democracy cannot survive without education essay in english

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Democracy Without Education Is Meaningless

The importance of education in a democracy cannot be overstated, as it is what leads to progress and greatness. Unfortunately in India, the situation regarding education is distressing, with 60% of the population being illiterate. Adult education is necessary and can serve as an incentive to primary education. Social education is also needed to guide people in their leisure time and to avoid illiteracy and ignorance, which is a burden on society. Overcoming the difficulties of implementing adult education requires cleverness, fact, compromise, or intentional avoidance. The purpose of good teaching is to produce changes in human behavior and adult education emancipates people from illiteracy. It is important for citizens to be knowledgeable, for older individuals to keep their minds active, and for workers to be up-to-date on new techniques and technologies in a complex modern economy. Anyone, regardless of age, can go back to school and pursue their dreams related to their job through adult education programs.

Democracy without education is meaningless. It is education and enlightenment that lifts a nation to the heights of progress and greatness. Unfortunately, the situation as it obtains in India in respect of education is not only distressing but disgraceful and deplor? able. At present about 60% of the people in India are illiterate; they cannot differentiate a buffalo from a black mole. Adult education is needed because it is a powerful auxiliary and an essential incentive to primary education. No programme of compulsory universal education can bear fruit without the active support and co-operation of adults ocial educa? tion is needed in order to guide in spending their leisure in health? ful recreations and useful activities. Lastly, illiteracy and ignorance is a sin; an illiterate adult is a burden on society. A The difficulties have to be overcome either by cleverness, or by fact or by compromise, or may be, by intentional avoidance. Only then we can hope to spread Adult Education. The purpose of all good teaching is to produce changes in human behavior. All adult education teacher must adopt a positive approach; adult education emancipates people from the tyranny of illiteracy. 1] Some people, in their early age, did not have the chance to get education for different reasons. When they are old if then, they get education and they can discover themselves in a new way. [2] Learning is a continuous process, and if adult persons have the continued relationship with knowledge is also important. {3] Some adult much time to take rest but if they are engaged in learning they can also have fun and friends. {4] If they are busy something creative jobs, they will never feel boring rather they will feel healthier and happier.

We can implement it by making people people aware of it , starting campaigns and doing surveys . 1. in a complex modern democracy, citizens must be knowledgeable. 2. research shows that older people who keep their minds active suffer less dementia and other memory type diseases in old age. 3. in a complex modern economy, workers must be up-to-date on new techniques, and technologies Many people fail to understand that if they don ‘t make the extra effort, they ‘ll never be able to amount to much in life. Some however, after spending a ot of their time as kids fooling around, begin to make the effort to improve their status in life. So being well above thirty or even forty years doesn ‘t matter; anyone can still go back to school to study. It could be any degree that you want. Having missed out on education when you were yet young, still doing school might not look like a good option. However, there are so many adult education programs around, it would spin you in the head just thinking of it. You don ‘t have to give up on your dreamsrelated to their job.

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Let’s educate tomorrow’s voters: Democracy depends on it

Subscribe to the center for universal education bulletin, elias blinkoff , elias blinkoff research scientist in the department of psychology and neuroscience - temple university molly scott , and molly scott research scientist - temple university kathy hirsh-pasek kathy hirsh-pasek senior fellow - global economy and development , center for universal education.

November 21, 2022

The final results of the 2022 midterm election in the United States are in. Journalists tell us that a key issue for voters was preservation of democracy . A recent NPR/PBS NewsHour /Marist poll showed that while inflation was the top issue on voters’ minds, “preserving democracy” captured second place. The issue that claimed little attention was education . Yet, as Thomas Jefferson once said, “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.” That is, if we care about democracy, we must also care about education.

Only $ 10 million were spent on education ads by both parties between Labor Day and late October 2022, compared to $103 million spent on abortion ads by Democrats and $89 million spent on tax ads by Republicans. When education was discussed, political scientist Sarah Hill suggests that the topic was narrowly construed around culture war issues, including parental rights and ideologically-driven curriculum changes like banning books .

Sadly, conversation about education was limited in the most recent American election. We desperately need to ignite this discussion.

Given the lack of discussion around education, it is fair to repeat the claim made in 1983 that our nation is at risk . Now more than ever, the populous is required to sift truth from fiction among the many hyperbolic claims made by politicians on both sides. Without strong critical thinking skills, it is nearly impossible to manage the amount of content that people encounter every day and to form cogent opinions—be it on issues like health care, inflation, or climate change.

We are failing the next generation of citizens. Our recent Brookings blog on the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores makes this point. It showed how students’ levels of proficiency in reading and math were already relatively low pre-pandemic, with the important qualifications that NAEP proficiency is not equivalent to grade level proficiency and a high academic standard to achieve. In fact, proficiency on the NAEP requires a deeper understanding of reading and math skills, including the application of critical thinking in relation to subject area content. And many reports suggest that even reaching proficiency (as defining success through the lens of just reading and writing) will not be enough to achieve Jefferson’s vision. Children need to learn a breadth of skills that includes—but goes beyond—content, to go from classroom to career success.

Our recent discussion of education facilitated by Brookings on November 9 following the launch of our book, “ Making Schools Work: Bringing the Science of Learning to Joyful Classroom Practice, ” explored a comprehensive, but flexible, framework for how to educate children with a breadth of skills—how to educate children to be caring, thinking, and creative citizens for tomorrow. Born from research in the science of learning , we suggest that we must teach in the way that human brains learn through an active (not passive) pedagogy that is engaging rather than distracting, meaningful with clear connections to prior lessons and students’ out-of-school experiences, socially interactive instead of entirely solo, iterative with room for experimentation and trial and error, and joyful rather than dull and repetitive. This is the antithesis of what is going on in many schools across the globe that were fashioned for a bygone era. If we do embrace a more modern educational model, students can be strong across the skills required to navigate school, work and society: collaboration , communication, content , critical thinking , creative innovation , and confidence (the ability to persist even after a failure and to know that you can grow with experience) .

Sadly, conversation about education was limited in the most recent American election. We desperately need to ignite this discussion. If our graduates are to outsmart the robots, to be viable for the job market, and to be discerning voters and citizens, education must literally be on the ballot. Yes, a major issue for voters this year was the precarious nature of our democracy. Our democracy, however, cannot survive if we do not educate our citizens. As The Atlantic proclaimed, “ Democracy was on the Ballot and Won .” If it is to keep winning, we must discuss education reform. Our science of learning can lead the way. It is imperative that children learn a breadth of skills that they can carry with them into the voting booth.

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Democracy Cannot Survive Without Education

What is democracy.

Democracy is a form of government that depends on the active participation of its citizens. The success of democracy is not only dependent on free and fair elections but also on the education of its citizens. In this article, we will discuss the importance of education in a democratic society and how it affects the survival of democracy.

Importance of Education in a Democratic Society

Education plays a crucial role in the success and survival of democracy. It is through education that citizens learn about their rights and responsibilities, and how they can participate in the democratic process.

Education also helps citizens develop critical thinking skills, which are essential for making informed decisions and participating in public discourse.

Without education, citizens are more likely to be uninformed and disengaged from the democratic process. They may be more susceptible to propaganda and misinformation, which can undermine the integrity of the democratic system.

Moreover, an uneducated population may not be able to hold their leaders accountable, which can lead to corruption and abuse of power.

What are the Main Features of Democratic Education?

Democratic education is an educational approach that emphasizes active student participation, critical thinking, and civic engagement.

The main features of democratic education include:

• Active Student Participation: In democratic education, students are encouraged to take an active role in their learning. This means that they have a say in what they learn and how they learn it.
• Critical Thinking: Democratic education emphasizes critical thinking skills, which are essential for making informed decisions and participating in public discourse.
• Civic Engagement: Democratic education aims to prepare students for active citizenship. This means that they are encouraged to participate in their communities and take an active role in shaping society.
• Diversity and Inclusion: Democratic education values diversity and inclusion, and strives to create a learning environment that is welcoming and respectful of all students.

Relationship Between Education and Democracy

Education and democracy are inextricably linked. A democratic society requires an educated population that can engage in public discourse, make informed decisions, and hold their leaders accountable.

Conversely, education requires a democratic society that values the free flow of ideas, critical thinking, and the open exchange of information.

In countries where education is not accessible to all citizens, democracy is often undermined. The ruling class may use its power to limit access to education and control the flow of information, making it difficult for citizens to participate in the democratic process.

This can lead to social and economic inequality, as those without education are often unable to compete in the job market and access basic services.

Benefits of Democratic Education in India

Democratic education has many benefits in India, where education is often inaccessible to marginalized communities.

Some of the benefits of democratic education in India include:

• Increased Access to Education: Democratic education can help increase access to education for marginalized communities, ensuring that all citizens have the opportunity to participate in the democratic process.
• Critical Thinking: Democratic education emphasizes critical thinking skills, which are essential for making informed decisions and participating in public discourse. This can help citizens become more engaged in the democratic process and hold their leaders accountable.
• Empowerment of Marginalized Communities: Democratic education can empower marginalized communities by providing them with the tools and knowledge they need to advocate for their rights and participate in the democratic process.
• Promotes Social and Economic Equality: Democratic education can help promote social and economic equality by providing marginalized communities with access to education and the opportunity to compete in the job market.

Does Democracy Impact Illiteracy?

There is evidence to suggest that democracy can have a positive impact on illiteracy rates. In a democratic society, there is usually greater access to education, which can help reduce illiteracy rates.

In addition, democratic governments often prioritize education and invest resources in educational programs, which can lead to better educational outcomes.

Moreover, democracy can help empower marginalized communities, including those with low literacy rates. In a democratic society, all citizens have the right to participate in the democratic process, regardless of their level of education. This can help increase the political engagement of marginalized communities, leading to greater representation and access to resources.

Role of Education in Democracy

Education is the cornerstone of democracy. It empowers citizens with the knowledge and skills needed to participate in the democratic process, hold their leaders accountable, and make informed decisions.

Education is critical in fostering civic engagement, promoting critical thinking, and ensuring that citizens are informed about public policies and issues.

The following are some of the key roles of education in democracy:

• Fosters Active Citizenship: Education is essential for fostering active citizenship in a democratic society. It provides citizens with the knowledge and skills needed to participate in the democratic process, including voting, engaging in public discourse, and holding their leaders accountable. Educated citizens are more likely to be politically engaged and take an active role in shaping public policies and decisions.
• Promotes Critical Thinking: Education promotes critical thinking, which is essential for evaluating different viewpoints and making well-informed decisions. In a democracy, citizens need to be able to analyze information and ideas critically to make informed decisions. Education provides citizens with the critical thinking skills necessary to engage in public discourse and contribute to the democratic process.
• Ensures Informed Decision-Making: Education ensures that citizens are informed about public policies and issues. In a democracy, citizens need to have access to accurate and reliable information to make informed decisions. Education provides citizens with the knowledge and skills needed to analyze and evaluate information critically and make informed decisions.

What is the Impact of Democracy on Education?

Democracy has a significant impact on education. Democratic societies value education as a means of empowering citizens and promoting social and economic progress.

The following are some of the ways in which democracy impacts education:

• Equal Access to Education: In a democratic society, education is seen as a fundamental right that should be accessible to all citizens. Democratic governments prioritize education and ensure that all citizens have equal access to quality education, regardless of their social or economic status. This leads to more equitable education systems and reduces educational disparities.
• Emphasis on Critical Thinking: Democracy values critical thinking and informed decision-making, and this value is reflected in the education system. Democratic societies prioritize education that promotes critical thinking, analysis, and evaluation of information. This is essential for citizens to participate effectively in the democratic process and make informed decisions.
• Transparency and Accountability: Democracy values transparency and accountability in all aspects of governance, including education. Democratic governments ensure that the education system is transparent and accountable to citizens, with clear policies and procedures for decision-making and resource allocation.

How does Education Promotes Democracy?

Education promotes democracy by empowering citizens to participate in the democratic process. Citizens who are educated are more likely to vote, engage in public discourse, and hold their leaders accountable.

They are also more likely to understand the importance of the rule of law and the protection of individual rights.

Education also promotes social and economic mobility, which is essential for a healthy democracy. Citizens who are educated are more likely to have access to better job opportunities and higher wages, which can reduce social and economic inequality. This, in turn, can help promote social cohesion and stability, which are essential for the survival of democracy.

What is the Aim of Education in Democratic India?

In democratic India, the aim of education is to promote active citizenship, critical thinking, and social and economic progress.

