The Gleam of Light Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson

by Saito, Naoko; Cavell, Stanley

• ISBN13: 9780823224630
• ISBN10: 0823224635
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-11-15
• Publisher: Fordham University Press

Summary

In the name of efficiency, the practice of education has come to be dominated by neoliberal ideology andprocedures of standardization and quantification. Such attempts to make all aspects of practice transparent and subject to systematic accounting lack sensitivity to the invisible and the silent, to something in the humancondition that cannot readily be expressed in an either-or form. Seeking alternatives to such trends, Saito readsDewey’s idea of progressive education through the lens of Emersonian moral perfectionism (to borrow a term coined by Stanley Cavell). She elucidates a spiritual and aesthetic dimension to Dewey’s notion of growth, one considerably richer than what Dewey alone presents in his typically scientific terminology.

Author Biography

Naoko Saito is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education, Kyoto University. Stanley Cavell is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Harvard University. His recent publications include A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises; Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, and Derrida; Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life and Emerson's Transcendental Etudes.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Foreword by Stanley Cavell	xiii
1 In Search of Light in Democracy and Education: Deweyan Growth in an Age of Nihilism	1	(16)
2 Dewey between Hegel and Darwin	17	(19)
3 Emerson's Voice: Dewey beyond Hegel and Darwin	36	(14)
4 Emersonian Moral Perfectionism: Gaining from the Closeness between Dewey and Emerson	50	(19)
5 Dewey's Emersonian View of Ends	69	(12)
6 Growth and the Social Reconstruction of Criteria: Gaining from the Distance between Dewey and Emerson	81	(18)
7 The Gleam of Light: Reconstruction toward Holistic Growth	99	(21)
8 The Gleam of Light Lost: Transcending the Tragic with Dewey after Emerson	120	(19)
9 The Rekindling of the Gleam of Light: Toward Perfectionist Education	139	(24)
Notes	163	(32)
Bibliography	195	(10)
Index	205