Public schools are functionally provided through structural arrangements such as government funding, but public schools are achieved in substance, in part, through local governance. In this essay, Kathleen Knight Abowitz explains the bifocal nature of achieving public schools; that is, that schools are both subject to the unitary Public compact of constitutional principles as well as to the more local engagements with multiple publics. Knight Abowitz sketches this bifocal nature, exploring both the unitary ideal and its parameters, as well as (...) the less understood forms of multiple, organic publics that come into being in response to localized problems in schools or districts. These publics often fail to realize their potential in the development of increased capacity for enhanced teaching and learning. The essay ultimately points to a practical application: that educational leadership of all types, and with some very specific kinds of habits and skills, is needed to help achieve public schools. (shrink)

At current rates, almost all U.S. public universities could reach a point of zero state subsidy within the next fifty years. What is a public university without public funding? In this essay, Kathleen Knight Abowitz considers the future of public universities, drawing upon the analysis provided in John Dewey's Democracy and Education. Knight Abowitz conducts an initial institutional analysis through two broad prisms: that of the political landscape that authorizes universities as public institutions, and that of the present political–economic context (...) of public education in general and public universities in particular. Dewey's conception of democratic education is then explored; his arguments regarding aims, experience, thinking, and social intelligence provide important tools for imagining the democratic futures of public universities today. (shrink)

In assembling scholars for the John Dewey Symposium for the 2015 Annual Meeting in Chicago, I sought thinkers who would critically engage Maxine Greene’s philosophy of democratic education. The recent death of Greene, long-time member of the Society, friend and teacher of many members, and John Dewey Lecturer in 1988, had left a powerful absence among educational philosophers, and many had honored her legacy with loving tributes. The Symposium’s aim was to bring together scholars in critical engagement with her work.Greene (...) had interpreted, critiqued, and in some ways enlarged Deweyan philosophy for much of her career. Key to her democratic educational thought was the concept of the social imagination:We... (shrink)

Thomas Friedman’s best-selling The World is Flat has exerted much influence in the west by providing both an accessible analysis of globalisation and its economic and social effects, and a powerful cultural metaphor for globalisation. In this review, we more closely examine Friedman’s notion of the social contract, the moral centre of his hopeful vision of a globalised world. While Friedman’s social contract holds a more generous view of social and state obligation than his neoliberal economic analysis might otherwise allow, (...) his fallacious assumptions about education rest on poorly argued claims about the nature of human beings, the proper aims of schooling, and meanings of justice in a globalised world. (shrink)

“When citizens can associate only in certain cases, they regard association as a rare and singular process, and they hardly think of it. When you allow them to associate freely in everything, they end up seeing in association the universal and, so to speak, unique means that men can use to attain the various ends that they propose. Each new need immediately awakens the idea of association. The art of association then becomes, as I said above, the mother science; everyone (...) studies it and applies it”When Alexis De Tocqueville visited the United States from France in the 1830s, he noted that many voluntary associations existed among citizens throughout the American landscape, something that did not exist in the... (shrink)