The following are some of the objectives of education in democratic India:

• Citizenship Education: The primary aim of education in democratic India is to promote active citizenship. Education is designed to provide citizens with the knowledge, skills, and values needed to participate effectively in the democratic process. This includes promoting democratic values like freedom, equality, and justice.
• Social and Economic Progress: Education is also designed to promote social and economic progress in democratic India. Education is seen as a means of empowering citizens and reducing social and economic inequalities. The education system in India is designed to provide students with the skills and knowledge needed to compete in the global economy and promote innovation and entrepreneurship.
• Critical Thinking and Problem-Solving: In a democratic society, critical thinking and problem-solving are essential skills for active citizenship. Education in democratic India is designed to promote critical thinking, analysis, and evaluation of information. This is essential for citizens to participate effectively in the democratic process and make informed decisions.

Democracy cannot survive without education. Education plays a crucial role in the success and survival of democracy by empowering citizens to participate in the democratic process, promoting critical thinking, and reducing social and economic inequality.

It is, therefore, essential that governments invest in education and ensure that all citizens have access to quality education. Only then can we ensure that democracy remains a vibrant and thriving form of government that serves the interests of all citizens.

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OPINION article

Learning for democracy: some inspiration from john dewey's idea of democracy.

• Center of Teacher Education, Minghsin University of Science and Technology, Hsinchu, Taiwan

1 Introduction

Citizens in a democracy must be educated because it is they who steer the ship of state ( Dar, 2021 ). Therefore, for a country to progress toward democracy, people need to be nurtured with democratic literacy through education. The ideas of John Dewey, a 20th Century American philosopher, are highly influential on our contemporary understanding of this relationship between education and democracy. He was born on October 20, 1859, in Burlington, Vermont, in the United States. After graduating from the University of Vermont in 1879, he taught in Vermont until 1881 and in high school in Pennsylvania until 1882. He received a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in 1884. He died on June 1, 1952. Dewey is known for his views on the relationships between philosophy, education, democracy, the society, and the individual ( Özkan, 2020 ).

In Democracy and Education , Dewey criticizes dichotomies such as those between reason and experience, intelligence and physical strength, liberal education and practical training, the sciences and the humanities, and the spiritual and the material. He believed that history had affirmed the former at the expense of the latter of these dichotomies, and such an imbalance hinders social progress. Thus, Dewey adopted an empiricist foundation and argued that ideally, science and labor ought to carry both practical and humanistic value in a society. In the preface of Democracy and Education, Dewey explored and explained the various ideas constituting a democratic society and the application of these ideas to various issues in education ( Dewey, 1916 ; Tampio, 2024 ).

Dewey's writings continue to influence discussions on a variety of subjects, including democratic education , which was the focus of Dewey's famous 1916 book on the subject ( Dewey, 1916 ; Tampio, 2024 ).

Dewey believed that democracy means that every human being, independent of the quantity or range of his personal endowment, has the right to equal opportunity with every other person for development of whatever gifts he has. Dewey's vision of education is teachers nurturing each child's passions and not using tests to rank children. School curriculum develop talent in every student—nurture by nature. However, some schools are far from realizing that vision ( Dewey, 1916 ; Shih, 2024 ; Tampio, 2024 ). Therefore, this article explores John Dewey's idea of democracy and his conception of the role of learning in developing a democratic learning atmosphere, and emphasizes a democratic education allows students to participate in the problem–solving process, that continuous use of real social issues enhances democratic literacy for students ( Ye and Shih, 2021 ).

2 Research method

This study uses a critical hermeneutic approach to understand Dewey's idea of democracy, which is a key pillar of his thought. Many scholars have studied his earlier and well-known works, The School and Society and Democracy and Education ( Dewey, 1899/1976 ; Shih, 2018 ; Saito, 2020 ).

3 Dewey's idea of democracy and how it inspires learning for democracy

3.1 students are socialized into a democratic way of life through education.

In the preface of Democracy and Education , Dewey states that he aimed to provide “a critical estimate of the theories of knowing and moral development which were formulated in earlier societies, but still operate… to hamper the adequate realization of the idea of democracy.” He argues that the realization of democracy is closely related to epistemic and moral development, upon which the society and its educational system are based. Dewey implied that for education to be truly democratizing, the theories of knowledge and moral development underpinning education must be aligned with a democratic way of life ( Dewey, 1916 ; Lind, 2023 ). In addition, students must be socialized into a democratic way of life ( Shih, 2020 ).

3.2 Students gain opportunities and resources to realize their potential by participating in political, social, and cultural life

Dewey fiercely advocated for participatory democracy: the belief that democracy as an ethical ideal calls upon men and women to build communities in which every individual has the necessary opportunities and resources to realize his or her potential by participating in political, social, and cultural life. This also extends to students ( Dewey, 1916 ; Peters and Jandrić, 2017 ).

3.3 Teachers should respect diversity in their students' way of being

Dewey's vision of democracy challenges us to adapt our global communities and educational systems according to the needs of our historical moment for all citizens to benefit. Dewey called on the citizens of democratic societies to imagine new ways of association and interaction that foster respect for freedom, equality, and the diversity in our ways of being in the world. Similarly, teachers should respect diversity in their students' way of being for students to flourish as human beings ( Dewey, 1916 ; Gordon and English, 2016 ; Ye and Shih, 2021 ).

3.4 The ability of students to exercise their judgment is honed through democratic education

Dewey stressed that education must prepare students for an uncertain future. Indeed, we face such a future given the speed of economic and technological change today. Thus, students must develop effective habits, be adaptable, and learn how to learn. This contrasts with a traditional, industrial model of education where individuals are trained to fulfill a single occupational niche for the rest of their lives ( Dewey, 1916 ; Stobie, 2024 ).

Dewey expanded the concept of democracy to mean something abstract to something that encompasses the entirety of human life. Correspondingly, education became increasingly entwined in such a conception of democracy. As noted by Dewey, most people think of democracy as a political institution, made most visible by the act of voting. However, voters ought to make an informed choice, and they can only do so through keen judgment, which is cultivated through education ( Dewey, 1916 ; Ye and Shih, 2021 ).

4 Discussion

Maintaining democracy and freedom is key to the future of the post-totalitarian countries that emerged 30 years ago from their isolation from the West to reclaim the place where they had historically belonged ( Strouhal, 2020 ).

The dialectical relationship between democracy and education for democracy reflects the fluid natures of both democracy and education. Fluctuations within the internal dynamics of democratic institutions and relations between democracy and society can reflect progress, a deepening of democracy, or setbacks. As a result of such flux, the relationship of democracy to education evolves as does democracy itself, necessitating periodic reexamination so that efforts to align educational institutions with democratic goals remain relevant ( Reimers, 2023 ).

In addition, the sustainability of a country depends on the quality of the next generation, which plays a vital role in various aspects of life, ranging from education, culture, economy, politics, and religion. Education can build a new generation of a nation toward a better direction. All nations worldwide are trying to prepare the next generation of good and smart citizens. Carrying the spirit of democracy, all nations worldwide emphasize organizing a good governance government and focusing on the involvement of its citizens ( Fuad, 2023 ).

Dewey's “ Democracy and Education ” is commendably guided by the vision of a democratic society. He contrasts the democratic society with an undesirable society “which internally and externally sets up barriers to free intercourse and communication of experience”. By contrast, a democratic society “secures flexible readjustment of its institutions through interaction of the different forms of associated life” and “makes provision for participation in its good of all its members on equal terms”. Dewey proposed two metrics “to measure the worth of a form of social life” by: “the extent in which the interests of a group are shared by all its members, and the fullness and freedom with which it interacts with other groups” ( Dewey, 1916 ; Papastephanou, 2017 ).

Finally, Dewey defined education in Democracy and Education as “that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience.” ( Dewey, 1916 ). Hence, education must be based on experience, developing and expanding the growth of experience from individuals' real-life experiences. Since each experience can have either a positive or negative impact on each person, the attitudes formed can lead to preferences or aversions, and the value of an experience can be inferred from the direction it drives. The transformation of experience has educational significance only when it develops positively. Therefore, teachers should promote education in a democratic manner, allowing students to gain experiences of democratic education. In this way, students are more likely to develop democratic literacy. And, our society is more likely to become a democratic society.

5 Conclusions

Autonomous citizens participating in a free society (i.e., a democracy) cannot be cultivated in a regimented, one-size-fits-all classroom. Students should thus be given enough space to continually experience life and establish their values. Dewey argued that education, both formal and informal, should be organized to promote individual and social growth. These ends are most likely to be achieved when learners work together and focus on crucial problems relevant to their lives ( Harbour, 2023 ).

Such education is the bedrock on which a democracy thrives, where democratic processes and practices extend beyond the political into the social and economic ( Harbour, 2023 ). Such education can also only function in a society where democratic ideals (that every young citizen ought to be socialized into becoming thinking participants of a free society) are cherished. Thus, education and democracy are parasitic on each other in Dewey's worldview ( van der Ploeg, 2019 ).

Through the decades, Dewey's focus increasingly shifted toward the importance of learning to think critically, including interrogating existing social structures and dynamics ( van der Ploeg, 2019 ). We glean the following points from Dewey's conception of democracy and education. (1) Education should socialize students into a democratic way of life. (2) Students should be given opportunities and resources to realize their potential by participating in political, social, and cultural life. (3) Teachers should respect the diversity in their students' ways of being. (4) Democratic education should hone the ability of students to exercise their judgment. (5) Education in a democracy should aim to “continuously reorganize and transform the experiences” of students. We hope that, through our article, educators and stakeholders can appreciate the centrality of democratic education in a democratic society.

Author contributions

Y-HS: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This study was funded by the Taiwan's Ministry of Science and Technology (Grant No. 104-2410-H-254-001-).

Conflict of interest

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher's note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Keywords: democracy, education, educational philosophy, John Dewey, learning for democracy

Citation: Shih Y-H (2024) Learning for democracy: some inspiration from John Dewey's idea of democracy. Front. Polit. Sci. 6:1429685. doi: 10.3389/fpos.2024.1429685

Received: 08 May 2024; Accepted: 13 June 2024; Published: 27 June 2024.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2024 Shih. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Yi-Huang Shih, shih262@gmail.com

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Education and Democracy

• Martha Minow

Anna Deavere Smith, American actress, playwright, and professor, once said , “Art convenes.  It is not just inspirational.  It is aspirational.  It pricks the walls of our compartmentalized minds, opens our hearts and makes us brave.”  In that spirit, can we “prick the walls of our compartmentalized minds” and bring heart and courage to reflections on education and democracy?   Democratic governance in societies around the world faces serious challenge today.  Education sits at the crossroads of the information revolution and widening inequalities.   The frailties of education increase the fragility of democracy. Strengthening each is critical to the other.

What steps move toward strength, and what steps instead make matters worse?

Democracy is hard work, and often produces poor policies.  Playwright George Bernard Shaw was not stretching the truth when he had one of his characters say , “Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.” The work of self-governance takes time, produces conflicts, and leaves us with few to blame but ourselves.  So, it “ is the worst form of Government except all those other[s]. ”

On top of it all, it’s difficult to keep a democracy.  Elections can be rigged.  Politicians can take choices away from the voters.  And the people can be tempted to surrender their power — by failing to vote or by voting for tyrants. Only 4.5% of the world’s populations live in full democracies, and even in those nations, self-governance faces rising gains by authoritarian leaders in Venezuela, Poland, Hungary, the Philippines, and, some would say , the United States.

The founders of the United States understood that “ an ignorant people cannot remain a free people and that democracy cannot survive too much ignorance. ” The American movement for “common schools” initiated in the 1830s sought to promote political stability, equip more people to earn a living, and enable people to follow the law and transcend differences in religion and background. Yet we are far from embracing this ideal as a guide for practice in the United States. As initially advanced, the common school ideal excluded enslaved people and children with disabilities.  After the Civil War — and even today — public school systems still often divide students by race and class in practice.

A sustained legal strategy attacking legally mandated racial segregation in schools yielded official victory in 1954. But this also triggered resistance, and, despite some successes, massive racial separation persists in American schools.  According to work done by Jennifer L. Hochschild and Nathan Scovronick , of this country’s 5,300 communities with fewer than 100,000 people, at least ninety percent were white at the turn of this century. In large urban districts, nearly seventy percent of the public students were nonwhite, and over half were poor or nearly poor. In some communities , this pattern has continued to worsen. Disparities in per-pupil expenditures further reflect the sharp differences in local wealth because most of the country funds schools based on local property taxes.   Although a majority of Americans report that school integration is a good idea, a majority also agree that “ we shouldn’t do anything to promote [it] .” One commentator reports that now we live in an era of “hoarding” by upper middle-class families — those in the top twenty percent of income — who have used zoning laws, local control of schooling, college application procedures, and unpaid internships to pass their opportunities onto their children while making it harder for others to break in.

As a result, it is fair to ask whether we are holding up the ideal, so well stated by John Dewey , that schools should “see to it that each individual gets an opportunity to escape from the limitations of the social group in which he was born, and to come into living contact with a broader environment”? Controversial policy reforms would increase educational opportunities for disadvantaged students, but there is little political will for paying teachers more to teach in schools in poor neighborhoods, making higher education truly affordable, ending exclusionary residential zoning, and replacing reliance on local property taxes with state-wide or national redistributive financing.

