Education and democracy in the world today (2025): Aboriginal conceptions of freedom as relational

This paper investigates critics’ claims that John Dewey neglected to adequately engage with racism—particularly his complicity in “whiteness,” including his valorisation of American democracy as an exemplar of the Anglo-Saxon legacy, viewed by critics as a narrative of human progress from “primitive” to “modern;” his failure to address his own prejudices and assumptions about the student and the community; and avoidance of the racial realities regarding “Black experience.” These criticisms could have ramifications for philosophy for children, which Matthew Lipman has said owes a debt to Dewey. We contend that education in Western-style democracies has not adequately responded to racial intolerance, and that liberal democracy has not lived up to its philosophical ideals of equal rights and opportunities, irrespective of people’s backgrounds. However, we argue that the problem goes deeper, that the very concept of freedom in liberalism is an obstacle to overcoming the problems that Dewey’s critics identified. We conclude that because reconstruction is inherent in pragmatist epistemology, reconstructing some of the assumptions that inform the community of inquiry, especially assumptions about democracy and deliberation, has the potential to strengthen engagement with the Aboriginal concepts of freedom and autonomy, thereby challenging the belief in the superiority of liberal philosophical thought in Western-style democracy. We begin our argument by drawing attention to the liberal concepts of freedom and autonomy (as idealised characteristics of identity that are the foundation of liberal understanding of human nature), followed by criticisms of Dewey’s ideal vision of the student and the classroom community, as well as his failure to acknowledge racial dynamics. We then introduce the Aboriginal political concept of autonomous regard (a core concept of simultaneously respect the autonomy of others that fosters a relational worldview of community and with the land). This relational worldview is informed by Aboriginal knowledge systems which emphasise careful, deliberate, and patient observation and engagement as a process of understanding our relationship with the world. In this sense, they share characteristics with Dewey’s relational epistemology, interconnectedness of experience, and continuity of the human, the organic, and the natural world, and could be understood as a forebear of pragmatism. As such, we turn to relational pedagogy to salvage the theoretical deficiencies in Dewey’s theory and practice, and to focus on Indigenous experience and colonisation, particularly experiences of belonging to land as integral to identity, knowledge, and cultural practices, including governance, kinship, and society.