Cultivating democracy through children’s play: An approach from the Northern American pragmatism of Addams, Dewey and Mead.

Abstract

One vital constant in pedagogical narratives is the link between children’s play and education. Study of their relationship from a philosophical perspective is marked by paradoxes and tensions that have often raised the implementation of their use in educational practice in differing and even opposing ways. This article seeks to set out new ways of interpreting the relationship between play and education from a conciliatory approach. This relationship is explored from the works of three contemporaneous pragmatist thinkers of the late nineteenth: Jane Addams, John Dewey, and George Mead. The results suggest that the possibility of a relationship between children’s play and education is not so much found in the development of potentially educational materials, an extraordinary teaching method, or strictly teaching the curriculum. Rather, the significant contribution is concentrated in the conviction that play could be crucial for the cultivation of democracy. Pragmatists such as Addams and Dewey relied on the aesthetic experience of play as one of the most powerful possibilities for not only keeping democracy alive but also cultivating a cosmopolitan citizenship.