To work, democracy needs effective schools that do even more than instruct students in the value and institutions of a democratic society (though this would be a good start, given that in 2014 only 36% of Americans could name the three branches of government ). Schools can cultivate habits and skills of taking initiative, showing respect, listening, and controlling emotions in the face of disagreement.  Schools can help individuals take the perspective of others and learn to assess and organize information.  These capacities are presumed by democratic governance, but children are not born with these abilities.  Nor are they born with knowledge of what life is like under fascism or autocracies.  Students can learn by doing: learn to use the tools of democracy in their classrooms, debate controversial issues, and practice disagreeing with respect.  Schools can trust young people to follow their own interests, to take responsibility, and to take up governance of their own classrooms and lives. Civics education with these features leads to greater political engagement, voting , and higher degrees of acceptance toward people of different backgrounds .

At this moment, the distance between these ideals and aspirations much less actual practices around the country is enormous.    A global study found that few millennials object to autocracy; only 19% of American millennials surveyed report that a military takeover would be illegitimate if the government is incompetent. Not many young people may know how following a worldwide economic depression, people in Italy and Germany turned to fascism in the 1930s and gave power to Mussolini and to Hitler .  Mussolini and Hitler appealed to racism, fanaticism, and fear — and created global violence, mass killings, and destruction of communities and democratic ideals.  A ray of hope for democracy: survey research suggests that people are much more willing to deliberate than prior research suggested, and those most willing to deliberate are exactly those turned off by standard, polarized, interest group politics. If the conventional avenues for participation can involve more opportunities for deliberation, many who are disengaged and disaffected might join in the work of self-governance.

Digital resources offer both promise and risks for education, for democracy, and for their connections.  The Internet, social media, and search engines bring much of the world’s knowledge within reach of more people than ever in human history.  Information — and disinformation — are plentiful and a few keystrokes away.  It is more difficult for repressive regimes to keep information out of people’s reach.  The architecture of the Internet also enables people with little cost to find others with similar interests, to share and spread information and views, and to recruit others because it facilitates one-to-many communication . These features are exemplified by the work of MoveOn and Breitbart News — and also by terrorist recruitment and sexual predators online. Arab Spring and public protests in Turkey indicate the power of the Internet to promote democracy but authoritarian governments have also found the Internet useful for surveillance, intimidation, and purging opposition . Research suggests that some individuals tune out of politics with the help of social media and internet entertainment , but here the internet simply joins many opportunities for people to avoid political engagement.   Both education and democracy are fragile unless people desire — and fight for — political participation, knowledge, debate, critical reasoning, and freedom, whether in governance of their societies, schools, or design of the Internet.

Education and democracy both enhance human freedom but require rules and structure to work.   Both need ground rules.  Neither can work amid untrammeled violence, disrespect, and lying. Formal rules and informal norms can guide people to assess claims and bolster intolerance of intolerance.   Practicing the predicates of education and democracy — the norms of respect and truth — these are the tasks pricking the walls of our compartmentalized minds, opening our hearts, and making us brave.

This post is based on remarks given at Sarah Lawrence College.

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Democracy and education in the united states.

• Kathy Hytten Kathy Hytten University of North Carolina at Greensboro
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.2
• Published online: 29 March 2017

There is an integral and reciprocal relationship between democracy and education. Democracy is more than a political system or process, it is also a way of life that requires certain habits and dispositions of citizens, including the need to balance individual rights with commitments and responsibilities toward others. Currently, democracy is under threat, in part because of the shallow and reductive ways it has been taken up in practice. Understanding the historical relationship between democracy and education, particularly how democracy was positioned as part of the development of public schools, as well as current approaches to democratic schooling, can help to revitalize the democratic mission of education. Specifically, schools have an important civic role in cultivating in students the habits and dispositions of citizenship, including how to access information, determine the veracity of claims, think critically, research problems, ask questions, collaborate with others, communicate ideas, and act to improve the world. Curriculum, pedagogy, and organizational structures are unique in democratic schools. Developing an active, inquiry-based curriculum; using a problem-posing pedagogy; and organizing schools such that students develop habits of responsibility and social engagement provide our best hope for revitalizing democracy and ensuring that it is not simply an empty slogan but a rich, participatory, justice-oriented way of life.

• United States
• social justice
• democratic schools
• purposes of education
• civic education

If we were to ask a typical citizen in the United States about the meaning of democracy, they would likely tell us that it is a political system that entails freedom, choice, and voting. They would have some familiarity with branches of the government, the electoral process, and the idea that citizens get to choose their leaders. They have probably learned that democracy is the best system in the world, especially in contrast to other possibilities, such as communism, socialism, totalitarianism, and oligarchy. They may point out how democratic societies allow individuals to do what they want, provide myriad consumer choices, and ensure opportunities for everyone who works hard to be successful, often implicitly conflating capitalism and democracy. Most likely, they take democracy for granted; it is simply the name for our way of life. Yet at the same time, the idea of democracy is fragile and contested and, from a global perspective, increasingly suspect. Democracy has been invoked to support a range of questionable practices, including invading foreign countries, declaring wars, exploiting the environment, and placing the needs of corporations above those of people. Democracy is called upon as the justification “for almost anything people want to do” (Beane & Apple, 2007 , p. 6), leading many around the world to worry “that an appeal to democracy is a veiled attempt by those making the appeal to dominate, to manipulate, or in other ways to advance their own interests at others’ expense” (Ryder, 2007 , para. 1). Ironically, the more democracy is called upon, the less we seem to agree on what it means, and the more empty an idea it becomes.

In this article, I offer a rich vision of democracy as a way of life and describe the role of education in supporting that vision. In contrast to a shallow view of democracy as merely a political process, I argue that democracy is an ethical ideal that must be deliberately fostered and nourished in order for it to survive. It is ever a work in progress, and the fundamental role of schools in democratic societies is to cultivate the habits, values, dispositions, and practices necessary to sustain a democratic way of life. Since the creation of public schools in the United States centuries ago, they have always served a civic mission, though the centrality of this mission has waxed and waned. In our current climate of high-stakes accountability, excessive international competition, and privatization of public goods, we have arguably lost sight of the crucial relationship between education and democracy. In order to revitalize the civic mission of public education, we must understand the meaning of democracy and the role of schools in teaching, modeling, and sustaining a democratic way of life.

I begin this article by defining democracy as a way of life that requires certain habits and dispositions of citizens, including the need to balance individual rights with commitments and responsibilities toward others. I then discuss some of the current threats to democracy, including the ambiguity surrounding its meaning, and the reductive ways in which it is interpreted in practice. Third, I describe the historical relationship between education and democracy, exploring how this relationship has developed over time. I focus especially on the ideas of John Dewey, as he dedicated so much of his philosophical work to detailing the intimate and reciprocal connections between democracy and education. Fourth, I make an argument for the role democracy should play in our thinking about education contemporarily, describing the civic habits and dispositions that schools should cultivate if democracy is to hold any meaning. Fifth, I sketch some visions for democratic schooling that can help to revitalize and sustain a democratic way of life, arguing that a way of life as fragile and precarious as democracy can only survive when schools equip young people, as citizens in the making, with the skills, knowledge, and dispositions needed to nourish it. I describe approaches to curriculum, pedagogy, and school organization that can best cultivate democratic habits and behaviors. I close by suggesting that thinking deeply about the relationship between democracy and education is critical to bringing about a more just, fulfilling, and peaceful world.

What Is Democracy?

Describing the meaning of democracy is a more difficult task than it might initially seem. Most of us learn that democracy is a “form of political governance involving consent of the governed and equality of opportunity” and that it involves direct participation in some activities in our society, including electing representatives who will speak and work on our behalf in others (Beane & Apple, 2007 , p. 7). We may also consider it a way of social and political organization, involving rules, laws, prohibitions, and rights, encapsulated in such documents at the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The word democracy comes from the Greek root demos , which means the population of a town or nation. Building on this root, Kohl ( 1992 ) writes that, “a democracy is a society in which the population rules, not royalty, not a small number of families, or the military” (p. 201). Yet exactly how the people rule, and who constitutes “the people,” are matters of ongoing debate. Historically, many people were excluded from democratic participation, including women, people from minority groups, slaves, and men who didn’t own land. Moreover, there are multiple ways in which people can be involved in governing themselves, from directly participating in deliberation and decision-making on a face-to-face level to voting for people whom they implicitly trust will make choices that are in their best interest. Held ( 2006 ) claims that the idea of democracy is contested and that key democratic ideas and ideals are sometimes ambiguous and inconsistent, including “the proper meaning of ‘political participation,’ the connotation of ‘representation,’ the scope of citizens’ capacities to choose freely among political alternatives, and the nature of membership in a democratic community” (p. x).

Describing the relationship between democracy and education is particularly challenging because there is only loose consensus on the meaning of democracy itself, and there are different forms of democracy in practice. Held ( 2006 ) identifies nine different (though often overlapping in important ways) models of democracy that have evolved over time: developmental republicanism, protective republicanism, protective democracy, developmental democracy, legal democracy, competitive elitist democracy, deliberative democracy, participatory democracy, and pluralism. Gabardi ( 2001 ) adds communitarian democracy and agonistic democracy to this list, while Biesta ( 2007 ) describes different ways of conceiving democratic subjectivity including individual, social, and political. Acknowledging the range of possibilities and practices, Dahl ( 2015 ) nonetheless argues that heart of democracy involves a belief in the political equality of citizens and that actualizing this belief requires, at a minimum, equal and effective opportunities for civic participation, voting equality, equal and effective opportunities to learn about a range of options and their potential consequences (what he calls “enlightened understanding”), citizen control of issues that get placed on the policymaking agenda, and inclusion of all adults as citizens in all matters that affect them.

Perhaps even more important than a political process, democracy is also a way of life, it is “both an ideal and an actuality” (Dahl, 2015 , p. 26), marked by values and practices that are complex, contested, and varied. In his well-known and often-cited description of democracy, John Dewey ( 1916 ) writes that it “is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” (p. 93), whose contours require regular discussion, assessment, and reinvention. Dewey goes on to suggest democracies are built upon the collaborative interdependence of people in a society who identify shared interests, work together to solve problems, and create ways of living together that bring out the best in everyone. We value democratic social arrangements because they offer us “the promise of freedom and self-determination in the context of shared commitment to the public good” (Gallagher, 2008 , p. 340). Yet there are always tensions, challenges, and conflicts among values in democratic societies. Among the most significant of these tensions is how we balance a commitment to autonomy alongside at least some minimal obligations to other people. One of the hallmarks of democratic societies is that they work to maximize individual liberty and autonomy, protecting the ability of individuals to advance their own interests without imposing upon them a singular vision of a good life. Liberal democratic theorists are thus “preoccupied with the creation and defense of a world in which ‘free and equal’ individuals can flourish with minimum political impediments” (Held, 2006 , p. 262). Alternatively, leftist, radical, and socialist-oriented democratic theorists worry about overly individualistic conceptions of democracy and defend the need for more collective orientations and intervention by states so as to ensure equality among citizens in reality, not just theory. The tension between liberty and equality never simply goes away; indeed, Mouffe ( 2009 ) claims this paradox is constitutive of democratic societies, it is “a tension that can never be overcome but only negotiated in different ways” (p. 5). Democratic educational theorists adopt a range of positions on the spectrum between liberal and leftist perspectives on the relationship between democracy and education, with many arguing that in our current era, and given existing threats to democracy, we need to reinvigorate our concern for common, not just individual, goods.

While understanding government systems and political processes is necessary for peaceful citizenship, the founders of democracy had grander ideals than simply creating laws for people to vote upon and follow. Rather, in the vein of Dewey, they believed that democracy was a way of life that involved values, principles, beliefs, and habits of being. Arguing from the more leftist perspective, Beane ( 2005 ) describes this way of life well. He maintains that democracy is ultimately an idea about how people can live together in ways that are equitable, just, enriching, and fulfilling. At the heart of democracy are two ideas: “that people have a fundamental right to human dignity and … that people have a responsibility to care about the common good and the dignity and welfare of others” (p. 9). The right to dignity requires the ability to access to information, think for oneself, decide how to live one’s life, be free from coercion, and pursue happiness. At the same time, as part of one’s responsibility toward others, we are compelled to care about common goods, work together to solve problems, participate in discussion, and improve our collective well-being. These ideas provide some “guidelines” and a moral compass for how people can “live and learn to work together democratically” (Beane, 2005 , p. 120). Yet in popular understanding, we have typically decoupled rights from responsibilities and lost sight of the centrality of common goods and commitments to others as an integral part of democratic living. In its most crass and neoliberal forms, democracy has too often come to mean celebration of individual self-interest. That is, as long as I obey laws, pay taxes, vote periodically, and don’t intentionally harm others, I can do pretty much anything that I want.

