A Companion to John Dewey's "Democracy and Education"

As the title suggests, this is a companion to John Dewey’s great Democracy and Education, which was first published in 1916, written by esteemed philosopher of education D.C. Phillips. Phillips opens this charming and sometimes funny book with his teacher training in 1958 and how baffled he was at the time by Dewey’s notoriously opaque though foundational work. As he returned to Dewey over the years, however, "some of the originally murky passages began to move into focus. I realized they were expressing important and extremely interesting, though often debatable, philosophical insights about matters such as how humans gain reliable knowledge, about mind in its relation to the body, about the relation between the individual and his or her community, about how moral progress can occur.” Nearly fifty years later, Phillips’s copies of Democracy and Education were filled with marginal notes, and he realized they constituted the skeleton for a companion to Democracy and Education like the one he had desired so many years earlier. This companion contains discussions of every chapter of D and E. It is not meant as a summary or replacement of the book, but designed to make the journey of discovery into D and E even more exciting and a thousand times clearer than it would be if undertaken alone.