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John Dewey Society 2015 Symposium

The Legacy of Maxine Greene: Critical Engagements
with Her Philosophy of Democratic Education

Liberalism and Beyond: Toward a

Public Philosophy of Education

Maxine Greene
The educational philosophers who wrote in The Social Frontier dealt unabash-
edly with problems arising out of the social conflicts of their time. Their universe
of discourse opened outward to the turbulent domains of politics, economics,
and the ideational changes occurring all·around. Fundamental to their concern
was the question of liberty in its relation to equality and social control. Rejecting
18th century atomistic notions, persistent dualisms, and the association of liberal-
ism with laissez-faire ideas, they sought a view that “combined equality and liberty
as coordinate ideals . . .”1 Because this placed them in a position of opposition to
what they called “finance-capitalism,” they then had to confront the problem of
how socioeconomic structures could be changed without violent revolution and
the loss of freedom. Unless those structures were changed, many of them believed,
democratic education would be inconceivable. And democratic education, focused
on the development of critical thinking and the release of human power for choice
and action, was necessary if democracy itself was to be preserved.
For them, the “bewitchment of thought”2 that endangered democracy was
not due mainly to conceptual or linguistic confusions. They attributed it largely
to the perpetuation of old pieties, outmoded “individualist” views of American
society. The lags, the fixities of thought, were functions of a deficient status quo;
they prevented people from redefining social goals. Centering their attention on
the demands of an “age of collectivism,” the contributors to the Frontier showed
no particular interest in what existentialists called the “human condition,” nor in
“Being,” nor in the life of consciousness. They inhabited a world in which human
intelligence, open communication, and cooperative action presumably could be
counted upon to solve the major problems facing humankind. Differ though they
might on political and social issues (the relevance of Marxism, the significance
of class interest in America, the meanings of social reconstruction), they shared
a range of fundamental commitments, many having to do with educational phi-
losophy. Philosophy, as they viewed it, was not only the “theory of education;”3 its
function was to direct educational practice and to shape its purposes. Since edu-
cation was primarily a social enterprise of the moment for the future of society,

Education and Culture 32 (1) (2016): 41-51 41

42 M. Greene
educational philosophy’s basic concerns could not but be social and political.
Indeed, its aims ought to be identical with those of democracy.
Dewey, Childs, Kilpatrick,. Brameld, Rugg, Bode, Counts, and the oth-
ers were writing in a period of economic depression and transition, and in an
atmosphere of precarious reforms.They were writing, too, at a time of fascist
expansion and aggression abroad, culminating in the Second World War. The
journal did not last long enough for them to have to come publicly to terms with
the bombing of Hiroshima and the threat of nuclear obliteration. Although they
knew
- about the existence of the German concentration camps, they appeared
not to be familiar with. the Nazis’ invention of a “Final Solution,” the scientifically
planned and executed extermination of millions of Jews. There was an occasional
noting of signs in the wind with regard to the misuse of industrial power; but
most contributors did not anticipate the consequences of science’s new links to
technical undertakings (as at Los Alamos) nor to large-scale industrial produc-
tion. Still optimistic about the scientific method and attitude and what they
could achieve, they did not predict the domination by depersonalized technol-
ogy of almost every area of social life; nor did they imagine the phenomenon
of what Jacques Ellul was to call “self-augmenting technique.”4 There is little evi-
dence that they confronted the influence of positivistic thinking and the split
between empirical and moral considerations such thinking entailed. Moreover,
although there were occasional comments about thought control by means of
media, they were in no position to predict the effect television and radio would
have on thinking as well as discourse; they could not have conceived what has
been described as the “industrialization of the mind.”5 Perhaps most important,
they did not (Dewey aside) see the overwhelming of a potentially “articulate
public”6 by a mass of “job-holders and consumers,”7 including the members of
trade unions on who so many rested their hopes. Although, in the first issue,
Kilpatrick drew attention to the emergence of “a highly complex urban and
industrial order” marked by “a common dependence on a far-flung productive
and distributive mechanism,” the contributors did not appear to see the advent
of a bureaucratized, overly “administered” society, in which the individualism
they lamented would be replaced by large-scale corporate planning and control.
Events of such magnitude could not but transform the ground on which
people attempted to “do” educational philosophy; and it is difficult to believe
that, as the new realities entered consciousness, educational philosophers
became less and less interested in the relation between education and the cul-
ture at large. In part, it was a response to often contemptuous criticism by the
conservative scholarly community; in part, it was a desire to “profession­ alize”
and ma ke more rigorous aspects of what was called “educational foundations.”
In any case, many members of the post-war generation of educational phi-
losophers had been trained in academic philosophy; and academic philosophy,