To challenge reductive, narrow, and overly individualistic and neoliberal visions of democracy, it is useful to consider it as an ethical, social, and political ideal—a dynamic work in progress. Minimally, argues Gutmann ( 1999 ), democracy entails the principles of nondiscrimination and nonrepression. In its ideal from, democracy involves the cultivation of individual characteristics and habits of being, such as caring, compassion, generosity, fairness, respect, imagination, courage, kindness, and cooperation. Concurrently, it requires that citizens create communal systems and arrangements that support inquiry, problem solving, diversity, and ongoing efforts at social reform. It involves both dispositions toward others and everyday practices, like listening, questioning, participating, and experimenting. An open flow of ideas and equitable access to information are necessary in democratic societies, even when that information may be unpopular, as this openness is imperative if people are to make informed decisions about issues that affect their lives (Beane & Apple, 2007 , p. 7). Democratic citizens value diversity and believe a range of ideas, worldviews, and perspectives is enriching and important. Indeed, the valuing of diversity and pluralism are central features of democratic societies, because in diversity there is strength. Moreover, they require that citizens actually at least minimally care about the welfare of others who are different from them and want to uncover social problems, work to solve these problems, and pursue peaceful means for navigating conflicts.

On the one hand, democracy is of course a political system, yet ideally, on the other hand, citizens come to view it as much more than that, seeing it more foundationally as a “creative, constructive process” that we need to nurture and protect, “a trek that citizens in a pluralistic society make together … a political path, a tradition of sorts, that unites them, not a culture, language, or religion” (Parker, 2003 , p. 21). In our richest visions of democracy, democratic citizens would understand that voting is only a small part of their responsibilities and that democracy is always unfinished and thus needs our sustained attention; it is not a gift we have simply received from our ancestors. Neumann ( 2008 ) captures this expansive and rich vision of democracy well, maintaining that democratic citizenship “involves a disposition for social responsibility and civic engagement; it involves participation in groups concerned with advancing foundational principles of liberty, justice, and equality and with improving human welfare and the environment of the country and planet” (p. 332). That is, it requires critical thinking and the habit of working with others to deliberate on matters of social importance as well as “faith in the individual and collective capacity of people to create possibilities for resolving problems” (Beane & Apple, 2007 , p. 7). While this vision of democracy as a way of life may never have been actualized widely, it is currently under significant threat, especially by shallow yet increasingly pervasive interpretations of democracy as nothing more than a system that protects and celebrates individual self-interests.

Democracy Under Threat

It is difficult to say whether democracy is more troubled now than any other time in our history. While some may argue that the deleterious impacts of neoliberal forms of globalization have led to a deeply problematic conflation of market freedom with democratic freedom and, in effect, have reduced our sense of democracy to little more than an empty slogan, there has been no time in our history when we have fully lived up to our democratic ideals. Moreover, different versions of democracy have always been in tension. Advocates of liberal, individualistic approaches to democracy have typically elevated individual freedoms and rights above common goods, arguing that these goods themselves are always contested and that the best way to protect individual liberty is through minimal state intervention. While we proclaim in the U.S. Declaration of Independence the equality of all “men” and their inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we have always excluded large groups of people from this supposed equality. It has taken the deliberate and sustained work of numerous civil rights activists to overturn slavery, extend voting privileges, and remove structural barriers to opportunity for historically marginalized peoples. And yet there is still much work to do to better achieve democracy in our times, especially given the growing gaps between the wealthy and poor around the world in terms of income, opportunity, health care, and overall quality of life. Indeed, advocates of more leftist visions of democracy suggest that we have lost sight of the fundamental commitment to equality that is part of democracy and maintain that states have an obligation to ensure not just “formal equality” among citizens “before the law, but also that citizens would have the actual capacity (and health, education, skills and resources) to take advantage of opportunities before them” (Held, 2006 , p. 278). They worry that we have frequently forgotten that democracy takes ongoing effort and commitment. Addressing this concern, Barber ( 1993 ) asserts that “we have been nominally democratic for so long that we presume it is our natural condition rather than the product of persistent effort and tenacious responsibility” (p. 44). He adds that “democracy is anything but a ‘natural’ form of association. It is an extraordinary and rare contrivance of cultivated imagination” (p. 44). As such, we need to perpetually attend to the work that democracy entails, recognizing that citizenship is an action, not merely a static identity.

Dewey also recognized the tendency to assume the existence of democracy rather than to understand it as an ongoing effort. He was especially troubled by this laissez-faire understanding while the United States was at the same time justifying its involvement in world wars “with the virtually unassailable statement that our soldiers were fighting to ‘make the world safe for democracy’ ” (Beane & Apple, 2007 , p. 5). Writing about the challenges he saw to our democratic way of life between the First and Second World Wars, Dewey ( 1938 ) called attention to our complacency and our habit of seeing democracy as simply a fact rather than a project that requires sustained focus. He lamented that citizens “had, without formulating it, a conception of democracy as something that is like an inheritance that can be bequeathed, a kind of lump sum that we could live off and upon” (pp. 298–299). Alternatively, he argued that each generation has to rework democracy in a fashion that is relevant for their times and that is responsive to contemporary challenges. Yet many people today still think of democracy in static ways, as a given, something that requires very little of citizens beyond voting and abiding by certain procedures. Goodlad, Mantle-Bromley, and Goodlad ( 2004 ) echo Dewey’s concern about stagnation, worrying that too many people simply “assume that the United States has a democratic system of governance” that was created “by the framers of the U.S. Constitution” and “that it is so thoroughly embedded in our collective psyche that it is invulnerable to external threats … and that all we have to do to maintain it is occasionally to vote” (p. 35). Compounding the belief that we have already fulfilled the promise of democracy in this country, the idea is also threatened by ambiguity surrounding its meaning, allowing it to be co-opted by those seeking to justify the global expansion of a way of life marked by self-interested, capitalist accumulation.

Absent sustained attention to the moral heart of democracy, namely commitment to individual freedom amid a concern for common goods, it often is reduced in public discourse and imagination to little more than a theory of individualism. We conflate capitalism and democracy, believing that an unregulated economic market is necessary and sufficient to secure democratic freedoms, which themselves are often reduced to consumer choices. Price ( 2011 ) argues that democracy is presented to us as system of governance that we ought to uncritically appreciate, one “that can only be built upon and sustained by free markets, private property, increased consumption and productivity, and the over-arching pursuit of profit” (p. 293). Yet unregulated capitalism under the guise of democratic globalization has led to the rapid concentration of wealth in the hands of an increasingly small portion of the population, as well as the pervasive assumption that economic growth inherently trickles down to the poor and improves their quality of life. There is little evidence that this is actually the case, and instead we have ever-growing gaps worldwide between the extremely wealthy and everyone else. One of the biggest challenges to democracy is the belief that our current approaches to globalization are actually democratic and that unregulated corporate behaviors can somehow protect the interests of citizens as opposed to simply shareholders.

Perhaps the biggest threat to democracy in our times is complacency. If we consider democracy as a given, we are unlikely to engage in the sustained efforts needed to bring it to fruition. Yet schools too often teach, both explicitly and implicitly, that democracy is merely the political system that we use to make decisions by in our country. We rarely discuss deeper visions for democracy or tensions and paradoxes within democracy or even reflect on the meaning of democracy at all. This allows those with more self-interested goals to assert, often persuasively, that their agendas are actually democratic. Apple and Beane ( 2007 ) capture this worry well when they argue that “rather than referring to ways in which political and institutional life are shaped by equitable, active, widespread, and fully informed participation, democracy is increasingly being defined as unregulated business maneuvers in a free-market economy” (p. 150). Revisiting the historic relationship between democracy and education can help to disrupt this reductive vision and provide the foundation needed to reclaim a more expansive understanding of what it means to live in a democratic society.

Historical Perspective on Democracy and Education

The founding and development of public schools in the United States were historically closely tied to democratic ideals. Indeed, as Schlesinger ( 2009 ) maintains, “it seems bizarre to have to make the case that the public school system should prepare citizens for democracy” (p. 88) since this why our school system was initially created in the first place. The founding fathers of the United States held important political motives for education, believing that critical literacy, as well as an understanding of history, were imperative for self-governance. These motives are evident in George Washington’s first message to Congress, where “he advocated for public schools that would teach students to ‘value their own rights’ and ‘to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority’” (Rothstein & Jacobsen, 2006 , p. 267). Consistently, in his farewell address he also talked about the importance of education to informed decision-making, claiming that “‘it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened’ by schools that teach virtue and morality” (Rothstein & Jacobsen, 2006 , p. 267).

Both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams also maintained the centrality of schooling to providing citizens with the information and habits needed to make wise decisions and to hold their leaders accountable. Jefferson acknowledged the potential for corruption in leadership, arguing that only an educated citizenry can protect against this. He wrote, “every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree” (Neumann, 2008 , p. 329). John Adams, who authored the section of the Massachusetts constitution focused upon “spreading the opportunities and advantages of education,” wrote about the importance of diffusing “wisdom and knowledge” to the broad population, because these are “necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties” (Michelli, 2005 , p. 11).

We can also see the relationship between education and democracy as an important part of the Common School Movement in the early part of the 1800s in the United States. Common school reformers believed that public schooling could help shape the population in progressive directions by providing all children access to shared basic information and the means to develop literacy skills, concurrently reducing tensions between social classes and developing citizens with the knowledge needed to self-govern. Spring ( 2005 ) identifies three distinctive features of this movement: creating schools “attended in common by all children in which a common political and social ideology was taught”; using schools as part of government policy aimed to address social, economic, and political problems; and building state agencies to regulate and administer schools (p. 74).

Considered the founder of the Common School Movement, Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education Horace Mann, in a series of annual reports he wrote to encourage support for public schooling, consistently maintained its integral role in sustaining democracy. For example, in his Tenth Annual Report in 1846 , he asserted that a democratic society requires public schools to provide, at the very least, the amount of education needed “to qualify each citizen for the social duties that he will be called to discharge,” including the information and dispositions necessary to maintain health, parent effectively, be a good witness or juror, and vote thoughtfully, and “for the faithful and conscientious discharge of all of those duties which devolve upon the inheritor of a portion of the sovereignty of this great republic” (Fraser, 2001 , p. 53). In another of his reports, written after a visit to Europe, Mann argued that schools needed to teach more than simply literacy, especially since students in autocratic regimes also learned to read and write. Instead, he offered “schools in a democracy could not be held accountable for academics alone, but must inculcate democratic moral and political values so that literacy would not be misused” (Rothstein & Jacobsen, 2006 , p. 268).

Historically, the discussion of the relationship between education and democracy, especially in the ideal, is most fully developed in the work of John Dewey. Across his large body of work, Dewey consistently argues that democracy is, first and foremost, a way of life marked by the degree to which individuals share similar interests and work across lines of difference in order to solve problems and create habits of interaction that allow all people to reach their potential. For Dewey, democracy and education are intimately and reciprocally related. He suggests that without an education that conditions us to understand both our freedoms and responsibilities toward others, democracy can neither develop nor endure. We need schools to learn the values, habits, and dispositions that form the heart of democratic living and that allow us to live “together in ways in which the life of each of us is at once profitable in the deepest sense of the word, profitable to himself and helpful in the building up of the individuality of others” (Dewey, 1938 , p. 303). The most essential function of schooling is to help develop democratic values and purposes. This goal should be the foundation for all other educational efforts. Dewey ( 1938 ) offers that school,

[i]s not the only means, but it is the first means, the primary means and the most deliberate means by which the values that any social group cherishes, the purposes that it wishes to realize, are distributed and brought home to the thought, the observation, judgment and choice of the individual. (p. 296)

It is through schools that we learn the meaning of democracy and develop commitment to others and to the processes of inquiry and collaborative problem solving necessary for individual and communal growth.

For Dewey, democracy is an evolving, creative, and cooperative way of life that must be nourished through schooling in order for it to survive. He argues that democratic citizens must learn to be critical, reflective, open-minded thinkers who can use their minds well to solve social, economic, and political problems and thereby reconstruct the world around them in more just, equitable, and fulfilling ways. The Educational Policies Commission echoed these beliefs in their 1938 report on “The Purposes of Education in American Democracy.” Sponsored by the National Education Association, then a quasi-governmental group comprised of teachers, educational professionals, and policymakers, members of the Commission were concerned about how schools should respond to challenges posed by global unrest in the wake of the First World War, and the aftermath of the Great Depression. The Commission opened this report stating definitively that “the democratic way of life establishes the purpose of American education,” yet they worried about how this way of life was being challenged both abroad and at home, and thus claimed, “the achievement of democracy through education” was “the most urgent and most intensely practical problem facing our profession” (Educational Policies Commission, 1938 , p. vii).

