Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education is a 1916 book by John Dewey. Dewey sought to at once synthesize, criticize, and expand upon the democratic educational philosophies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Plato. He saw Rousseau's philosophy as overemphasizing the individual and Plato's philosophy as overemphasizing the society in which the individual lived. For Dewey, this distinction was largely a false one; like Vygotsky, he viewed the mind and its formation as a communal process.