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 Liberalism and Beyond: Towards a Public Philosophy of Education 43
in their time, was being affected and often remade by the influence of British
analytic philo­sophy. The wide-ranging “polity” addressed by American think-
ers from Emerson to Dewey was gradually replaced by a version of what the
British thought of as a rational community, mainly composed of university
graduates (almost always men).
Philosophical systems were questioned; so were efforts to draw implications for
practice from a variety of philosophical “movements.” With the major focus on clari-
fication and criticism of terminology, arguments, “slogans,” on what Israel Scheffler
was to call “the language of education,”8 philosophers refused to speak of themselves
as guides to classroom practice. Such discussions as D. J. O’Connor’s, differentiating
the use of “theory” in the natural sciences from the use of the same term with regard
to. education,9 seemed to invalidate the treatment of philosophy as “theory of edu-
cation.” In time, such thinkers as R. S. Peters, sharply distinguishing the concept
of “education” from “schooling,”10 made it suspect to speak of education as a way of
bringing about social reforms. (Dewey, of course, had earlier made the distinction
between education and schooling;11 but, for him, “education” was a larger and more
encompassing concept. It referred to the multiple efforts to transmit knowledge and
values throughout the culture, not in the specialized atmosphere of the school alone.)
Analytic philosophers, also, were continually reminded of the Humean insistence
on the autonomy of the sphere of values; and fewer and fewer were inclined to draw
conclusions about what “ought” to be from descriptions of what “was” in the social
domain. As for the relatively few .who ventured into modern Continental philoso-
phy: the tendency was to focus on the individual’s quest for freedom, authenticity,
and meaning, rather than on broader struggles for social change.
But, even as educational philosophers were divorcing themselves from the
problems of public schools, a serious erosion of faith in those schools had already
begun. The climate for it was created by right-wing attacks on their “mediocrity”
and distorted images of “progressivism” that filled the public prints. The reports of
near-illiteracy among draftees in the Second World War added to the disillusionment;
and there was little surprise when, at the time of the Sputnik panic, a group of aca-
demic scholars assumed responsibility for curriculum reform. The perceived role of
the school as an agent of social reconstruction was arbitrarily replaced· by the view
that the school’s .prime function was to contribute to national security and the sur-
passing of the USSR in scientific and engineering expertise. Cognitive “excellence”
became the- watchword; the promotion of individual talent, the overriding goal.
In the Sixties, with the election of Lyndon B._ Johnson to the Presidency,
there seemed (for a moment) to be a resurgence of the Frontier’s hopes and
ideals. Responding, in part, to the Civil Rights movement and the sudden vis-
ibility of the “invisible poor,” the reforms and remedies made possible by the
Elementary and Secondary Education Act were proposed as modes of “equal-
izing,” “compensating,” instituting overdue social change. In certain respects,

