John Dewey’s willingness to endorse a remedial form of education for African American students offers us a rare glimpse of the racial assumptions underlying Dewey’s educational philosophy. By considering a variety of clues — Dewey’s silences on racial equality, his understanding of race and racial progress, and his respective prescriptions for European American and African American students — Frank Margonis offers in this essay a speculative case suggesting that the visionary child‐centered education for which Dewey was most well‐known was intended for European American students and not African American students. Because of the racial assumptions operative in Dewey’s educational philosophy, Margonis suggests, Dewey’s fundamental conceptions of the “student” and “classroom community” would best be abandoned by educational philosophers hoping to write philosophy that serves all students.
This manuscript argues that two systems of metaphors have set the parameters governing the national debate over educational choice; proponents have relied heavily on laissez-faire metaphors and critics have relied on communitarian metaphors. The former invoke visions of free individuals whose actions are made harmonious via a beneficent market; the latter appeal to the civic role schools have in creating unified communities and a national citizenry. Proponents of choice have argued that markets will make schools more efficient and egalitarian, whereas critics of choice have suggested that privatization may further fragment the body politic. Once choice proposals are considered in the light of institutional racism, it appears that further segregation is a likely result of privatization. Discussions of choice proposals without the systematic consideration of economic and racial inequality threaten to legitimate the most drastic educational inequalities in our society.
Navajo women's historically problematic relation to public schools might be best understood by considering the role that matrilineal networks play in giving Navajo women a place of respect as mothers and daughters-+ life course to which schools contribute little. Navajo women's commitment to cooperative family relations is sharply at odds with contemporary educational practice and much educational thought, which assumes the desirability of an individualistic lifestyle and is devoted to helping students adopt a middle-class orientation.
In contrast to educational policies in the U.S., which assume an individualistic path of success and promote the assimilation of students, this essay argues for pedagogies where teachers focus upon facilitating the development of strong relationships en route to creating exciting educational environments and fertile contexts for social justice movements. Powerful teachers model the process whereby a commitment to appreciating the perspectives of individual students is combined with the orchestration of a dynamic intersubjective context, because such contexts call out the strongest performances of individuals. Viewing educational events in terms of the patterns and rhythms that transpire in a particular social fields allows educators ways to create powerful educational environments even in neocolonial contexts that pit students and teachers against one another. Viewing educational events as social fields also allows us to understand how the common classroom, which focuses each student on the material in front of them, creates impotent individuals who dissociate themselves from others.Keywords Relational educational philosophy Á Student-centered pedagogy Á Neocolonial educational contexts As an educational philosopher situated in the United States, I have sought to develop a counter-hegemonic collectivist pedagogical orientation devoted to creating exciting educational environments and fertile contexts for social justice movements. Seeking healthy collectivities in the U.S. is complicated by the nation's cut-throat economy combined with its colonial history-both of which pit individuals and groups against one another. A pervasive culture of competition renders individuals isolated and impotent, and the nation's colonial history has left us with deep relational wounds, separating people who have endured forms of colonial attack-such as American Indians, African Americans, and Latinas/os-from European descendant peoples. The fault lines of class and race predict
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