Epimethean Education and the Student as Standing Reserve: Pragmatism, Technology, and Democracy in the United States

The dynamic model for public education laid out by John Dewey in the early 20th century has broadly established the terms by which democratic progressive education is evaluated in America. Since the publication of his work Democracy and Education (1917), there has been an unprecedented acceleration of technological innovation and global market restructuring that pose problems for Dewey’s progressive program. The aim of this TFM is to analyze the viability of Dewey’s program for progressive democratic education as it has been problematized by what 21st century philosopher Bernard Stiegler calls the hyper-industrial age, characterized by the merging of symbolic and industrial production which finds its apex in globalized digitization. Hyper-industrialization complicates the individuation and political engagement of citizens and intergenerational knowledge retention and transmission. This constitutes a threat to the promises of democracy and the possibilities of democratic pedagogy. I will employ a poststructuralist analysis of John Dewey’s conception of education through the philosophy of technology as articulated by Bernard Stiegler. The frame myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus in his major work Technics and Time (1998) will guide an exploration of new prospects for the future of democratic education through an anthropology that takes technics as co-constituted with humanity. My goal is to model a critical assessment of the vulnerability of our informational and ecological environment through the acceleration of technology in the digital age which can maintain that the demand for public education rightly conceived is coeval with a democratic societyMáster Universitario en Estudios Norteamericanos (M157