Volume 32 (1) 2016

44 M. Greene
all this represented an expression of the “liberalism” John Dewey and his col-
leagues had in mind. The failures, the cut-offs that followed after were due, in
part, to the heavy invest­ment in the Vietnamese War; but they were also testi-
mony (as the Reverend Martin Luther King and others made clear) to the fact,
made very explicit by The Social Frontier, that socioeconomic structures had
themselves to be changed if liberalism was to be achieved.
The contributors to the Frontier, it must be said, ventured occasionally into
discussions of civil liberties, but said little or nothing about the racial problem in
America or how it related to the work of public schools. There was mention of “the
Negro” on occasion, of discrimination and exclusion, of the need on the part of the
“Negro” to call his plight to the attention of the public. (No mention was made of
what is now called the “gender gap” and the discrimination against women that
constituted another threat to equity.) In any case, the Frontier writers neither saw the
treatment of excluded groups as the test of democratic education’s claims; nor did
they anticipate the ways in which efforts to achieve equity would further erode con-
fidence in what education could achieve. Segregation and discriminatory practices
were offensive enough. As serious was the sudden recognition that school reforms,
even when properly subsidized, were not themselves going to insure thoroughgoing
equality or repair the damage done by decades of exploitation and exclusion. Again,
major structural transformations were needed; and no polity existed (nor political
party, nor nationwide movement) ready to bring them about. Along with the anger
and disillusionment felt by the reformers and the defenders of civil rights, there was
a spurt of latent resentment in the face of regulations aimed at effecting school inte-
gration and improvement. Racism and self-interest became manifest everywhere as
busing arrangements were legislated, open enrollment programs, affirmative action,
and the like. The tension between a demand for equality and the affirmation of per-
sonal liberty took on new forms as thousands of white parents objected to federal
requirements that seemed to cancel out their right to self-determination. What fol-
lowed, among such groups, were well-publicized rejections of public education.
“Free” white schools were established, to be followed by “Christian” or “funda-
mentalist” schools set up by people intent on protecting their parochial interests
against the incursions of integra­tion and (later) “secular humanism.”
In the period of school reform and its slow disintegration, “romantic” and
“revisionist” critiques of the public school began to appear. The Frontier writers had
dealt with threats to the school by conservatives, business interests, and such groups
as the American Legion. They had dealt often enough with the difficulties involved
in educating for growth and free expression in a material­ist, capitalist society. But
they never regarded the schools as intentionally repressive and selective, no matter
how responsive they sometimes became to restrictive outside forces. The “romantics”
saw. the imposition of worn-out middle-class values when they looked at the schools;
they saw. teachers threat­ened by the “natural”. capacities and energies of children;

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 Liberalism and Beyond: Towards a Public Philosophy of Education 45
they saw people being socialized into respectability and small-mindedness, deprived
of significant life goals. Certain ones, libertarian and anarchist in point of view,
provided new legitimations for “free” or private education (or for “de-schooling”).
They objected to any kind of centralized planning and associated liberalism with
“sort­ing” and state control. Social reconstruction, in the Frontier sense, meant
nothing to them; more Emersonian than Deweyan, they thought changes would
be brought about through regeneration of the Single One.
The radical “revisionists,” in their turn, came somewhat closer to the more
radical Frontier thinkers; but they tended to apply the tools of Marxism in a different
way and within a different frame. They saw the schools as deliberate­ly stratifying
the young in accord with the demands of industrial capitalism. The very structures
of educational institutions, they said, were—and were meant to be—manipulative.
Testing procedures, tracking devices, curriculum emphases: all were intended to
keep workers’ children, immigrants, and minorities in their place; socio-economic
hierarchies were defended and maintained. Liberalism, for them, was to be identi-
fied with capitalism; the only hope was in the teaching of socialist values within the
schools, in some effort to found revolutionary—or reconstructive—communities.
Legitimate philosophic problems were clearly implicit in the various modes
of critique; but there was little response from the field of educational philosophy.
Shifts and changes in academic philosophy were required before the focus widened
in any degree at all. Attention was still concentrated on concept analysis, ordinary
language, speech-act theory, the logic of arguments, the “language of morals.”
Here and there, a few educational philosophers did concept analysis with respect
to “equality” or “authority;”12 but little serious attempt was made to relate what
was happening in schools (or what might happen) to desired changes in the culture
at large. When Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions13 appeared,
there was some effort to look at the field of educational philosophy through Kuhn’s
constructs of paradigms and anomalies, and a certain restlessness moved some to
wider spheres. When John Rawls’s Theory of Justice14 appeared with its rigorous
examination of “the prime virtue of the polity,” educational philosophers began
more frequently to apply their analytic skills in the social and political domains.
The rising interest in moral reasoning and moral development enlisted a number
of them, usually in the analytic—occasionally in the Deweyan—mode.
More consequential for a return to the concern and spirit of The Social Frontier
were ideas stemming largely from the fields of sociology, Continental philosophy,
and curriculum theory. The idea of “constructed” social reality, developed by Alfred
Schutz15 and expanded upon by Peter Berger and Thomas Luck-Schultzmann,16
occasioned new interest in what Jonas Soltis now calls “sociocentric” approaches to
knowledge,17 certain strands of which connect to Dewey’s epistemology.
By now, however, the social and sociocentric concerns being registered in
educational philosophy have also been affected by social phenomenology, the work

