Genocide, Diversity, and John Dewey's Progressive Education

Abstract

This article discusses how John Dewey's “Report and Recommendation upon Turkish Education” (published in 1924) and some of Dewey's related travel narratives reflect “civilizing mission” imperatives and involve multiple utopian operations that have not yet attracted political‐philosophical attention. Such critical attention would reveal Dewey's misjudgments concerning issues of diversity, geopolitics, and global justice. Based on an ethicopolitical reading of the relevant sources, the aim here is to expose developmentalist and colonial vestiges, to raise searching questions, and to obtain a heightened view on the stakes of Dewey's utopianism and progressive pragmatism. The article concludes that the acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide constitutes a major challenge to Dewey scholarship.

Inclusion in Education and in Public Debates on Education

“…Consider, for instance, membership in circles and aspirations to join specific circles: we find references to developing countries joining the circle of the civilized countries even in John Dewey. Dewey employed precisely this vocabulary of civilizing mission in support of a development that would make a foreign nation eventually merit inclusion in the 'civilized world' (Papastephanou, 2016 and.…”

Learning by Undoing, Democracy and Education, and John Dewey, the Colonial Traveler

“…Elsewhere [9] I discuss Dewey's 'Report and Recommendations' [10] (henceforth Report) in much more detail. Here I will sum up my points.…”

“…'Words such as these that indirectly justify ethnic cleansing still take my breath away twenty years later', says Marsoobian, referring to his initial reading of Dewey's texts back in the 90s [5] (p. 15). Due to deep affinities of his political and intellectual milieu with colonial mindsets (and other reasons which I have indicated in [9]), Dewey had so much given in to propaganda and had so unquestioningly accepted what he heard through his own experience of 'learning by doing' that he ended up condoning processes of turning peoples into refugees (in that specific case). Likewise, our question today should not only be how to integrate refugees but rather through what processes one becomes a refugee and whether she would rather prefer to have our help so as not to become a refugee in the first place instead of having no option but to be integrated [17].…”

“…Was it open-mindedness that led Dewey astray when he failed to see the Armenian massacre as it was, that is, as genocide [9]? In addition to his modernizing dreams, Dewey entertained some developmentalist and colonial views that mirror strong cultural affinities with the new Turkish state's determination to preserve imperial territoriality and control over subaltern populations at all costs.…”