The Gleam of Light

Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson

Naoko Saito

American Philosophy

Foreword by Stanley Cavell

Pages: 228

Fordham University Press
Fordham University Press

This book can be opened with

Glassboxx eBooks and audiobooks can be opened on phones, tablets, iOS and Android devices

Paperback / softback
ISBN: 9780823224630
Published: 15 November 2006
$35.00
Open Access
Hardback
ISBN: 9780823224623
Published: 28 July 2005
$85.00
Open Access
eBook (ePub)
ISBN: 9780823283095
Published: 18 September 2018
$0.00
Open Access

Note on our eBooks: you can read our eBooks (ePUB or PDF) on the free Fordham Books app on iOS, Android, and desktop. To purchase a digital book you will need to create an account if you don’t already have one. After purchasing you will receive instructions on how to get started.

In the name of efficiency, the practice of education has come to be dominated by neoliberal ideology and
procedures of standardization and quantification. Such attempts to make all aspects of practice transparent and subject to systematic accounting lack sensitivity to the invisible and the silent, to something in the human
condition that cannot readily be expressed in an either-or form. Seeking alternatives to such trends, Saito reads
Dewey’s idea of progressive education through the lens of Emersonian moral perfectionism (to borrow a term coined by Stanley Cavell). She elucidates a spiritual and aesthetic dimension to Dewey’s notion of growth, one considerably richer than what Dewey alone presents in his typically scientific terminology.

The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

Saito's elegantly written book is a meditation on what she regards as a crisis of nihilism affecting modern democratic life, especially education.---—Educational Studies in Japan: International Yearbook

. . . Exemplifies a vision of education as cooperative inquiry in which heterogenous voices resound yet experiential authority in its full force operates.---—Journal of Philosophy of Education

Saito has written an important book with a remarkable educational implication: We should educate every individual to grow by recognizing their unique gleam of light in self-transcendent relation with others different from ourselves while recognizing the Over-Soul sustains us all.---—Teachers College Record

A provocative book that will be of value to all who care about Emerson, Dewey, and what they have to say about education.---—David Hansen, Philosophy of Education Society

[A] spirited inquiry . . .---—Studies in Philosophy and Education

Please click the link below to download the Open Access version of this book.