Volume 32 (1) 2016

46 M. Greene
of certain radical sociologists,18 and the critical theory developed by the Frankfurt
School.19 An exemplary instance of a thinker grounded in phenomenology and
Marxism, and at once to praxis, is Paulo Friere,20 who is influencing the thinking
of many educators concerned with social transformation. Among these are such
curriculum theorists and sociologists as Michael Apple21 and Henry Giroux,22
neither of whom has been fully accepted by educational philosophers, old Marxists,
or by the Brameldians who compose the Society for Educational Reconstruction.
Even so, they have drawn variously and productively from the resources of Euro-
pean political philosophy and used these to anatomize the school in its relation to
society. They have shed light on the school’s role in “cultural reproduction,” on the
unequal distribution of knowledge, and on the perpetuation of “hegemony.” In
their search for the shapes of possible “resistance,” however, they have said almost
nothing about the reemergence of a public in the United States and nothing about
the importance of recapturing the realm of discourse Sheldon Wolin says has
been taken over by the country’s conservatives.23 Most recently, and perhaps
most relevantly, Walter Feinberg has undertaken a philosophical inquiry into the
various dimensions of social reproduction, including an examination of the pre-
conceptions of many recent scholars who have understood education differently:
analytic philosophers, interpretive and Marxist critics, revisionist historians.24 Sig-
nificantly, he concludes with what constitutes an introduction to “education and
the self-formation of the public,” which he believes might occur under conditions of
dialogue and “unmanipulated judgment.” Socially oriented and committed though
he appears to be, he has not dealt with the problematic of liberalism nor with what
a public philosophy of education might turn out to be.
Educational philosophers now live and work at a moment when, as Dewey put
it in The Social Frontier,25 the “letter” is destroying the “spirit” of liberalism. What
he said about the “meaning of liberalism” at that time might well be said today. He
was concerned about the anti-social interests of the dominant social class and about
its uses of the dogma of laissez-faire individualism to justify a “hands-off” policy
by government. What began, he wrote, “as a movement in the direction of greater
liberty for expression of the energies of man and which was put forward as giving
every individual new opportunities and new powers, has become socially oppres-
sive for the greater number of individuals. It has almost resulted in identifying the
power and liberty of the individual with ability to achieve economic success . . . .”
He concluded that a “new liberalism” required radical changes in economic insti-
tutions and political arrangements so that "social control of forces and agen-
cies socially created may accrue to the liberation of all individuals associated
together in the great undertaking of building a life that expresses and promotes
human liberty.” Words like these in their passion are in many ways expressive of
the commitment of The Social Frontier: a commitment to liberate and to transform.
But, we ·must add, in the world the contributors· knew.

