User Clip: Democracy and Values

Dewey made a profound shift which we have not yet begun to absorb in understanding democracy not as a political system or a body of rights or an expressence of such documents as the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution or as a system of legislation or legal authority, but as a way of life. He was explicit about this. In "Democracy and Educational Administration" an essay of 1937, he wrote, The keynote of democracy as a way of life may be expressed it seems to me as the necessity for the participation of every mature human being in formation of the values that regulate the living of men togehter.

Formation is the key word in this idea that democracy is a way of life. Democracy consists in the formation of values not in pre-established values. We do not hold to democratic values, we experimentally strive toward them and then live them. close