User:MathisBitton/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Democracy and Education

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
"Democracy and Education" is an important work on the relationship between political education, citizenship, and democracy. As someone who is deeply sympathetic to the idea that democracy is a way of life, Dewey's account represents a source of inspiration. More than any modern philosopher, Dewey thought of education as the central task fo democracy. He believed that true democracies would not merely teach future citizens how to be productive and efficient. For Dewey, true democracies cultivate certain habits -- of problem solving, compassion, imagination, solidarity, and civic self-governance.

Like Dewey, I think that education is -- or, rather, should be -- the highest political and economic priority of all democracies. This article was therefore a natural place from which to start.

Evaluate the article
Lead section:

At present, the lead section is more than incomplete. It consists of a single sentence that states basic facts about the book -- namely, that it was written by Dewey in 1916. The lead section does not summarise the book's thesis, its main themes, its reception, or its impact upon the literature on political education. The lead section also fails to introduce the main sections of the Wikipedia article, thereby making the page's structure less evident. In short, the lead section is simplistic and insufficiently detailed -- on the plus side, it does not contain anything that is not in the article itself.

Content:

The "synopsis" section covers a single aspect of the book -- its defence of education as a way to socialise children in a meaningful way. But the article fails to explore Dewey's radical conception of democracy as a way of life. By focusing upon the abstract, theoretical facet of the book, the article evacuates the political dimension of Dewey's philosophy of education. The "reception" and "legacy" sections focus on the difficulty of implementing Dewey's ideas. At no point does the article mention the fact that Dewey's vision of education as the primary objective of democracies -- an ancient ideal that disappeared with the advent of modernity -- is gaining momentum among deliberative theorists and others.

Further, the article simply does not cite a sufficient number of sources. The "synospsis" section has 0 citations -- the book itself is never cited, and mainstream interpretations are never outlined. The "reception" section has only 2 citations, and none of them is sufficient to justify some of the claims that the article's author makes -- e.g. the author claims that Dewey's language is vague and often misinterpreted, but no evidence is provided.

More broadly, the article lacks depth. For instance, the author mentions the difficulty of implementing Dewey's ideas, and then cites a source in the footnotes. But it would useful to know which ideas are difficult to implement, which have been implemented, and -- most importantly -- why certain ideas may be hard to implement. An uniformed reader will get nothing out of a paragraph that insists upon the difficulty of implementing Dewey's proposals without ever explaining what these proposals actually are.

Lastly, just as the "synopsis" section neglects the political-theory dimension of Dewey's work, the "reception" and "legacy" sections fail to outline different waves & schools of interpretation. Outlining broad trends in interpretations, and situating them in their historical context, would be of immense help. More broadly, more emphasis upon contemporary, up-to-date sources would improve the article (the only two pieces of secondary literature cited are from 2002 and 2005).

In short, while the article's content does not contain any mistakes, it has significant gaps that require more elaboration.

Tone and Balance:

Generally, the article's tone remains neutral -- at no point does the author try to impose a particular interpretive lens, and the line between descriptive and normative observations is clearly drawn. There are, however, two potential issues with the article -- both of which were mentioned in the "content" section above. First, the article's author places too much emphasis upon how unclear and/or incomprehensible Dewey's writing is -- as long as this claim remains unsupported by substantive evidence, it sounds like a rather subjective observation by the article's author.

Second, by neglecting the importance of Dewey's democracy-as-a-way-of-life account, the authors gives a rather unidimensional picture of the book -- went that focuses almost exclusively on Dewey's anthropological claims.

Overall, however, the article is largely unbiased and neutral.

Sources and References:

The article cites very few sources -- 3 in total, including the book itself. While the lack of quotes from the book need not be problematic, the lack of secondary sources is a real issue. Granted, the two sources cited are both reputable academic works. But they came out in 2002 and 2005, do not reflect the breadth or depth of the literature on Dewey, and certainly do not reflect recent developments in the relevant literature. In short, the list of sources needs to be considerably extended -- by including competing interpretations, putting the book in its intellectual context, and analysing its legacy vis-à-vis, say, recent developments in deliberative democracy theory.

Organisation and writing quality:

The writing is clear throughout. While the lack of lead paragraph makes the structure more abrupt than it needs to be, the three sections -- legacy, reception, and synopsis -- make relative sense. I do not think that the term "synopsis" is best-suited to describe the content of a philosophical essay, but this may be a convention on Wikipedia. I also do no think that the difference between legacy and reception is clearly established -- could we not say that the book's long-term reception is its intellectual legacy? One more, a clear lead paragraph would help. Otherwise, the writing is clear, concise, and grammatically correct.

Images and Media:

The author does not use images and/or other forms of non-written media, but I do not think that doing so would be necessary in this specific case.

Talk Page Discussion:

The Talk page reflects my impression of this article -- one commentator says that the article was largely drawn from the John Dewey page, and the other two complain about the lack of breadth/depth of the article. In short, everyone agrees that the article needs considerably more work, and that -- at present -- it simply does not do justice to the book.

Overall Impressions:

This article does not do justice to "Democracy and Education." Its cites to few secondary sources, does not cite any recent literature on the book, fails to reflect upon the legacy of Dewey's work, barely contextualises the book at all, and presents a rather rudimentary picture of the book's main arguments. If the remarks in the "Talk" page are accurate, it seems like the redaction of this article was rushed -- it is need of considerably more elaboration.