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 Liberalism and Beyond: Towards a Public Philosophy of Education 47
For all the relationships and the live implications, educational theorists today
are likely to constitute their social realities quite differently. They look out on a world
of broken promises and destroyed faiths, a world where tortures continue to be the
order of the day in both hemispheres, where totalitarian thought controls multiply,
where wars go on eternally, where multinational corporations extend their influence
further and further, where the prospect of world government recedes each day.
The vision of human societies becoming responsive to intelligence and modera-
tion dims accordingly. Even the so-called “democracies” tolerate—and sometimes
sponsor—brutalities and violence toward human beings. And no one can claim
economic or commercial success; since economic failures seem unmanageable, no
matter what the system. Centralized planning seems unworkable; the scale and
cost of support networks make localism seem unthinkable. Wherever one looks,
facts like these are obscured. The “space” of human association is dominated by
propaganda, the artificial languages of “cost-benefit” concerns, or simple mystifi-
cation. It becomes increasingly difficult for individuals to express or to communi-
cate their own particular values, values formed—not as members of a “crowd” or
an “audience” or a “congregation”—but as ordinary beings trying to learn how to
live together, how to “be.” In the background, sometimes confronted and some-
times denied, there is the ever present danger of nuclear holocaust, the possibility
of losing what human beings have in common: their world, their human world.
In the meantime, in our country, federal demands for educational “excellence”
are openly linked to “national interest,” meaning economic and military primacy.
Stress is laid on “effectiveness,” on scientific proficiency, on computer literacy. Efforts
are deliberately made to exclude value education from the schools, as cognitive
expertise in the fields relevant to expanding technology becomes the overriding
norm. And the grassroots population, suffering unemployment,. dislocation, and
anxieties related to the “high tech” society they are told is in the making, can only
call for more and more concentration on technical skills, “competencies,” saleable
aptitudes. Disturbing numbers of them, black and white, react to talk of “tax cred-
its” with plans to send their children to private or parochial schools.
This is but one of many indications of the contemporary “eclipse of the
public,”26 of a feeling that the space between separate individuals is empty, a
kind of void. Somehow that space must be recreated; somehow, we must bring
into existence an “in-between."27 To move toward a public philosophy of educa-
tion in days like these is to work toward what was once called theoria, mean-
ing a normative conception of a rational. and humane society. It is not a matter
of sociological description or the kind of explanatory enterprise associated
with political science. Nevertheless, the effort ought to incorporate some of the
“experimental” consciousness of The Social Fron.tier, avoiding doctrine and final.
answers, keeping the goal in the realm of possibility. And, certainly, the ques-
tions must be kept open: the questions about liberty, equality, planning, social

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48 M. Greene
reconstruction, social control. If education has to do with empowering persons
for participant and articulate membership in their society, these issues have as
much to do with education as they do with the surrounding culture. Although
we (like Dewey and others) cannot claim that schools have the capacity to
“change the social order,” we can affirm a continuity between the public space
we would like to see and what happens (or ought to happen) in public schools.
In pondering what a public philosophy of education might be today, how-
ever, we are not required to go back in time in order to recover what some believe is
lost. The optimistic humanism, the “social consciousness” of the Frontier contribu-
tors are appealing enough to make certain readers want to set aside what has been
learned about language and consciousness, about the problematic of empiricism,
about technology and hegemony, and even about the insoluble nature of some of the
problems now facing the world. But there is no turning back. There is no undoing of
the extermination camps or the Gulags, of the recognition that educated and intel-
ligent people can commit unimaginable crimes. There is no undoing of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, no denying of our country’s responsibility for massacres. Nor can
there be a covering over of the assassinations in the recent past, of the extremities
in Vietnam and Cambodia, of the “lying in public” that has marked our several
administrations, of the moralistic masking of the truth.
Similarly, there can be no rejection of what we have learned in educational
philosophy itself, when it comes to clarification and critical understanding. There
will remain differences between those who take the analytic, highly rationalist,
often Kantian approach and those who insist on the importance of standpoint,
perspective, and the intentionality of consciousness. But there may be widening
areas of agreement on the matter of constructed or constituted realities, on the
need for “communicative competence”28 and new modes of “critico-creative think-
ing”29 And, surely, when it comes to the matter of human reality, there is no denying
today that people become “human” by means of communication and within matri-
ces of relationship. Whether personhood is understood in the sense of centers of
consciousness30 or in the sense of what has to be chosen, what is not yet,31 there is
at least some tacit acknowledgment that to be an individual depends upon being
with others in a way that entails mutuality and regard. It is unlikely, therefore, that
the old “either/ors” (liberty or social control); equality or self-determination; self-
actualization or socialization) would today provoke serious philosophical debate.
As for the crucial issues of values and ethics, there remains a spectrum of
points of view. Like the academic philosopher today, however, the educational
philosopher tends to look outward from his/her study or institution. What is
specifically “desirable” in educational activity still concerns him/her; so does the
ubiquitous question of the “worthwhile.” The matter of “oughtness,” the matter of
“norm-governed action” in the course of learning, the matter of virtue: all these
still preoccupy the educational philosopher. However, even as philosophy in other

