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On moral education through deliberative communication

John Dewey’s masterpiece Democracy and Education, from 1916, is clearly far removed from the dominant tendencies of current education policy in the western world, with their emphasis on the narrow accountability of the New Public Management. Nevertheless, his book still challenges those tendencies and sets forth criteria for citizenship and moral education for democracy as ‘a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience’. According to Dewey, the measure of the worth of activities in schools is the extent to which they are animated by a social spirit, a spirit that can be actively present only when certain conditions are met. How can we understand and characterize these conditions in today’s schools, and to what extent are they desirable by different forces? I will move between these two questions using texts by Dewey and others on moral education, exploring communicative strategies that have inspired my own writing. In particular, I will present and discuss my own proposal of deliberative communication, and briefly relate it to the challenge from agonism, the ‘realities’ of educational policies and the status of moral and citizenship education in Sweden and the US today.