Westbrook e Rockfeller: The education between politics and religion
Teodora Pezzano
This paper examines the thought of the one of most important authors of contemporary philosophy of education, John Dewey, through two very interesting biographies: Westbrook’s John Dewey and American Democracy and Rockefeller’s John Dewey. Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism. Two biographies, published both in 1991, that show two different perspectives. Westbrook shows us Dewey as the democratic political thinker by which the individual finds his sense of fullness and unity.
Rockefeller’s work, instead, is an attempt to show the Dewey’s thought linked to the religious faith. He emphasizes the religious meaning of deweyan philosophy. Rockfeller analyzes the various relevant phases of experience in which the individual reaches its fullness and the true sense of unity. He pays special attention to deweyan radical democratic reconstruction of Christianity and some contributions to spiritual democracy of American society. Two interesting and original perspectives that allow us to expand and evaluate the complex and eclectic Deweyan thought, above all related to his philosophy of education.
Keywords
Philosophy of education, democratic education, religious faith.