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 Liberalism and Beyond: Towards a Public Philosophy of Education 49
fields has become concerned with issues of justice, human rights, and social welfare,
so has educational philosophy begun to consider related questions as they touch
upon teaching and learning, and upon the structures of the schools.
Once a philosopher chooses to enter into the great “conversation”32 about
freedom, equity, human rights, power, and choice, that philosopher has to some
extent “gone public.” There remains, however, the contribution to be made to
recreation of a public space, to the reemergence of an “articulate public” by those
whose primary focus is on the public school. For Sheldon Wolin,33 the domination
of public discourse by economics with its special language of “cost-benefit” and
“rationality” makes difficult, if not impossible, the existence of a civic ethic. The
reason for a civic culture, he writes, “is that citizens will have to cooperate, tell
the truth, respect each other’s rights and sensibilities, observe the law, and pay
taxes, if a self-governing and free society is to be possible.”34 A public philosophy
is needed to nurture such an ethic; but, when such a philosophy is grounded in
economics, the ethic is declared. obsolete. Much in.the spirit of The Social Fron-
tier, Wolin views the anti-political power now being usurped as “generated by
the search for private advantage;” there exists no principle for finding common
ground. He finds conservative groups, with arguments grounded in the political
culture of a time long past, taking over the space where significant human val-
ues are discussed. The Moral Majority, the anti-abortionists, the creationists, the
fundamentalists: these have, he says, in their solidarity and sense of community,
provided a substitute for politics. Doing that, “they leave the entire structure
of power, inequality, hopelessness, and growing repression wholly untouched.’’
Whether Wolin’s sense of despair is justified or not, whether a new public
philosophy will “need the backing of the moral and religious conservatives” or
not, he is surely correct in pointing to the impacts of the new economic positiv-
ism, especially as it becomes incorporated in official language and media explana-
tions. The educational philosopher, still concerned about the nurture of intelligence
and critical thinking, may well begin to “do” a more public philosophy if he/she
attends—and empowers others to attend—to the nature of contemporary mystifica-
tion and domestication. This not only means an understanding of how language is
used and how it affects human consciousness; it means a deliberate effort to break
through the impersonality and namelessness of speakers, the presumed “objectiv-
ity” that allows them to give their explanations the inexorability of natural law.
It means as well a conscious attentiveness to the actualities of lived expe-
rience in the classroom, to the common-sense realities in which sense-making
begins. Biographies should be taken into account, and background awareness, so
that students can be made conscious of the fact that “reality” signifies interpreted
experience, and that interpretation is affected by location and by point of view. School-
learning, “liberal education,” even “initiation” mean empowering persons to inter-
pret in more and more varied and complex ways, to structure their experiences with

