This article gives a historical-philosophical overview of three generations of pragmatist thinking centered around the question of democracy. It serves as an introduction and contextualization to the papers that develop a third generation pragmatic point of view in the remainder of the special issue. The perspective is from one American-trained…

Fear is not the first feature of educational experience associated with the best-known progressive educational theorists--Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Dewey, and Paolo Freire. But each of these important thinkers did, in fact, have something substantive to say about how fear functions in the processes of learning and growth. Andrea English and…

In this essay, Richard Smith observes that being a parent, like so much else in our late-modern world, is required to become ever more efficient and effective, and is increasingly monitored by the agencies of the state, often with good reason given the many recorded instances of child abuse and cruelty. However, Smith goes on to argue, this begins…

In this essay, Robert Davis argues that much of the moral anxiety currently surrounding children in Europe and North America emerges at ages and stages curiously familiar from traditional Western constructions of childhood. The symbolism of infancy has proven enduringly effective over the last two centuries in associating the earliest years of…

In this essay David Bridges argues that since most families choose to realize their responsibility for the major part of their children's education through state schools, then the way in which the state constructs parents' relation with these schools is one of its primary levers on parenting itself. Bridges then examines the way in which…

This paper presents a critical examination of the work of Christopher Lasch. The individual's growing sense of helplessness, the development of a "minimal self," the impact of mass culture on education, Lasch's proposals to resolve the culture crisis, and the relevance of Lasch's views to the reform of social education are addressed. (MT)

This paper explores the impact of John Dewey on the field of educational psychology. Dewey raised issues and ideas, such as the role of context and the reapproximation of knowledge, that would come to haunt education and psychology for the next century. And yet soon after the turn of the twentieth century, Dewey abandoned psychology and redefined…

This essay examines how themes emerging in the writing of New Left thinkers resemble those espoused by traditional American cultural conservatives. The views of Donald Davidson, a representative of the Southern Agrarian movement, concerning industrialization in the United States and the role of progressive education in socialization are discussed.…