The vision of democracy offered by this Commission is consistently reflective of Dewey’s ideals and of more leftist visions of democracy that foreground the connection between freedom and equality. For example, they claimed that commitment to the general welfare was one of the most important elements of democratic living, asserting that

[d]emocracy prizes a broad humanitarianism … a feeling of kinship to other people more or less fortunate than oneself. One who lives in accordance with democracy is interested not only in his own welfare but in the welfare of others – the general welfare. (Educational Policies Commission, 1938 , pp. 7–8)

They went on to outline a number of other “minimum essentials of democracy,” including that democratic societies afford individuals inalienable rights, inescapable responsibilities, and respectful treatment; ensure access to information and the participation of the people in decision making; use peaceful and thoughtful methods of settling controversies; and work to create the conditions for all people to pursue happiness (Educational Policies Commission, 1938 , pp. 7–8). Speaking to educators, the Commission argued that democracy ought to be the guiding ideal for public schooling, and “those who administer and teach in the schools must regard the study of democracy as their first professional responsibility” (p. 16).

While I have only provided a snapshot of the historical connection between democracy and schooling, that democratic goals were central to the founding and development of a public school system in the United States is undeniable. There is significant support over time for Dewey’s ( 1897 ) belief that “the community’s duty to education is … its paramount moral duty” (p. 94). This is because it is only through education that “society can formulate its own purposes, can organize its own means and resources, and thus shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes to move” (Dewey, 1897 , p. 94). Democracy as a “ personal way of individual life” (Dewey, 1939 , p. 226) requires schools that nurture democratic attitudes, habits, and dispositions and that uphold a civic mission. Writing contemporaneously with Dewey, the Educational Policies Commission ( 1938 ) outlined a compelling vision for the civic responsibilities of schools in rich detail, suggesting that an educated, democratic citizen is sensitive to the disparities of human circumstance, acts to correct unsatisfactory conditions, seeks to understand social structures and processes, has defenses against propaganda, respects honest differences of opinion, has regard for the nation’s resources, measures scientific advance by its contribution to the general welfare, is a cooperating member of the world community, respects the law, is economically literate, accepts his or her civic duties, and acts upon an unswerving loyalty to democratic ideals (p. 108). Yet in our current era, we seem to have lost sight of this civic mission of schooling, pointing to the pressing need to revisit and establish anew a democratic vision for public education.

Role of Schools in a Democratic Society

While history illustrates that a civic mission was always an integral reason for public schooling, attention to this mission has waned over time, but especially in the last few decades, and particularly since the 1983 report assessing the quality of education in the United States, A Nation at Risk . This contentious report (as later analysis revealed much of the data and its interpretation to be problematic) set in motion a pattern of attacking public schools “for failing to keep up with other foreign powers with the context of Cold War geo-politics” (Au, 2009 , p. 44) and for implicitly allowing a “business model of competing in the global economy” (McClung, 2013 , p. 37) to trump civic purposes for schooling. The authors of the report claimed that international students were outperforming U.S. students in crucial areas of math and science. As part of the response to this report, states created education commissions to establish rigorous content standards and to develop a framework for schools to engage in regular testing to ensure that students met these standards. This high-stakes accountability regime was only exacerbated when the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation went into effect in 2002 . Frequent, high-stakes testing in reading and math are integral to NCLB, as the law mandates that students be tested in these subjects every year in grades 3–8 and at least once in high school. Testing in science at least once in elementary, middle, and high school was added in 2008 (Au, 2009 ). While ostensibly this system helps educators to ensure the achievement of all students, a corollary effect has been to significantly narrow the curriculum, as little attention is now paid in schools to nontested subjects like social studies, art, writing, and the humanities (Pederson, 2007 ).

One of the most disturbing consequences of an obsessive focus on students meeting standards in math, reading, and science, beyond the fact that standardized tests are now dictating and dominating the curriculum, is that concurrently, we have lost sight of more noble goals for schools. McClung ( 2013 ) laments that “the economic purpose of getting a job or getting into college in order to get a better job”—narrowly individualistic pursuits that implicitly presume our quality of life can be measured by the quantity of our paychecks—“has evolved into the de facto primary purpose of K–12 (and higher) education” (p. 37). Students are taking fewer classes in social studies, and in the best-case scenario schools are attempting to integrate social studies content into literacy goals. Yet as McGuire ( 2007 ) shows, social studies taught in this supposedly integrated fashion are not helping students to develop as democratic citizens, as typically students are simply offered disconnected bits of information to digest, memorize, and recall for tests. Instead of learning to think critically about history, current events, political systems, operations of power, and global dynamics, social studies topics are offered instrumentally as a way to improve reading skills. For example, “students are asked to find main ideas and supporting details, to compare and contrast, to make inferences, to scan, and to understand graphical material” (McGuire, 2007 , p. 621) but are not taught the habits and dispositions needed to become knowledgeable, engaged, social justice–oriented citizens.

It is against the backdrop of a declining attention to civic educational purposes that the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement released a 2003 report entitled The Civic Mission of Schools . Containing contributions from some of the most respected and distinguished scholars in the bipartisan field of civic education, the report was an outgrowth of a series of meetings held to reach consensus about the research, role, and value of civic education and provide recommendations for civic education reform, especially important in light of what they characterized as waning civic participation in the United States. The opening to this report echoes the knowledge and wisdom of our founding fathers:

For more than 250 years, Americans have shared a vision in which all citizens understand, appreciate, and actively engage in civic and political life—taking responsibility for building communities, contributing their diverse talents and energies to solve local and national problems, deliberating about public issues, influencing public policy, voting, and pursing the common good. Americans know that it is a rare and precious gift to live in a society that permits and values such participation. (Carnegie Corporation of New York and CIRCLE, 2003 , p. 8)

While they describe a compelling role for citizens in a democratic society, there is little evidence that today’s young people understand this “rare and precious gift” or that they are being taught the habits necessary to sustain it. The high stakes accountability movement only exacerbates this concern.

In arguing for revitalizing the civic mission of schools, this committee offers a powerful description of the habits and behaviors integral to democratic citizenship. This description can serve to guide efforts to center democratic goals for public education and to reform curriculum, pedagogy, and the organization of schooling. Their vision is worth quoting at length. They maintain that “competent and responsible citizens”:

Are informed and thoughtful; have a grasp and an appreciation of history and the fundamental processes of American democracy; have an understanding and awareness of public and community issues; and have the ability to obtain information, think critically, and enter into dialogue among others with different perspectives.

Participate in their communities through membership in or contributions to organizations working to address an array of cultural, social, political, and religious interests and beliefs.

Act politically by having the skills, knowledge, and commitment needed to accomplish public purposes, such as group problem solving, public speaking, petitioning and protesting, and voting.

Have moral and civic virtues such as concern for the rights and welfare of others, social responsibility, tolerance and respect, and belief in the capacity to make a difference. (Carnegie Corporation of New York and CIRCLE, 2003 , p. 4)

They offer this vision in the hopes that educators will better understand the centrality of schooling to democracy and, concurrently, strengthen their commitment to preparing young people to engage in the work needed to sustain and promote a democratic way of life.

In order to create the kinds of caring, competent, committed, and responsible citizens envisioned both by our founding fathers and by the wide range of democratic educational theorists exploring the issue of schooling for democracy, educators need to think more regularly in the language of habits and dispositions than in the more familiar language of content and standards. Instead of obsessing about what students know—the information that students must learn in order to be successful on standardized tests—educators need to attend much more to identifying how students should learn to be—the habits and dispositions that we ought to be cultivating. We should be as concerned, if not more concerned, with the kinds of people we are shaping and molding through schooling than we are with the isolated bits of information students can recall for tests or whether they outperform their counterparts around the world on these tests. To start, democratic citizens need to be in the habit of accessing information, determining the veracity of claims, thinking critically, researching problems, asking questions of those in power, dialoguing with others, finding resources, communicating ideas, and acting to improve the world around them. Stitzlein ( 2014 ) argues that developing certain habits of inquiry is at the heart of educating for democracy. Drawing from Dewey, she offers that such habits include “beliefs in equal opportunity, free communication, inclusion of varied perspectives, hope for a better future, and valuing of life uncoerced by others” (Stitzlein, 2014 , p. 63). In addition, democratic citizens must be empathetic and compassionate, media literate, responsible to others around them, and globally aware. They should be able to think for themselves and to substantiate their perspectives and opinions about the world on the basis of evidence and information, not easily falling victim to propaganda or lies.

The habits, dispositions, and behaviors of democratic citizenship don’t simply come naturally to people; they must be learned in the context of interaction with others. As most of all young people in the world attend schools, they are ideally positioned to directly and deliberately cultivate these habits. Parker ( 2003 ) describes the minimal qualities of good citizens in relation to foundational knowledge, cognitive habits, and dispositions toward others. He writes that democratic citizens understand that they are caught up in an “inescapable network of mutuality” with other people; exhibit practical and contextualized judgment; hold civic knowledge, including “knowing the conditions that have undermined democracies in the past”; demonstrate “civic know-how,” such as skills for deliberation and problem solving; and maintain a thirst for social, political, and economic justice (Parker, 2003 , p. 23). It is no doubt one of the most important roles of schools to cultivate these skills and habits, and to help students to “develop initiative and imagination, the capacity to name the world, the wisdom to identify the obstacles to their full humanity and to the humanity of others, and the courage to act on whatever the known demands” (Ayers, Kumashiro, Meiners, Quinn, & Stovall, 2010 , p. 13). These civic goals are surely as important, if not more important, than economic goals for schools, which are reflected in the ways, however inadvertently, schooling has often become simply about acquiring credentials for individualistic and selfish economic gain.

Taking democratic goals seriously would mean that we would organize and focus schools differently than we do now. At the very least, such schools would be “marked by an emphasis on cooperation and collaboration rather than competition” and would be organized to “encourage young people to improve the life of the community” around them, instead of simply using education as a steppingstone to personal gain (Beane & Apple, 2007 , p. 12). Cultivating democratic habits is no doubt best done in schools that are themselves structured to support a democratic vision and mission. While many schools and school districts allude to and even explicitly name issues of democracy in their mission statements, rarely do they demonstrate deep commitment to democracy in practice.

Democratic Schools

In contrast to the all-too-common reality of schools as passive places where students quietly absorb textbook-based information in classrooms, complete worksheets and standardized assessments, and where knowledge is artificially divided into disconnected subjects, schools that foster democratic habits are active, engaged spaces built around a culture of inquiry and civic engagement. They are organized such that teachers and students are encouraged to be creative, flexible, and experimental. They elevate cooperation and collaboration above competition and ask students to take ownership over their own education and to complete community engaged projects. Students in such schools study actual problems facing humanity, as opposed to simply learning about inherited truths, mathematical and scientific abstractions, or events in the past.

Reflecting on contemporary schooling, it is disturbing how little of the dominant content taught helps students to make meaning of the world around them, let alone to address and respond to pressing social concerns. Purpel brings this point home in a thought experiment he often performed with his teacher and administrator education students (Shapiro, 2006 , p. 18). He would begin his classes by posing two questions to students. First, he would ask them to brainstorm a list of the biggest problems currently facing humanity. Here they would typically identify such topics as war, poverty, terrorism, racism, famine, materialism, environmental degradation, prejudice, and greed. He would then ask them to reflect on if, and how, the education we offer young people prepares them to respond to any of these problems. As Shapiro ( 2006 ) reports, what usually resulted was a “stunned silence as they recognized how removed our educational focus and work have become from anything that attempts to help us engage and change the human condition in the contemporary world” (p. 18). Alternatively, an education that cultivates the “habits of heart and mind that make democratic life possible” (Wood, 1992 , p. xvi) reorients typical approaches to curriculum, pedagogy, and school organization such that content is meaningful, learning is vibrant and student centered, and schools are structured to cultivate relationships and build a sense of responsibility. We have many models of such democratic schools, and democratic practices within schools, which provide a vision for what is possible.

