The chapter examines John Dewey's concepts of society and the public in the context of digital technology and its potential to transform society and the moral ethos of the public school. I argue that Dewey's theory of society and the public, though articulated for an industrial age, are, like his moral vision of social democracy and public education, still of perennial importance as a ethical lens to frame and critique the emerging network society and publics.
“Don't Be Evil.” Google founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin (2004)
In a recent book on schooling in the present era, Tony Wagner describes American society transformed by the global economy, a world students must prepare to enter.
The needs of our society have changed dramatically…. The days of well-paid unskilled or semiskilled work are over in this country, due to the forces of global competition. As we know any job that can be routinized is being either automated or off-shored. Increasingly, the only decent jobs that remain in this country will go to those who know how to continuously improve products or services or create entirely new ones—the knowledge workers of the twenty-first century. (Wagner, 2008, p. 256)
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