The ‘liberal utopia’ presented by Richard Rorty in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is a unique attempt to address the ancient problem of the relationship between individual and society or, in Rorty's terms, that between the private and the public. This article examines Rorty's influential conception of education and asks: can his book be regarded as utopian? Is it possible to establish an education for democracy on his ‘postmodern’ premises? I conclude that Rorty's attempt to separate private from public and to promote a fusion between irony and solidarity is tantamount to founding human existence on an aestheticising orientation. This entangles Rorty in self‐contradiction and raises educational and political problems which remain unresolved.
Dewey declares that the teacher’s calling is to be ‘the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God’. This apparently religious declaration seems inconsistent with Dewey’s philosophical position. An examination of Dewey’s writings on religious issues reveals that his religious faith is a secular belief in democratic ideals, and that his teacher’s alleged religious mission is in fact a worldly one. This article claims that Dewey’s religious conception is a pragmatic conception designed to answer the social needs of American society in the 1930s, and that it presents no adequate solution to the problems of our contemporary world.
The article examines the educational interpretations given to Nietzsche throughout the three last decades in English and in German, compares the educational images of Nietzsche portrayed in these interpretations and elaborates on the conclusions resulting from this comparison. Whereas Nietzsche appears in Anglo‐American educational interpretations as a democratic and humane educator par excellence, German interpreters not only disqualify him as an educator, but practically erase his philosophy from educational theory. The comparison of these interpretations manifests the problem of the relationship between ideology and philosophy of education.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.