Accomplishing Modernity: Dewey's Inquiry, Childhood and Philosophy

Against the backdrop of two remarks by Martha Nussbaum on Dewey and Socratic education (which can be connected with a statement by Matthew Lipman about his going beyond Dewey in a Deweyan way), the paper explores what seems to be a sort of ambivalence in Dewey's educational device. On the one hand, by recognizing children as inquirers and the attitude of childhood as "very near to the attitude of the scientific mind", Dewey infringes on the modern (Cartesian-Kantian) pattern which separates childhood knowledge and reflective thinking. Such a move represents a more radical Copernican revolution in comparison with the Kantian one and a way of accomplishing modernity in that, by reformulating the relationships between experience and thinking, it allows Dewey to recognize the child as an epistemic agent and at the same time as a pivot of the educational process. On the other hand, despite this valorisation of children's epistemic powers and despite his emphasis on philosophy as a general theory of education, Dewey failed to mobilise philosophical inquiry as a way of educating children for thinking. In the final part of the paper some possible explanations are advanced about why in Dewey philosophy does not take on the educational role that it will have in Lipman.