Education, not democracy? the apolitical dewey

In German-speaking countries, John Dewey came to be considered a school reformer, an advocate of the project method and as the propagator of a cognitivistic psychology of learning. His ideas on socio-political reform, on the other hand, were ignored, partly intentionally, partly due to a lack of familiarity with them in detail. His major pedagogical work, Democracy and Education received little attention. In what follows, this selective view of Dewey is discussed mainly on the basis of internal pedagogical theoretical positions. © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers.