting matters as he did was the very distinction between technology, on the one side, and tools and techniques, on the other, that is reflected in the etymology of the words.  Techniques are what we have with us daily, and we most often employ them transparently, without thinking.  Technology, on the other hand, is the "ology" or "logos" of techniques.  It is the study of techniques as surely as biology is the study of "bios," or living things.  So Dewey's definition does not beg the question so much as it honors word origins and makes a distinction that is worthy of being both understood and maintained. 

Dewey's view of these matters constitutes a radical departure from the epistemology of the modern period of philosophy.  At least since Descartes it had been generally accepted that the central problem of epistemology was the problem of skepticism: how is experience possible and how is it that we can have certain or reliable knowledge of the world?  Although the story of modern epistemology is long and complex, certain of its features stand out in high profile.  As Descartes and other modern philosophers attempted to move out from under the influence of medieval scholastic thought, they faced the difficulty of constructing a foundation for science that offered the same level of certitude that scholasticism had claimed.  Since their move was toward naturalism, however, they were obligated to locate certitude within the realm of nature instead of within the realm of the supernatural. 

The best recourse seemed to Descartes and others to treat certainty as knowledge possessed by an individual thinking mind.  Modern theories of knowledge and belief were thus designed to find ways of depicting states of affairs in a world that was assumed to exist separately from a thinking mind, and this in a way that would insure that such depictions were reliable.  Unfortunately, these Cartesian ways of thinking have persisted even into the 20^th and 21^st centuries.  The varieties of behaviorism advanced by John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner were among what I would describe as futile attempts to deal with Cartesian dualism, and the assaults on skepticism mounted by much current Anglo-American epistemology represent equally futile attempts to come to terms with his skepticism.   Believe it or not, some philosophers are still chewing the cud of attempts to refute skeptics.  The failure of these programs is the result, in my view, of their failure to progress beyond the Cartesian model, to come to terms with a truly social psychology and a theory of knowing that assumes human experience rather than attempting to discover the foundations for it. 

Unlike Descartes, Dewey thought the search for foundations futile.  He preferred to talk about platforms.  In his view, we enter a world filled with various platforms, many of which afford us the opportunities to construct even better platforms.  Sometimes, however, even big and important platforms can tip over and even disappear.  This is an idea that Thomas Kuhn was later develop in his now famous work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 

Like the late-nineteenth-century photographers who attempted to get ever better emulsions for ever more accurate photographs of a world outside and independent of their cameras, these Cartesian epistemologists were, and still are, attempting to get ever more accurate mental representations of a world that they thought, and still think, is outside and independent of the human mind.  They have characterized that world not just as independent of mind, but also as what it is without respect to whether or not it is ever know by one of those independent minds.  Their quest is the quest for certainty, with a full complement of fixed and finished essences. 

Dewey’s experiments in psychology (and for Dewey, psychology is social psychology) led him to the view that this "picture theory" or "spectator theory" of knowledge was deeply flawed.  He reasoned that knowing is not just the capturing of a picture or impression, but an active and experimental involvement of an entire organism (not just a “thinking substance” or even a brain) with the raw materials of its experience in such a manner that tools – including habits and potential habits, such as hypotheses, for example – are brought to bear on those materials and new products are thus formed.  And he thought that the point of making these new products was not to take a more accurate pictorial representation of what was or had been the case (for example, an external "state of affairs"), but rather to deal with felt problems and difficulties in ways that effected their objective resolution.  He thought that inquiry is always launched for the sake of resolving some specific felt difficulty.  When inquiry is successful, he argued, it produces a new product – a new outcome. 

For Dewey, then, there is no such thing as knowledge in general.  Rather, the production of new knowledge in specific cases, ranging from the most quotidian and concrete to the most abstract, involves technology just as surely as does cases of problem-solving in chemical engineering.  This is because we live forward in time in a world that is perilous at best and in continual need of being "tuned up."  We have to keep turning out new knowledge-products, including new tools and methods, if we are to convert conditions that are precarious into situations that are stable, harmonious, and more nearly what we wish them to be.  This is the process that Dewey termed "technology." 

