Democracy and Education

John Dewey’s best-known and still-popular classic, Democracy and Educa­tion, is presented here as a new edition in Volume 9 of the Middle Works. Sidney Hook, who wrote the introduction to this volume, describes Democracy and “It illuminates directly or indirectly all the basic issues that are cen­tral today to the concerns of intelligent educators. . . . It throws light on sev­eral obscure corners in Dewey’s general philosophy in a vigorous, simple prose style often absent in his more technical writings. And it is the only work in any field originally published as a textbook that has not merely acquired the status of a classic, but has become the one book that no student concerned with the phi­losophy of education today should leave unread.” Dewey said in 1930 that De­mocracy and Education, “was for many years the one [book] in which my philos­ophy . . . was most fully expounded.”