Abstract

With this proposal, we wish to revisit the Idea of the University in the perspective of the democratic project of the American philosopher and pragmatist John Dewey. Our hypothesis consists in the thesis that the deweyen project confronts the problem of the social distribution of knowledge, in the aim of giving us the means to transform the latter. In this way, if we consider that the university is part of this distribution through its student learning function, then our purpose is to demonstrate that this learning is currently guided by an individual intelligence paradigm harms that the development of collective intelligence. For John Dewey, the latter is one of the central means of his democratic project which would reconcile the Idea of a University with real University institutions. Therefore, according to him, if universities want to contribute to the democratic project, we must adopt a new pedagogical orientation promoting individual and collective intelligence.