Introduction : a Mediterranean Dewey...a Deweyan Mediterranean

Abstract

The metaphor of a journey is most fitting for this volume. First and foremost, this book is about the travelling of ideas across time and space. It is, more specifically, an attempt to find trails and traces of John Dewey’s educational thought across the Mediterranean, that enclosed sea which, in ancient times, was considered to be the cradle that nourished so much of what we consider ‘philosophy’ today. But this book is also about the saga of getting together a group of academics from the region to write about a figure, and an educational movement, that found its way in their country, sometimes directly and explicitly under the banner of Dewey, at other times filtering through under the guise of ‘progressive education’ – the so-called ‘new education’ of which Dewey was only one, albeit arguably most powerful, representative (Darling & Nordenbo, 2002; Bruce & Pecore, 2013). [Excerpt]