For Dewey, therefore, one of the most important concerns of philosophy was not so much epistemology, or the attempt to deal with the problem of skepticism, but logic, or the theory of inquiry.  Inquiry, he once wrote, is not so much a matter of "grasping antecedently given sureties" as it is a matter of experimentation, or "making sure." (LW.1.123) This remark goes to the heart of Dewey’s social vision. 

Unlike modernist epistemology, Dewey's notion of inquiry emphasizes the use of raw materials and the tools that have been designed for the refinement of those materials.  It also involves other tools whose purpose it is to refine and reconstruct tools that already exist, but that are simpler and more primitive.  Inquiry also requires the production and stockpiling of intermediate parts, among which are relatively secure concepts and objects.  The end or goal of inquiry is products that can be said to be finished in a relative sense of that term, that is, satisfactory until they are challenged by further experience and demonstrated to be in need of being reworked or reconstructed. 

Dewey worked out this extended technological metaphor for inquiry at great length in the introduction to his 1916 Essays in Experimental Logic.  That essay is pervaded by technical figures of speech.  Here is a typical example: 

Hence, while all meanings are derived from things which antedate suggestion or thinking or "consciousness" – not all qualities are equally fitted to be meanings of a wide efficiency, and it is a work of art to select the proper qualities for doing the work.  This corresponds to the working over of raw material into an effective tool.  A spade or a watch-spring is made out of antecedent material, but does not pre-exist as a ready-made tool; and, the more delicate and complicated the work which it has to do, the more art intervenes.  (MW.10.354) 

Dewey wanted to demystify those entities traditionally called "logical objects," "essences," and "ideals," by taking them out of the psychical or metaphysical realms they had occupied in the works of Plato and Frege, for example, and by treating them as so many tools in a toolbox.  These tools include logical connectives and numbers, abstract terms such as "democracy," and essences such as "disease" or "the family."  When it is understood that these entities are tools and the products of tools, then it will also be understood that they are open to reconstruction and reconfiguration.  They will not be honored as essences that are deemed to be fixed and finished for all time.  The conceptual tools called upon by governments, church hierarchies, and yes, even university professors, are thus for Dewey continually open to the need for reconstruction and reconfiguration.  

So Dewey argued that essences and ideals should be treated not as absolute and fixed, but instead as just more artifacts, constructed not so much by inquiry as arising from inquiry.  They are not found within a chain of inference, but are instead the byproducts of inference.  In this way they are like agricultural implements that are developed and improved not as a direct consequence of farming but incidentally, as the byproducts of tilling, planting, and harvesting. 

As Dewey argued in his 1938 Logic, the subject matter and the specific tactical methods of inquiry may be, and most likely are, different from one of these enterprises to the next; but each enterprise nevertheless participates within a more general strategic form of inquiry that he called the "general method of intelligence."  Because his root metaphor was technological, however, Dewey was able to do explicitly what Peirce and James had done only implicitly.  He was able, for example, to reconstruct the important categories of human activity traditionally termed "theory," "practice," and "production." 

He did this by reconstructing the Aristotelian hierarchy of types of knowledge.  Aristotle had lived in a world in which science was still only empirical and not yet experimental.  In other words, Aristotle's science was observational, and not yet instrumental.   Instrumentation was not yet viewed as an essential ingredient in science, nor as a source of insights into the pattern of successful inquiry.  Aristotle therefore held theory, or contemplation, to be the highest form of knowledge and as such he regarded it as superior to practice, which he in turn regarded superior to production. 

But because Dewey's emphasis was on the production of successful outcomes as the end of inquiry, he treated theory and practice as component parts within inquiry and as instruments for further production.  He did not completely invert the Aristotelian schema, however, since he regarded theory and practice as phases of inquiry, whose outcome is the production of something new.  In Dewey's view, theory and practice must cooperate if there is to be success in the production of new knowledge.  This is an important matter that deserves more detailed attention. 

