John Dewey and the New Left, 1960-1988

ABSTRACT

In this intellectual history, the author traces the refashioning, fall, and re-emergence of the reception of Dewey’s work between 1960 and 1988 by student-centred radicals, de-schooling advocates, neo-Marxists, critical educators, and feminist pedagogues—scholars collectively known as the New Left. New Left scholars rejected the assimilationist, bureaucratic, and elitist ideas of the 1940s and 1950s and espoused existential, participatory, and localized educational alternatives. Educators cast Dewey as a subversive in the 1960s, a corporate liberal in the 1970s, and a critical and feminist educator in the 1980s. Many of the argumentative strands of the New Left ignored one another and, as a result, scholars have failed to fully address some of the unresolved ambiguities and paradoxes in Dewey’s work.

KEYWORDS:

• John Dewey
• New Left
• critical pedagogy
• feminism
• curriculum history

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Elsewhere, Giroux described the ‘radical education’ he espoused in his work to be ‘a new language that went beyond the earlier critical tradition of Dewey and his colleagues.’ See Giroux, H. (1988). The hope of radical education: A conversation with Henry Giroux. Journal of Education 70 (2), 91–101.

2. Lagemann traced her appreciation of Dewey to her mentor, Lawrence Cremin, and she even thanked her son for reminding her that ‘there is more to life than John Dewey’ in the preface to her most cited work, Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Education Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), xvii.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thomas Fallace

Thomas Fallace is Professor of Education at William Paterson University of New Jersey. He is the author of four books. His most recent book is In the Shadow of Authoritarianism: American Education in the Twentieth Century (Teachers College Press, 1918). He researches social studies education, curriculum history and the history of ideas in education.