In democratic schools, the curriculum is built around inquiry, as students learn to ask questions of the world around them and to engage in civic work in their communities. They complete “transdisciplinary projects” that address social needs, while coupling “these with academic analyses of the social and institutional context” (Westheimer & Kahne, 1998 , p. 7). Rather than math and science, social studies are centered in a curriculum that prepares students for democratic citizenship. Students engage in self-reflection, work with others, question power, and develop action plans to change the world around them. As an example of this type of education, Westheimer and Kahne ( 1998 ) describe the curriculum of C. Wright Mills Middle School, which is designed around themes and “prompting challenges,” such as how to respond to hunger, violence, or homelessness in the local community and, concurrently, the world. Interdisciplinary teams of teachers start with these challenges and construct the curriculum around deep questions, covering required subjects and topics within the context of studying pressing social problems. Math and science are not neglected, rather these subjects are taught through real world examples, for instance, studying the economic costs of violence or violence in families (Westheimer & Kahne, 1998 , p. 9). Similarly, in his 5th grade classroom at Byrd Community Academy in Chicago, Schultz ( 2007 ) worked with his students to develop an entire year-long curriculum around understanding problems in their impoverished and neglected community and working to fix their collapsing school. This project paid off, as standardized test scores improved, but more importantly, students came to school feeling both valued and involved in learning that mattered. They attended school at unprecedented rates (98%) and had few disciplinary problems (Schultz, 2007 , p. 78). In both examples, educators model Wood’s ( 1992 ) belief that “less is more.” Describing meaningful democratic curricular reform, he writes, “not all of the facts we teach children will stick with them. But a habit of mind, something much more important, will stay with young people. It takes time, not coverage, to develop these habits” (Wood, 1992 , p. 168).

Paralleling a curriculum built around projects, inquiry, options, and engagement, educators teach differently in schools that cultivate the habits of democratic citizenship. They see themselves as co-learners, facilitators, and guides, not as experts whose role is to inform and enlighten students. They help students to “question power” by exposing them to social, economic, political, and cultural contradictions, creating spaces for them to dialogue about these contradictions, and pushing them to take action against education that dehumanizes (Elliott, 2015 , p. 20). Students learn to take positions and argue for their stances as part of a pedagogy premised on active learning. Imagining such a pedagogy, Wolk ( 2007 ) suggests that such schools replace textbooks, worksheets, formulaic assignments, and multiple-choice tests with activities that create a love of learning, an exploration of self, habits of caring and empathy, environmental literacy, multicultural understanding, a commitment to peace and nonviolence, media literacy, global awareness, creativity and imagination, and social responsibility. “Rather than being places where students sit in silence as their teachers talk all day,” argues Wolk, classrooms that cultivate habits of engagement are “dynamic public spaces where the authentic and vibrant discourse of daily democracy would be an essential part of the school experience” ( 2007 , p. 651).

Democratic teaching involves creating communities of learning, where collaboration and cooperation are the norm and students have opportunities to participate in decisions about curriculum, assignments, school organization, and assessment. Students learn to become social justice–oriented citizens who are “thoughtfully informed about a variety of complex social issues, think independently, and look for ways to improve society” (Westheimer, 2015 , p. 40). The curriculum and pedagogy of Deborah Meier’s ( 1995 , 2003 ) Central Park East Secondary School provides a powerful example of such schooling for democracy, as teachers in this school developed relationships of trust with students, provided them choices for their learning, asked them to exhibit and/or perform what they know, and habituated them to thinking critically. In teaching students to assess all information and curricular content, they pushed them to develop the habits necessary of good democratic citizens, for example, conditioning them to ask how we know what we know, whose perspective information comes from and why this matters, what causes what (as part of looking for patterns and connections), how things might be different, and why we should care (Meier, 1995 , p. 50).

Schools that foster the habits of democracy are organized and governed in ways that solicit and value the input of all stakeholders, including parents and community members. They are open and flexible places that model respect and teach responsibility. Wood ( 1998 ) laments the fact that we give students very few responsibilities in schools, instead worrying more about controlling their behavior and covering predetermined content. Yet if we want students to become responsible citizens, they need to practice responsibility. Putting this idea into action when he took over as principal at Federal Hocking High School, Wood completely reorganized the school around the ideas of “being accountable for one’s own actions, choosing to make a contribution, making wise decisions that take into account how decisions affect others, and making productive use of one’s own time” ( 1998 , p. 128). What this meant in practice is that high school students learned to track their own academic progress; displayed their learning through projects, portfolios, and exhibitions, instead of simply accumulating credits; took their learning into the community through action projects and internship experiences; managed their own time during the school day as they were given options for what to work on and how to learn; and assumed significant responsibilities in the school, including involvement in scheduling, organizing extracurricular activities, hiring staff, and designing the standard operating procedures of their school. Ultimately, to learn the habits and dispositions necessary for democratic citizenship, students need to practice them in schools that are organized to support the cultivation and development of democratic values. As Beane ( 2005 ) aptly notes,

[c]ritical thinking is learned only by thinking critically, reflection by reflecting, collaboration by collaborating, independence by working independently, social action by acting on social issues, compassion by caring for others, responsibility by having authentic and meaningful responsibilities, and decision making by making decisions. The only way we can have democracy is by being democratic. (p. 119)

Developing an active, inquiry-based curriculum; using a problem-posing pedagogy; and organizing schools such that students develop habits of responsibility and social engagement provide our best hope for revitalizing democracy and for ensuring that it is not simply an empty slogan but a rich, participatory, justice-oriented way of life.

As is evident from the preceding examples of democratic schooling, there is a close relationship between democracy and social justice, especially among leftist-oriented democratic educators who pay consistent attention to issues of equity and equality of opportunity in social, political, and educational arrangements. Leftist-oriented democratic educators are troubled by the glaring and persistent inequities in both our society and our educational system, the latter of which are especially apparent in inequitable funding for schools, lack of resources in poor districts, and pervasive achievement gaps between privileged and marginalized students. They argue that a commitment to social justice is part and parcel of what it means to be a democratic citizen. As social justice entails “the principles of ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’ for all people and respect for their basic human rights” (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2012 , p. xvii), it is inherently also a democratic value. Yet the degree to which social justice is centered in our thinking about democracy varies, and many liberal democratic theorists would argue for personally responsible and participatory models of citizenship (Westheimer, 2015 ), believing that in an ideologically diverse society we must respect students’ rights to identify the good life for themselves and not to seemingly compel them to uphold certain conceptions of what this life entails. These tensions are inherent in democratic education, which, like democracy itself, is ever a work in progress.

Final Thoughts

The future of democracy is tied to the quality of our public education system. Democratic societies need schools that teach the habits, dispositions, and practices of citizenship. Democracy is a precarious yet potentially powerful and energizing ethical ideal, in spite of the significant tensions and paradoxes in how we understand democratic life. It provides us a kind of moral compass for how we ought to live together amid our diversity, learning from each other and working to expand freedoms for all people. It is a way of life that celebrates individual autonomy and growth in the context of care for fellow citizens and the environment and a future of peace and social and political stability. The challenges to enacting democracy in our present time are many. Currently, despite how often we invoke democracy as part of our discussions about education, “schools don’t really teach the democratic way of life. Mostly they just teach about it. Or more accurately, they teach about its symbols and procedures” (Carnegie Corporation of New York and CIRCLE, 2003 , p. 118). Schools that truly emphasize democracy are few and far between, but they exist, and we can learn much from their practices. Commitment to democracy requires concurrent commitment to rich, sophisticated, ongoing, and comprehensive civic education. This is a move away from schooling that both implicitly and explicitly celebrates competitive individualism. Public schools have always played a significant role in the making of citizens and in bringing the kind of society we imagine to fruition. As Levinson ( 2012 ) powerfully argues, “decisions about how to educate our and others’ children are at their heart decisions about how we conceive of the world we live in now and how to create the world we want to inhabit in the future” (p. 54). A truly democratic future requires education that nurtures, fosters, and sustains the habits and dispositions of citizenship, as well as ongoing discussion about the nature of these habits, which is ultimately our best hope for creating a world that is just, mutually fulfilling, and peaceful.

Further Reading

• Apple, M. W. , & Beane, J. A. (Eds.). (2007). Democratic schools: Lessons in powerful education (2d ed.). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
• Beane J. A. (2005). A reason to teach: Creating classrooms of dignity and hope . Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
• Elliott, S. (2015). Teaching and learning on the verge: Democratic education in action . New York: Teachers College Press.
• Westheimer, J. (2015). What kind of citizen? Educating our children for the common good . New York: Teachers College Press.
• Apple, M. W. , & Beane, J. A. (2007). Lessons from democratic schools. In M. W. Apple & J. A. Beane (Eds.), Democratic schools: Lessons in powerful education (2d ed., pp. 150–155). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
• Au W. (2009). Social studies, social justice: W(h)ither the social studies in high-stakes testing? Teacher Education Quarterly , 36 (1), 43–58.
• Ayers, W. , Kumashiro, K. , Meiners, E. , Quinn, T. , & Stovall, D. (2010). Teaching toward democracy: Educators as agents of change . Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
• Barber, B. R. (1993). America skips school: Why we talk so much about education and do so little. Harpers , 287 (1722), 39–46.
• Beane, J. A. , & Apple, M. W. (2007). The case for democratic schools. In M. W. Apple & J. A. Beane (Eds.), Democratic schools: Lessons in powerful education (2d ed., pp. 1–29). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
• Biesta, G. (2007). Education and the democratic person: Towards a political conception of democratic education. Teachers College Record , 109 (3), 740–769.
• Carnegie Corporation of New York and CIRCLE . (2003). The civic mission of schools . New York: Carnegie Corporation and Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.
• Dahl, R. A. (2015). On democracy (2d ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Dewey, J. (1897). My pedagogic creed. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The early works, 1882–1898 (Vol. 5, pp. 84–95), Electronic edition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
• Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The middle works, 1899–1924 (Vol. 9), Electronic edition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University.
• Dewey, J. (1938). Democracy and education in the world of today. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The later works, 1925–1953 (Vol. 13, pp. 294–303), Electronic edition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University.
• Dewey, J. (1939). Creative democracy—the task before us. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The later works, 1925–1953 (Vol. 14, pp. 224–231), Electronic edition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University.
• Education Policies Commission . (1938). The purpose of education in American democracy . Washington, DC: National Education Association.
• Fraser, J. W. (2001). The school in the United States: A documentary history . New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Gabardi, W. (2001). Contemporary models of democracy. Polity , 33 (4), 547–568.
• Gallagher, C. W. (2008). Democratic policy making and the arts of engagement. Phi Delta Kappan , 89 (5), 340–346.
• Goodlad, J. I. , Mantle-Bromley, C. , & Goodlad, S. J. (2004). Education for everyone: Agenda for education in a democracy . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
• Gutmann, A. (1999). Democratic education . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Held, D. (2006). Models of democracy (3d ed.). Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
• Kohl, H. (1992). From archetype to zeitgeist: Powerful ideas for powerful thinking . Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
• Levinson, M. (2012). No citizen left behind . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• McClung, M. (2013). Repurposing education. Phi Delta Kappan , 94 (8), 37–39.
• McGuire, M. E. (2007). What happened to social studies? The disappearing curriculum. Phi Delta Kappan , 88 (8), 620–624.
• Meier, D. (1995). The power of their ideas: Lessons for America from a small school in Harlem . Boston: Beacon Press.
• Meier, D. (2003). So what does it take to build a school for democracy? Phi Delta Kappan , 85 (1), 15–21.
• Michelli, N. M. (2005). Education for democracy: What can it be? In N. M. Michelli & D. L. Keiser (Eds.), Teacher education for democracy and social justice (pp. 3–30). New York: Routledge.
• Mouffe, C. (2009). The democratic paradox . London: Verso.
• Neumann, R. (2008). American democracy at risk. Phi Delta Kappan , 89 (5), 328–339.
• Parker, W. C. (2003). Teaching democracy: Unity and diversity in public life . New York: Teachers College Press.
• Pederson, P. V. (2007). What is measured is treasured: The impact of the No Child Left Behind Act on nonassessed subjects. The Clearing House , 80 (6), 287–291.
• Price, J. M. (2011). Democracy: Critical red ideal. In J. L. DeVitis (Ed.), Critical civic literacy: A reader (pp. 291–304). New York: Peter Lang.
• Rothstein, R. , & Jacobsen, R. (2006). The goals of education. Phi Delta Kappan , 88 (4), 264–272.
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Education and Democracy

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Democracy is a contested concept. While democracy is generally interpreted as a political system that promotes self-government, once we unpack these terms, several questions, tensions, and disagreements emerge. Because of these disagreements, scholars also disagree over the meaning and value of democracy. In this chapter, I aim to bring to life to these debates, by focusing on three major areas of concern over the relationship between democracy and education. (1) How should we conceptualize the role of education within a democracy? (2) How ought we to understand education for a democracy? (3) How do we conceptualize the role of education without democracy? By framing our discussion through the lens of an education within , for , and without democracy, I hope to invite the reader into the rich, yet contested, debate over the relationship between education and democracy.

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Democracy, Education and the Need for Politics

Education for Democracy

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Wheeler-Bell, Q. (2018). Education and Democracy. In: Smeyers, P. (eds) International Handbook of Philosophy of Education. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72761-5_55

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Democracy is Pointless Without Education

Today’s words of wisdom come from former American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945), who we’re going to assume you’ve probably heard of. The quote below makes clear that democracy cannot succeed on its own. It’s only one piece of a larger puzzle.