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50 M. Greene
the aid of patterns made available by their “predecessors and contemporaries.”35
To know this, to recognize that understanding is a free act, undertaken by a person
as center of consciousness, is to be somewhat defended against false consciousness.
To be afflicted with false consciousness is to incorporate, without question, the arti-
ficial needs fabricated by advertising, to acquiesce in “commodity fetishism,”36 to
become the object of (rather than the listener to or the beholder of) popular culture.
To empower persons in this way may be to make it possible for them to come
together, as distinctive beings, in “speech and action,”37 in a space where freedom
can once again come to be. To speak is to articulate and, at once, to discover what
one thinks and how one sees. If situations can be created in which people are free to
speak in “agent-revealing ways,” as who and not what they are (as Hannah Arendt
puts it),38 they may be able to bring into existence an “in-between,’’ something more
significant than a sharing of interest, something that creates a “web of relationships.”
It is this that makes possible the institution of a public space, brought into existence
by people in their distinctiveness and in their moral equality. Given the opportunity
to speak from their own perspectives about what lies between, what they hold funda-
mentally in common, they may be able to recreate a civic culture, a “common world.”
If liberalism connotes (as some of the Frontier writers believed) a commit-
ment to human liberation—liberation for action and speech and choice, the spirit
of liberalism may be given play again if a public philosophy of education develops
a theoria oriented to a public space. Again, there is no turning back. There is the
need. to clarify what it signifies to engage in critique, to pursue freedom, to be with
others. And, in the tradition of The Social Frontier, to act in concert with others
taking part in the ongoing conversation, to live toward· open possibility.

Notes
1. John Dewey, “Liberalism and Equality,” Social Frontier II, no. 4 (January, 1936): 105.
2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “The Blue Book,” Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Vol. II,
ed. William Barrett and Henry D. Aiken (New York: Random House, 1962), 715.
3. John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 22.
4. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage Rooks, 1967), 80.
5. R. N. Enzensberger, “The industrialization of mind,” in The Consciousness Industry
(New York: Seabury Press, 1974), 315.
6. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1954), 184.
7. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958),
43–45.
8. Israel Scheffler, The Language of Education (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1960).
9. D. J. O’Connor, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: Philosophi-
cal Library 1957).
10. R. S. Peters, Ethics and Education (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978), chapter 1.
11. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: The· Macmillan Company, 1916).
12. Peters, Ethics and Education, 237–65; R. S. Peters, Authority, Responsibility and Edu-
cation (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1959).

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 Liberalism and Beyond: Towards a Public Philosophy of Education 51
13. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1962; 1970).
14. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).
15. Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality (The Hague: Marti-
nus Nijhoff, 1967).
16. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Garden
City: Anchor Books 1967).
17. Jonas F. Soltis, “Education and the Concept of Knowledge,” in Philosophy and Educa-
tion, ed. J. F. Soltis (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981), 97–98.
18. See, e.g., Paul Connerton, ed., Critical Sociology (New York: Penguin Books, 1978)
and John Rex, Sociology and the Demystification of the Modern World (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1974).
19. See, e.g., Andrew Arata and Eike Gebhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt Reader (New
York: Urizen Books, 1978).
20. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Herder and Herder 1970).
21. Michael W. Apple, Ideology and Curriculum (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979).
22. Henry Giroux, Ideology, Culture and the Process-Schooling (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 981).
23. Sheldon S. Wolin, “The New Public Philosophy,” Democracy (October 1981): 23–36.
24. See, e.g., Clarence J. Karier, Shaping the American Educational State: 1900 to the Pres-
ent (New York: The Free Press, 1975) and Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1968).
25. John Dewey, “The Meaning of Liberalism,” Social Frontier II, no. 3 (December, l945):
74–75.
26. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 110–42.
27. Arendt, The Human Condition, 182–83.
28. Jurgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1979), 26–68.
29. John Passmore, “On teaching to be critical,” in The Concept of Education, ed. R. S.
Peters (New York: The Humanities Press, 1967), 200–201.
30. See Peters, Ethics and Education, 211.
31. See Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego (New York: The Noonday Press, 1936).
32. Michael Oakeshott, “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind,” Rational-
ism and Politics (London: Methuen Press, 1962).
33. Wolin, “The New Public Philosophy,” 23.
34. Ibid., 33.
35. Schutz, Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality, 10.
36. See “The Social System of Capitalism,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology
and Social Philosophy, eds. T. R. Battomore and Maximilien Rubel (New York: McGraw-
Hill Paperbacks, l964), 146–60; Andrew Arata, “Esthetic Theory and Cultural Criticism,” in
The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Urizen Books, 1978), 190.
37. Arendt, 181–83.
38. Ibid., 182.

Maxine Greene was the William F. Russell Professor Emerita in the Foundations of
Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Volume 32 (1) 2016