Despite the claims of some of its critics, pragmatism is in the last analysis not a philosophy of action.  In a richer sense than has been developed even by the critical theorists, for example, pragmatism is a philosophy of production.  To put the matter a bit differently, it is a philosophy of "warranted assertibility" in the broadest sense in which what is assertible with warrant is a part of art, historiography, and law, as well as the technosciences.  Productive pragmatism is not interested in action for its own sake, as Bertrand Russell had accused it of being, but in action that operationalizes outcomes with a view to the production of tools and habits of action.  Its concern focuses on the checks and cues that validate the results of the interactions of thinking and other types of behavior as such interactions come to be worked out in the realm of existential affairs. 

Productive pragmatism thus regards the question of primacy regarding theory and praxis as a false and misleading question.  Two of the three great pragmatists of the classical period – Peirce and Dewey – exhibit remarkable unanimity on this matter and James was moving toward their position at the end of his life: the goal of inquiry is not action, but the construction of new and more refined habits, tools, goals, and meanings, in short, new and more refined products.  The term "more refined" is in their work operationalized, contextualized, and provisionalized.  This is more or less what we term "growth," and it is the core of Dewey's educational theory. 

Nowhere did Dewey express the matter more clearly than in his Gifford Lectures, published in 1929 as The Quest for Certainty.  "In reaction against the age-long depreciation of practice in behalf of contemplative knowledge," he wrote, "there is a temptation simply to turn things upside down.  But the essence of pragmatic instrumentalism [what I have called productive pragmatism] is to conceive of both knowledge [or theory] and practice as means of making goods – excellencies of all kinds – secure in experienced existence." (LW.4.30 n.1.) 

In the hands of the productive pragmatist, then, theory and practice become equal partners as phases of inquiry.  Working together, they orient themselves not just to the analysis of the past or present, but to plans for the future.  Like good business partners, they are always negotiating with one another about the feasibility, design, cost, and marketability of potential products.  Theory keeps an eye on practice, making sure that options are kept open,  that imagination enters into the design stage, and that potential products are coherent with the larger goals of the firm.  Practice keeps an eye on theory, making sure that design and production goals are not too ambitious or too fanciful, that products correspond to the needs of the market, that inventories of products and spare parts are maintained, and that the cash flow is sufficient to start the next project.  Together, theory and practice engage in a conversation that constantly adjusts means to ends-in-view, and ends-in-view to the means at hand.  The goal of the partnership is not merely action, but production.  The goal of the partnership is continual adjustment to changing situations by means of the development of enhanced tools and new products. 

But I can imagine someone saying, "what about norms"?  Doesn't this leave Dewey with an unstable and untenable form of relativism?  Whence arise the norms by means of which we judge our tools, techniques, and other products, including those that are social and political?  Dewey addressed this question in the introduction to his 1916 Essays in Experimental Logic.  Just as in the case of agricultural practice, they are formed not by farming, but from farming.  Ceteris paribus, the norms of democratic life are formed not by democratic processes, but arise  from the democratic processes.  The norms of democratic life are the byproducts of democratic life as it is constructively pursued. Norms arise neither from the iron laws of history nor even from the specific hardware or materials of technology.  They arise through the interaction of theory and practice as it provides intelligent answers to perceived problems. 

This interaction between theory and practice is, in Dewey's view, the basis not only for successful everyday life, and for the technosciences, but for social and political life as well.  More specifically, Dewey defined democracy as "belief in the ability of human experience to generate the aims and methods by which further experience will grow in ordered richness." (LW. 14.229)  Democracy is therefore not the maintenance of an historical institution.  It is not a particular form of government (much less the export of some specific form of government from one location to another).  It is not work toward a fixed goal or essence.  It is instead a method of experimentation, a method of production, a method of education, or what amounts to the same thing, a method of growth of individuals and communities.  Dewey wanted to convince us that methods of democracy, like the methods of the technosciences in their broadest sense, involve "the faith that the process of experience is more important than any special result attained, so that special results achieved are of ultimate value only as they are used to enrich and order the ongoing process.  Since the process of experience is capable of being educative, faith in democracy is all one with faith in experience and education." (LW.14.229) 