There are those in America who treat the U.S. Constitution as if it were a sacred document, a sort of divine cookbook recipe for the perfect free society. The truth is that a democratic society is fragile and ripe for exploitation. A successful democracy relies heavily on the abilities and intelligence of the populace. 

But what if the populace lacks in ability? What if the world continues on a slow, meticulous de-evolution into superficial idiocracy? What if — and this might not be a difficult hypothetical for you to conceptualize —  the voters are nothing but a bunch of misinformed morons ?

Well, then it all falls apart.

This is why education is so important. It’s also why powerful people make it a priority to try and wield as much control over education as possible, although that’s a different topic altogether. Democracy cannot succeed without a culture of learning, introspection, and critical thinking. FDR knew that then; we ought to know it now.

Words of wisdom from FDR: “Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.”

Scientist Lawrence Krauss expresses a similar view in the video below. A robust education system is in America’s best interest. It’s in the world’s best interest. Yet time and time again we fail ourselves and our society by bastardizing “the safeguard of democracy”:

By the People: Essays on Democracy

Harvard Kennedy School faculty explore aspects of democracy in their own words—from increasing civic participation and decreasing extreme partisanship to strengthening democratic institutions and making them more fair.

Winter 2020

By Archon Fung , Nancy Gibbs , Tarek Masoud , Julia Minson , Cornell William Brooks , Jane Mansbridge , Arthur Brooks , Pippa Norris , Benjamin Schneer

The basic terms of democratic governance are shifting before our eyes, and we don’t know what the future holds. Some fear the rise of hateful populism and the collapse of democratic norms and practices. Others see opportunities for marginalized people and groups to exercise greater voice and influence. At the Kennedy School, we are striving to produce ideas and insights to meet these great uncertainties and to help make democratic governance successful in the future. In the pages that follow, you can read about the varied ways our faculty members think about facets of democracy and democratic institutions and making democracy better in practice.

Explore essays on democracy

Archon fung: we voted, nancy gibbs: truth and trust, tarek masoud: a fragile state, julia minson: just listen, cornell william brooks: democracy behind bars, jane mansbridge: a teachable skill, arthur brooks: healthy competition, pippa norris: kicking the sandcastle, benjamin schneer: drawing a line.

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Democracy Can Not Survive Without Education, Views Either For or Against

Democracy Can Not Survive Without Education, Express your views either for or against this statement.  In a democracy which rests on the pillar of free people, one cannot survive without education. Education of its citizens takes predominance as the choices made by the people should be the outcome of a defined thought process, which cannot happen in a vacuum. Visit official website  CISCE  for detail information about ICSE Board Class-10

Democracy Can Not Survive Without Education, Views Either For or Against This Statement

For a healthy Democracy people should be educated but some time it has a dark face also . therefore there are two Face on question of Education in Democracy.

For The Statement

Every citizen from the richest to the poorest should receive education for the benefit of the society and the various interests of the society that need to be catered too. Citizens should be able to read and understand what is going on in the world and learn to keep their part in it and contribute towards democracy.

The Education needs to start right from a person’s childhood because if he is untaught, his ignorance and vices would cost us dearly, creating a need to correct them later on in life. On the other hand, if children are educated, they would imbibe virtue and values that would enable them to contribute as responsible citizens to the democracy.

Education should not just stop at the common man, but should also reach out for the training of able counselors so that they can administer the affairs of the country in all matters that include legislative, executive and judiciary. For a democracy to be alive, it needs people with truth and integrity in all the departments and that is possible only through education and by which a country can be led to prosperity, happiness, and power. Hence It is true that education is the backbone for any democracy to function well and all citizens must be educated.

 Against The Statement

The common man, for example, might not be interested in the functioning and running of the governments and its departments such as the judicial, executive and legislative. He would probably be more concerned with fulfilling his immediate needs and relax, once his goal has been reached. He is not worried about the everyday happenings of a democracy.

To create a just society, the society can be under the control of the most cultivated and best-informed minds and ‘lovers of wisdom,’ according to Plato. There is truth to this as a healthy and just person is governed by knowledge and reason.

Most often, it is the ignorance of the common, which hinders their involvement in the processes of democracy, for they choose to be so. In such a case, it is not the educated and enlightened ones who mislead people. It is the lackadaisical or apathetic response to the democratic process. Therefore, it can be said that education of all citizens is not required for democracy to survive.

—: End of Democracy Can Not Survive Without Education, Views Either For or Against :–

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It was really very informative and interesting to read the solved topics. It would be very helpful if this trend continues.

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• Published: 14 November 2017

‘Democracy’ in education: an omnipresent yet distanced ‘other’

• Ashley Simpson 1 &
• Fred Dervin 1  

Palgrave Communications volume  3 , Article number:  24 ( 2017 ) Cite this article

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Like many concepts and notions used in various subfields of education, the idea of democracy is both floating and polysemic. It can also be a conveniently loose term that can be used by some to position themselves above others and to ‘teach them’ lessons about how to ‘do’ democracy, often creating unjustified hierarchies and moralistic judgements. Based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of 'authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse', this article examines how the contested idea of democracy is constructed and negotiated at a key International Conference on democratic education. Excerpts from talks given at the conference serve as case studies in this paper, without the intention to generalise about discourses of democracy in education. The results hint at uncritical attempts, often based on pathos, to totalise and generalise ‘democracy/the democratic’ especially within discourses on ‘democratic schools’. Such discourses can contribute to cultural othering and stereotyping, as well as, simplistic assumptions about how ‘democracy’ functions and comes-into-being. They can also help the utterer hide their sentiments. Thus, the aim of this paper is to deconstruct an essentialised and somewhat empty vision of democracy discourse in education. The fact that the idea of ‘freedom’ is often used as a synonym for ‘democracy’ during the conference is also discussed.

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Introduction: democracy and heteroglossia.

Note that all excerpts within the chapter are verbatim, without any attempt to correct them.

‘Democracy’ and ‘education’ are always seemingly joined by the connective ‘and’—to refer to John Dewey’s ( 1916 ) publication ‘Democracy and Education’. Scholars, policy-makers, politicians and educators often assume the word ‘democracy’ follows ‘education’, and/or vice versa. However, consideration needs to be played to the wider social, political and linguistic interrelationships of how ‘democracy’ and ‘education’ are understood and how ‘democracy-comes-into-being’ in the specific context of education (Joas, 2000 ; Howlett, 2013 ).

Apple ( 2014 ), like many other commentators (e.g., Ball, 2007 , 2009 ), drawing on the neoliberalisation of education systems, notes how increased privatisation, competition, marketization, combined with ‘standards-driven’ procedures and measures have become ingrained within educational policies throughout the world. Apple ( 2011 , 2014 ) observes how schools, pupils, educational policies, and, knowledge have become ‘commodified’. He also argues that the forces of neoliberalism manifest through processes of disarticulation and misarticulation whereby hierarchised and hegemonic metadiscourses function ideologically in distorting meanings and representations (ibid). In this sense, words such as ‘democracy’ and ‘justice’ are constantly refracted by discursive, social, and ideological forces which shift how ‘democracy’ and ‘justice’ are continually represented and understood (ibid).

The forces of neoliberalism in education have resulted in perceptions of educational choice such as in ‘free schools’, ‘academies’, and other forms of decentralised schooling that have distorted perceptions of ‘public’ (state) and ‘private’ education (West, 2014 ; Hicks, 2015 ). At the same time, for instance, ‘democracy’ and ‘citizenship’ have become part of national curricula, teaching syllabi, teacher training resources and programmes, as well as, policy documents—seemingly, we are all ‘democratic citizens’ (Biesta, 2011 ). Simultaneously, the so-called ‘alternative education movement’ has positioned itself as an alternative to the neoliberalisation of education through, for instance, ‘democratic schools’ (Dundar, 2013 ; Korkmaz and Erden, 2014 ).

‘Democratic education’ and/or ‘democracy in education’ may encompass a number of ‘buzzwords’ and metadiscourses such as ‘multicultural education’ (Peters-Davis and Shultz, 2015 ), ‘intercultural education’ (Clark and Dervin, 2014 ) and ‘citizenship education’ (Biesta, 2015 ). As a result, some of the ‘meanings’ associated to, and generated within, ‘democratic education’ and ‘democratic schools’ can be somewhat ambiguous and contradictory (Woodin, 2014 ). As such, the multiple, varied and differing translations of ‘democratic values’ (such as equality and human rights) mean one must pay attention to the symbolic, representative and discursive functions of ‘democracy’ (Laclau, 2005 ).

Mikhail Bakhtin’s ( 1975 , 1981 ) concept of heteroglossia can be useful to examine these functions. Heteroglossia refers to the fact that one’s own utterances always contain ‘another’s speech in another’s language (Bakhtin, 1981 , p 324)—the other[s]-in-the-self are articulated through the discourses we utter. Heteroglossia can thus be understood as the constant refraction and metamorphoses of utterances within one’s speech (Bakhtin, 1981 ). Thus, one’s speech can never entirely be ‘one’s own’ (ibid). In this sense, heteroglossia can mark the negotiation of the self and other[s] through the refracted interplay and performativity of multiple and varied discourses (Schiffrin et al., 2010 ). It is through the constant interaction between and within discourses which can engender meanings that can condition others (Bakhtin, 1981 ). Bakhtin adds that ‘all utterances are heteroglot’ in that they function symbolically through indexing representations within discourse (Bakhtin, 1981 , p 428).

The interplay and performativity between sign-signifier-signified offers a way of understanding the representative and symbolic functions of discourses in engendering social meanings and identities (Hall, 1993 ). As Barthes explains, ‘the signified is the concept, the signifier is the acoustic image (which is mental) and the relation between the concept and the image is the sign (the word, for instance), which is a concreate entity’ (Barthes, 1972 , p 112). In this sense, the meanings of words (‘democracy’ in this paper) are not fixed in one singular or ‘objective’ way (Hall and Du Gay, 1996 ). It is important to note the influence discourse has on the constant instability and displacement of discursive concepts such as ‘democracy’, notwithstanding, the inherent antagonisms found within ‘democratic values’ (Mouffe, 2000 , 2009 ).

Two aspects of Bakhtin’s 'The speaking person in the novel' ( 1981 ), on which we focus in this article, is authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse. Authoritative discourse, as described in the (1981) English translation is described as discourses whose meanings have been fixed and allow no space for neither contestation nor interrogation (e.g., the authority of religious dogma) (Bakhtin, 1981 ). Authoritative discourse can function as a taboo as it ‘commands our unconditional allegiance’ (Bakhtin, 1981 , p 343). Taken from the glossary of the English version of the book, internally persuasive discourse is described as discourse, which is accentuated and reaccentuated by ‘one’s own’ gestures and accents within discourse (Bakhtin, 1981 ), though, Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia reminds us that both authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse are contained within the discourses of the self and others (ibid).

Many quotations/citations have focused on the ‘opposition’ of authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse (Skidmore, 2016 ). As Wardekker ( 2013 ) shows [an]other’s discourse is present in both authoritative and internally persuasive discourse—just because a discourse may be authoritative does not mean authoritative discourses are untouched by the forces of heteroglossia. We argue that Bakhtin himself would not agree with the idea that authoritative discourses and internally persuasive discourses are uttered and/or written in the form of a binary opposition. Discourses can be simultaneously authoritative and internally persuasive.

Basing our discussion of what we consider to be simultaneous aspects in Bakhtin’s work, authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse, we use excerpts and images taken from the International Democratic Education Conference (IDEC 2016). The annual conference (year of creation: 1993) brought together a number of different people, from academics and teachers, to activists and ‘gurus’ of the so-called ‘democratic education movement’. The discourses shared at the conference under review offer a rare insight into discourses frequently uttered in education about democracy in education and offer a lens to look into how utterances on ‘democratic schools’ and ‘democratic education’ manifest into deeper logics and meanings.

Discourses of democracy as a way of hiding sentiments

Our interpretation of Bakhtin’s concepts of authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse, is that discourse can simultaneously be authoritative and internally persuasive (Bakhtin, 1975 , 1981 ). In this sense, a discourse can be totalising and exert power over us (through reproducing customs, traditions, ignorance etc.), yet, be constituted by intersubjective manifestations and differences (such as differing intersectionalities of multiple identity markers) whose content is open to discursive argumentations and contestations (Bakhtin, 1975 , 1981 ). In a sense, discourses on ‘democracy/the democratic’ can hold a metadiscursive ideological grip over us whilst enabling to reconstruct differing possibilities. In this sense, ‘democracy’ contains inherent discursive antagonisms and contradictions whereby the sign of ‘democracy’ is susceptible to influences from the social heteroglot (Bakhtin, 1975 , 1981 ) (including; discourses/ power/ideologies) resulting in a constant metamorphoses of the sign whilst maintaining a symbolic signified (Barthes, 1972 ). As we shall see in the excerpt below, the multivoicedness of the speakers’ utterances, and of ‘democracy’, is illuminated to show potentially hidden sentiments which lie behind his/her utterances.

