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Michael G. Festl (ed.), John Dewey and Contemporary Challenges to Democratic Education, Routledge, 2024, 194pp., $144.00 (hbk) ISBN 9781032756288.
Reviewed by Matthew Festenstein, University of York
Michael Festl has edited a stimulating and wide-ranging collection of essays on the relevance of John Dewey’s philosophy of education, which should engage anyone with a stake in Dewey’s social and political philosophy, the philosophy of education, and what are nervously packaged as “current challenges” to democracy—one of the challenges being deep and violent dissensus around how to describe these challenges.
The collection is organised into three parts. In the first, on “Dewey’s Theory of Education: Then and Now”, Jeff Frank discusses the perceived threatening character of Dewey’s so-called “method of intelligence”. Maura Striano explores the relationship between Dewey and his friend and collaborator, Jane Addams. Filippo Sanna puts Dewey in conversation with the perfectionist ethics of Stanley Cavell.
In part II, “Dewey and Contemporary…
