Dewey's Concept Of Community: A Last Third Of The Twentieth Century Perspective

Abstract

John Dewey belongs to a tradition in the west whose members have attempted to explain how the breakdown of community has occurred. Although Dewey is not a romantic nor a conservative, he acknowledges his debt to their nineteenth century analyses. Dewey argued that the school and the greater society are inextricably one; therefore, the kind of school he favored was dependent upon the building of a democratic community. Dewey's analysis of the disintegrative power of bourgeois liberalism and its inability to replace the synthesis of medieval civilization goes a long way toward explaining the educational, social, political and moral crises which afflict much of the modern industrial west, and especially America.