What did Dewey mean by experience in this connection?  He told us that it is "that free interaction of individual human beings with surrounding conditions, especially the human surroundings, which develops and satisfies need and desire by increasing knowledge of things as they are. . . . Need and desire – out of which grow purpose and direction of energy – go beyond what exists, and hence beyond knowledge, beyond science [as body of knowledge].  They continually open the way into the unexplored and unattained future." (LW.14.229) 

In Dewey's view, then, one of the many paths to democratization involves the introduction into political and social life of the types of techniques of experimentation, discovery, and production that have proved so successful in the various technoscientific disciplines.  These paths to democratization are committed neither to any particular institution, to any particular historical practice, nor to any particular set of beliefs (although they do rule out some institutions, historical practices, and sets of beliefs as having failed experimental tests).  Neither are they committed to any predetermined goal (unless that goal be described as the growth of individuals and communities).  Because of their intimate relationship to the technosciences and education, these pragmatic paths do not seek any particular result.  They call instead for the application of methods of adjustment that have proven successful in the various technoscientific disciplines, and in education (insofar as they have been tried out), but that have yet to be applied in many areas of human life.  Such methods are open-ended in terms of their potential for their own (methodological) self-development and self-correction. 

For Dewey, the type of education that is the consequence of this productive pragmatism is neither indoctrination on the one side, nor haphazard self-expression on the other.  It involves instead the interaction –or transaction – between teacher and learner – between expert and non-expert, if you will – in ways that alter and enrich the experience of both.  It is this feature of education – not just in the schools but in a life-long curriculum – that makes it such a potent agent for social reform. 

In the broad sense in which Dewey uses the terms, therefore, democracy is the name of the method of inquiry which, when applied to political association, enriches and makes worthwhile the life of each associated individual and therefore enriches the associated whole.  And it is only as such political associations themselves become richer and more meaningful that other manifestations of technological culture will achieve balance. 

For Dewey, the paths to democratization lead through the schools, through the local newspaper and the national journal of opinion, and through various levels of government.  They lead through the workplace, through the places where religious and civic groups gather, and through the courts.   They lead to more, not less technology, once technology is understood as the intelligent production of new tools, including conceptual and ideational ones, for dealing with problematic situations.  They lead not to the cheap talk about individualism that is most often a cover for retreat from common action (as in some forms of libertarianism), but to a true commitment at every level of government to fostering a true individuality that enables children and adults alike to undertake a lifelong quest to develop their capacities to the fullest extent, whatever those capacities may be. 

For Dewey, technology is a rich blend of theory and practice that eventuates in new and improved tools for living and out of which new norms develop.  It involves improved taxonomies of perception as inquirential skills are improved.  Linguistic and other types of analysis, together with practice of all sorts, constitute phases of inquiry, but are neither separately nor conjointly its equivalent.  For Dewey, technology has to do with ideals and goals and ends-in-view in so far as they are transformed by means of intelligence.  For Dewey, differentiation between tangible and intangible tools is a functional, not an ontological matter.  When such differentiation is required, it does not exist in re but in inquiry. 

What I find so attractive in Dewey's work is his deep commitment to three ideas about technology and democratization, or what in a 1939 essay he called "political technology."  The first is that democratic reform is not a matter of distinguishing technological artifacts from the ways in which we use them, because our technological artifacts are the ways we use them.  The second is that there are no recipes for democratic reform, nor could there be.  Reform is not a goal but a process that takes on new dimensions and new import at each stage of its development and whose outcome can therefore never be predicted.  And third, continuing democratic reform is more or less what Dewey meant by education.   In these three ideas, I believe, we come very close to Dewey’s social vision. 

Let me now take a moment to turn even more specifically to the problems associated with education.  Dewey's essay "The Sources of a Science of Education," published in 1929, provides major insights into the essence of his educational program. 

One of his most difficult and most misunderstood ideas may be found in that essay.  It is also one of his most crucial ideas, provided that we want to understand his blueprint for reconstructing education.  He put the matter with such subtlety, however, that at first glance his statement appears disarmingly simple and it is easy to miss his point. 

