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The Public and Its Problems

by John Dewey

Downloads: 100+
First published: 1927
Pages: 131

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About this book

Published in 1927, this work is John Dewey's response to a wave of thinkers, Walter Lippmann among them, who argued that ordinary citizens were too ignorant and distracted to govern a complex modern society. Dewey concedes democracy's failures but refuses to hand power to a class of experts. A public, he argues, forms when people recognize that they are affected by actions beyond their control, and democracy depends on that public finding itself, communicating, and staying engaged. He locates the trouble not in human incapacity but in a fractured social life that keeps citizens from seeing their shared stakes. It remains one of his most enduring political books.

About the author

John Dewey

Dewey argued that a school teaching children to sit still and repeat is training them for a society that no longer exists, and that democracy is less a form of government than a way of living together that has to be practised daily. Democracy and Education is the fullest statement of it.