Pragmatism and Education

In 1908, the Third International Congress of Philosophy convened in Heidelberg, Germany. According to the editors of Pragmatism and Education, this event witnessed a rejection of pragmatic ideas in Germany which would hold throughout most of the twentieth Century. In the wake of the American revival of pragmatism, the intellectual landscape in Germany has changed, enough so to invite a reconsideration of pragmatism’s philosophical coherence and relevance for contemporary German educational thinking. In 2003, the editors organized a conference in Zurich to do just that. The resulting book consists of eleven papers along with the editors’ Introduction. The papers range from the historical to the philosophical, and cover a variety of pragmatists, from Dewey, James and Mead, to Jane Addams and Mary Parker Follett. Each essay considers both the philosophical ideas of its subject and the relation of those ideas to German pedagogical thought in the twentieth century. Overall, although the papers (admittedly) do not constitute a comprehensive treatment of the issues, they represent an interesting and valuable contribution to the ongoing discussion of pragmatism and its relevance to the philosophy of education, inside Germany or out. In the first chapter, James A. Good challenges the traditional view that Dewey made a complete break from Hegelianism by 1903. Much of the impetus for such a reading, Good argues, lies in an apparent need to dissociate Dewey from the “philosopher of the Prussian state” (19). On the contrary, Good argues, we ought to recognize that Dewey’s early Hegelianism was influenced by the St. Louis Hegelians, who opposed that interpretation of Hegel (14). Dewey’s early admissions of his debt to Hegel implicate the influence of the St. Louis Hegelians on this count. Second, Book Review