He wrote that "education is itself a process of discovering what values are worthwhile and are to be pursued as objectives.  To see what is going on and to observe the results of what goes on so as to see their further consequences in the process of growth, and so on indefinitely, is the only way in which the value of what takes place can be judged.  To look to some outside source to provide aims is to fail to know what education is as an ongoing process."  (LW.5.38) 

There are several things worth noting about this remark. 

First, it does not say, and in fact denies, that social conditions are to be the sources of such discovery.  The same is true of educators themselves.  Social conditions, far from providing the ultimate norms for valuation, are among the things that education is called upon to evaluate.  And even the ideas and ideals of the educator himself or herself, expressed in the form of syllabi, lesson plans, or directives, must be evaluated in terms of the broader educational processes that Dewey here characterizes. 

Second, Dewey's remark implies that neither the methods nor the contents of the technosciences are directly applicable to education in the absence of concrete, experienced problems.  In other words, the methods and contents of the sciences are instrumental to education, and not its equivalent.  Allegedly scientific tests, such as those that are administered to assess personality or intelligence, are not where education begins, even though they may be useful educational tools when utilized on an individual basis.  Nor does education begin with instructions about how to take standardized tests (though it does sometimes seem to end there). 

Third, Dewey's statement sets out a method of constructing norms that is not restricted to classroom education.  The method described in this passage is repeated throughout Dewey's work.  In his 1916 presentation to the Columbia Philosophy Club, for example, published later as "Logical Objects," in the introduction to his 1916 Essays in Experimental Logic, and, in fact, in every one of his major works, he emphasized this point.  Norms that function in the service of evaluation are generated not as a direct result of the practice of education, but arise as byproducts of it.  This is a central feature of Dewey's instrumentalism. 

 In what remains of my time I want to discuss the first of these points in more detail.  

Social conditions as such cannot be the source of educational values.  This is true in two important senses.  Wherever prevailing practices determine educational values, then education becomes little more than a matter of applying the results of surveys and polls.  (Of course surveys and polls may in fact have great value for educators – but in a different sense than the one just described.)  If social conditions as such were the source of educational values, then the values entrenched or enshrined in a community would need only to be sampled scientifically and then brought into the classroom to be reported, rehearsed, and absorbed. 

Where educational practice of this type is honored, of course, there is the continual danger of disagreements regarding which of the community's values will be accepted – and indeed which of the many communities that make up the wider society shall even be permitted to assert its own values as candidates for acceptance.  This is precisely the type of education against which Dewey argued so forcefully during his decade at the University of Chicago, from, 1894 to 1904.  He continually reminded his readers that rote practice without opportunities to innovate through creative hypothesis-formation and testing fails to be educative: it is little more than indoctrination and initiation into the traditions of existing  norms. 

If social conditions were accepted as the source of values in a second, alternative sense of the term, then educational values might be imported from lists and catalogues of traditional "virtues," to mention just one course of action that happens to have been urged upon us by William Bennett, a former U. S. Secretary of Education who has published a "Book of Virtues."  Or perhaps the "great ideas" of the past would be taught as adequate guides for future actions.  Education would then in the main consist of reading "the great books" and applying their lessons. 

Of course existing "social conditions" must be understood before they can be criticized, and the great books must be read before their applicability to current issues can be ascertained.  Dewey was clear enough on this point: what he termed education required that the student should acquire increasingly broad perspectives with respect to received values. 

Dewey's efforts to teach geopolitics at his elementary school, for example, began with the study of fibers and foodstuffs.  The pupils grew vegetables, which they cooked and ate.  They produced cloth from cotton and wool.  Then Dewey and his students worked outward to the study of history and trade, and went from there to take up the interaction of these factors with the geography and political organizations of particular world regions. 

During the past few minutes I have attempted to suggest some of the reasons why Dewey's ideas are now enjoying a renaissance, what kinds of ideas were at the heart of his project, and what that project can offer us as citizens of the 21^st century.  In doing so I have invited you to consider the implications of Dewey’ global outreach for our new century.

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