1. A Travelling Classic On the centennial anniversary of the publication of Dewey’s Democracy and Education (New York, Macmillan, 1916) this symposium (including contributions from European and non European scholars) explores both the epoch-making significance and the topicality of the ideas in Dewey’s masterpiece for the development of European educational reflection. Democracy and Education has frequently been represented as a turning point in educational discourse, inaugurating a radically...

Did John Dewey’s ‘new philosophy of education’ really try to dissolve the whole block of tradition or is his debt namely to educational core-concepts of neo-humanism deeper than he was prepared to acknowledge? After some general remarks on the process of reception as productive re-adaptation and its implication for historiography I will deal with Dewey’s own contexts that shape the interpretative grid through which he receives the tradition. Two case studies attempt to illustrate both continuity and discontinuity with a specific (...) part of this tradition, namely two critical perspectives within German neo-humanism: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Johann Friedrich Herbart. (shrink)