Page 143 - TWO OF A KIND • Erik Renkema

DUTCH COOPERATION SCHOOLS AS DEMOCRATIC COMMUNITIES
Both aspects of democratic education come together in one of Dewey’s central pleas for a “conjoint activity” (1980, 26), which fulfills both the sociological aim of fostering community life in school and the psychological aim of focusing on students’ life experiences and on the experiences from outside the students. By participating in such an activity, the student “appropriates the purpose which actuates it, becomes familiar with its methods and subject matters, acquires needed skill, and is saturated with its emotional spirit” (1980, 26). We recognize both aspects and the creation of the activity mentioned as a “democratic environment” in Webster’s portrait of Dewey’s view:
For him education involves children learning how to inquire thoroughly and
intelligently and this is only possible in a democratic environment. Democratic 6 education, according to Dewey, sees children and teachers working together to
make better sense of themselves and their world by listening to, challenging,
testing and critiquing each other’s ideas (2009, 93).
4. Cooperation Schools and Dewey’s Perspective on Democracy
To answer our question of what Dewey’s concept of democracy can contribute to reflections on the connection between values and religious education in cooperation schools, we formulate four points. In this, we follow Dewey’s sociological and psychological aspects of democratic education. These remarks guide cooperation schools in reflecting on the balance between their core values of educating and the practices of religious education.
Our first observation concerns the relation between Dewey’s sociological aspect of democracy in education and the practice of religious education of cooperation schools. Noting this, we also refer to Sutinen, Kallioniemi, and Pihlström in their elaboration on Dewey’s philosophy of education:
If students only live in their own religious subgroups, no common religious language is possible. The existence of such diverse religious sub-groups blocks access to democratic ways of living, primarily because of the difficulty of creating a common religious language. A “common faith” is hard to establish among isolated groups. This impasse is also a barrier to the creative solution of religious problems. However, being exposed to religious thinking different from one’s own helps provide the language and symbols needed to understand and develop multicultural and multifaith societies. (2015, 345/346).
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