Introduction: Maxine Greene on Democracy and the Social Imagination

In assembling scholars for the John Dewey Symposium for the 2015 Annual Meeting in Chicago, I sought thinkers who would critically engage Maxine Greene’s philosophy of democratic education. The recent death of Greene (1917–2014), longtime member of the Society, friend and teacher of many members, and John Dewey Lecturer in 1988, had left a powerful absence among educational philosophers, and many had honored her legacy with loving tributes. The Symposium’s aim was to bring together scholars in critical engagement with her work. Greene had interpreted, critiqued, and in some ways enlarged Deweyan philosophy for much of her career. Key to her democratic educational thought was the concept of the social imagination: