Is it possible to trace, within the philosophy of education, a historical line or tradition in which education has been understood in terms of communication – or at least to discern specific attempts, not necessarily related to one another, to understand it in such terms? Could such a tradition, if one exists, also be viewed as a way of developing education understood as deliberation (where deliberation is seen as a specific qualifier of communication)? My main underlying endeavour is to try to develop an understanding of education and an educational rationale that are in line with democratic ideals, supporting a democratic way of life. Such an understanding can of course be developed along many different lines, but here I propose a communicative and deliberative approach.
My paper comprises three sections. In the first, I will try to show how Dewey, in the first three chapters of his Democracy and Education (1916), creates a specific starting point for my deliberative approach. In the second section, I will show how certain writings of Jürgen Habermas are central to the construction of my model of deliberative communication and to its potential to change the rationale of education. Lastly, I will address certain criticisms of the concept of deliberation, while still maintaining the proposed model as a normative ideal. In this last section I will also refer to some of the contributions in a recently written anthology on ‘education as communication’ edited by me (Englund ed. 2007: Utbildning som kommunikation [Education as communication]).