Excerpt 1 is taken from one of the keynote speeches at IDEC 2016. The speaker, reminiscing his time as a student, attended a ‘democratic school’ and has worked professionally in and with ‘democratic schools’ in the United Kingdom. In the excerpt he reflects with the audience on a basic issue: the potential embedment of democratic cultures in schools.

Excerpt 1. IDEC 2016 Keynote speech (i) ‘Shifting the future of education: can you embed democratic cultures in any school’?

For the purposes of this paper we only show the opening stages of the speakers’ presentation. The presentation lasted for 19 min and it was not necessary to transcribe all of the contents for our study.

So, can you embed democratic cultures in any school? That is the question. Can I just see a show of hands.

That’s the question. Who says ‘yes’?

[looks at the audience]

Can you embed democratic practices in any school?

[participants who agree with the statement raise their hands]

Yes. Do you think you can?

And who thinks no you can’t?

Interesting, so most people think maybe you can. I’m going to talk about that today. But I started thinking

when I sat down for the keynotes yesterday, okay, so if we are thinking about whether we can embed democratic

cultures in state schools and in in any school, can you do a keynote speech at an IDEC conference without a set of

powerpoint slides and without just talking the whole time. Because if you can’t do that you definitely cannot

Embed democratic cultures in any school. So I’m going to try it. And this is the test.

[Audience applaud]

We’ll see if it works [laughs] and partly it’s going to rely on you guys. So first, I just want to start thinking about

this. What, who …who in this room thinks that every child should have an access to education please stand

up now. Should every child have access to education?

[The audience participants stand up]

Okay. And if you think, and if you think that, that access to that education should be free can you give me that

you know, that international money symbol

[Keynote speaker makes a gesture with their hands that is copied by the conference audience]

[Keynote speaker laughs]

And if you think whilst they are having this free education they should have their rights respected in accordance

with the UN convention

[Keynote speaker makes a gesture with both hands in the air which is copied by the conference audience]

Yeah. I mean that’s what I thought. [laughs] and, and from my take on this if you, if you think that then we

have to realistically look at embedding democratic cultures in every school. Because a democratic culture in my

mind is the only way that students can have their rights fully respected within education and I think every child

has a right to that and every child is not in one of the democratic schools that many people in this room are

privileged to be part of.

As asserted earlier, the conference participants appear to be part of one community that shares similar ideas about democracy in education. What the speaker does here is to verify that this is the case. In other words, by asking the entire audience to share what they think, the speaker wants to ensure common understanding—and thus, implicitly, belonging to this same community of discourse on democracy in education. Let us examine the way the speaker leads her/his audience to ‘agree’ with her/him.

The Excerpt starts with a question from the keynote speaker, ‘can you embed democratic cultures in any school?’ (line 1), the speaker then performs a speech repair when repeating the question by uttering on line 4, ‘can you embed democratic practices into any school’? In conversations speech repairs can show hidden sentiments/meanings behind utterances (Hayashi et al., 2013 ), whereby repairs themselves can be utilised as a defensive discourse strategy to ‘repair’ the images of the self through re-working previous utterances in conversations (Benoit, in Holtzhausen & Zerfass, 2015 ). Here defensive discourse strategies such as speech repairs can mark facework (Lee, 2013 ). When the face is threatened, indicated in the excerpt by the audience’s reaction to the keynote speaker’s question on line 1 and by the Speaker’s re-wording of the question on line 4, the speaker is trying to make the face consistent with their utterances (Haugh and Chang, 2015 ). In this instance, the keynote speaker avoids confrontation with the audience by not repeating the word ‘culture’, instead, the speaker decides to use the word ‘practice’. Here ‘democracy/the democratic’ functions as authoritative discourse as ‘culture’ has seemingly become an uncomfortable taboo or an embarrassingly empty signifier for the speaker to discuss.

‘Democratic cultures’ re-enter the dialogue on line 11, here the speaker distances themselves from ‘democratic cultures’ through speech act exteriorisation whilst at the same time uttering ‘democratic cultures’. The speaker utters ‘Because if you cannot do that you definitely cannot embed democratic cultures in any school’ (lines 10 and 11), combined with laughter (line 12) and the utterances ‘and partly it’s going to rely on you guys’ (line 12) show how the speaker exteriorises ‘democratic cultures’ by deflecting the responsibility onto the audience. Simultaneously, the internal struggles of internally persuasive discourse are characterised by the speaker’s incoherence—the struggle of the others-within-the-self (Bakhtin, 1981 ). The symbolism of the speaker’s requirement for the audience to agree with their statements (see also excerpt 3 below) can show the omnipresence of ‘democracy/the democratic’ as authoritative discourse, yet, it can also show the struggles of how ‘democracy/the democratic’ come-into-being. The Other is simultaneously omnipresent in conjunction with, and, alongside ‘democracy/the democratic’. The iconography of ‘the international money symbol’ (line 16), the ‘UN convention’ (line 18) and rights of the child (line 19 to line 23) shows how these concepts/ideas/logics are ‘assumed’, emphasising the antagonistic and often contradictory manifestations of ‘democratic values’ (Rancière, 2007 ). Though, when faced by international others (an international conference audience), in the setting/context of [an]other, here the struggle of internally persuasive discourse (Bakhtin, 1975 , 1981 ) shown by discourses on ‘democracy/the democratic’ is an internal struggle between, and within, the others-within-the-self. This seems to show potentially hidden sentiments which lie behind her/his utterances.

‘Democracy’ as a convenient substitute for other contested words

This article puts the idea of dialogism at its centre. As asserted earlier, discourses of democracy are embedded in other discourses of democracy, well beyond a given context of utterance. Excerpt 2 is another keynote speech taken from IDEC 2016. While the first excerpt asked the basic question of the place of democracy in schools, this keynote speech looks into what the presenter refers to as Democratic Education 2.0. The keynote speaker is regarded as a ‘democratic education guru’ who runs their own ‘democratic school’ and has written and spoken on ‘democratic education’ around the world. In this excerpt the keynote speaker reflects on the similarities between democratic schools around the world.

Excerpt 2. IDEC 2016 Keynote Speech (ii) ‘Democratic Education 2.0—Changing the paradigm from a pyramid to a network’.

This keynote speech was 48 min long and it was not necessary for us to transcribe all of the speech. Instead we show the speech through two excerpts.

But if we look globally about all of the thousand schools [so-called ‘democratic schools’] all over the world and

we can see what is …. because a lot of people say democratic education it’s different. It’s different in Japan it’s

different in Korea it’s different in Europe. But I think we can say three four things that is in most of the schools.

And the most, what we will see is, first of all we see a democratic community in every school, the school run by a

democratic community, it’s different from school to school, but we have parliament meetings, we have

different meetings, we have different way of voting or consensus, we have a democratic process that runs the

school and all the schools. Another thing we can see in all the schools is pluralistic learning, what it mean, it

means that in all our schools the student[s] choose what to learn, how to learn, with whom to learn, and all these

things… we can find in most democratic schools. another thing we can see ……is dialogic ….

relationship, in all our schools we have a very close relationship between everyone to everyone. This is our goal.

We do not want a close relationship between teachers and students, we want between student to student, between

teacher to student we believe the connection and close relationship is very very important. And the fourth thing,

that does not exist in all of the democratic schools but in a lot of democratic schools, I call it democratic content,

what it means, when you look about the curriculum is a lot of time you adopt the national curriculum and the

national curriculum is very nationality and what, where, what we can see in democratic schools is the curriculum

comes from the point of view of human rights, of the right of the minority, the rights of the weak people, that’s

very very important when you study history and other things.

Excerpt 2 starts with the keynote speaker uttering contradictory utterances. He acknowledges the ‘diversity’ of ‘democratic schools’ by stating ‘it’s different in Japan, it’s different in Korea, it’s different in Europe’ (line 2 and line 3). The speaker then goes on to utter a number of generalisations and assumptions about ‘democratic schools’, such as, ‘what we will see is, first of all, we will see a democratic community in every school’ (line 4), ‘the school run by a democratic community’ (line 4 and line 5), ‘another thing we can see in all the schools is pluralistic learning (line 7), and, ‘in all our schools the student[s] choose, what to learn, how to learn, with whom to learn’ (line 8). The speaker utters these generalisations without problematising and explaining these concepts, such as, how is a ‘democratic community’ understood in ‘democratic schools’? How does the so-called ‘democratic community’ come-into-being? What is meant by ‘pluralistic learning’? None of these questions are problematised. Here, it is important to note, that throughout the excerpt the speaker is constantly reformulating previous utterances. For example, the speaker explains that ‘in all our schools the student[s] choose what they learn’ (line 8), later in the extract the speaker utters ‘when you look at the curriculum… you adopt the national curriculum’ (line 14), so how can students in democratic schools choose what to learn when (as the speaker utters) in most instances teachers are adopting a national curriculum? It can be fair to say, there is a considerable amount of ambiguity about how ‘democracy’ is uttered by the speaker.

It is also important to note the ways the speaker fixes, what the speaker calls, ‘democratic content’ (line 13). The speaker utters ‘democratic content’, then juxtaposes the national curriculum and ‘democratic schools’ by uttering ‘what we can see in democratic schools is curriculum comes from the point of view of human rights’ (line 15 and line 16). This utterance is preceded by the repair ‘what, where, what’ (line 15), and is followed by discourses which could potentially marginalise and ‘other’ (Dervin, 2016 ; Jackson, 2012 ; Holliday, 2011 ) peoples and/or groups. By 'othering' we mean discursive constructs which have been closely linked to the [re]production of power/knowledge in society especially in their ability to marginalise, stereotype and discriminate against peoples and/or groups through essentialised representations (Dervin, 2016 ). The speaker utters human rights in ‘democratic schools’ comes from ‘the rights of the weak people, that’s very very important when you study history and other things’ (line 16 and line 17). As McDonald ( 2016 ) shows, classroom practices and subject textbooks (such as History) can essentialise identities through the reproduction of white victimhood, thus, further marginalising and/or discriminating against one’s other[s]. Here the speaker’s labelling of the ‘weak’ (line 16) engenders discursive boundaries between ‘the strong’ and ‘the weak’. Such a dichotomy, reveals the coherently incoherence of discourses on ‘democratic schools’, yet these incoherencies are bound together by ‘democracy’ as an authoritative discourse—in the sense that ‘democracy’ is simultaneously assumed and generalised (as being present).

Following the presentation, the speaker invited audience participants to engage in a questions and answers session. Excerpt 3 is a short dialogue between a member of the audience and the keynote presenter about democratic schools '3.0, 4.0, 5.0'.

Excerpt 3. Questions and answers following IDEC 2016 Keynote Speech (ii) ‘Democratic Education 2.0—Changing the paradigm from a pyramid to a network’.

Speaker A—I got a question, when I saw the pictures about democratic schools they reminded me of my own

school about 50 years ago… what about schools without classrooms, without principals, without teachers

without curricula, without blackboards, like, democratic schools like 3.0, 4.0, 5.0.

Keynote speaker—…. I think from my point of view, my point of view, every school without is not interesting

me, every school without is not interesting me, not, continue what you want, I am very interested in

….ah…because I don’t need a school that is negative to someone, something. I want to see what you are doing, I

like the idea without [the] principal, I like the idea, but it’s not an idea, it’s half of the idea, what happened, how

to run the school and you need to bring the idea how to run the school without something that’s very very

interesting and for example, I can give you an example, when we say… education city we don’t say a

school without walls, I can say it, a school without walls, or without limited space, but we say it differently, we

say all the city is one big school and then people can ask me, ok, if all the city is one big school why don’t you

say all the world is one big school, and I have answered to this because I think that education in the future

need[s] to be ‘blend learning’, it needs to be face-by-face, and meeting, and using…web meetings. But this,

this is interesting me, yeah I want to see how we run the…schools that give much freedom to peoples.

Speaker A’s question in excerpt 3 (line 1 to line 3) combined with the response of the keynote speaker (line 4 to line 16) in addition to the utterances in excerpt 2, marks authoritative discourse—in part this is marked by the keynote speaker not uttering the word ‘democracy’ or ‘democratic’ in their response. Bakhtin’s concept of assimilation, whereby the speech of others can be detected in one’s own speech, whilst still remaining other (Bakhtin, 1975 , 1981 ), shows how ‘democracy’, or to be more specific, the ‘democratic’ in ‘democratic schools’ is continuously reaccentuated and displaced by, and within, discourse. Here, drawing on excerpts 3 and 4, the ways the keynote speaker and speaker A utter ‘democracy’/ ‘[the] democratic’ is uttered in a totalising and generalised manner fundamentally based upon assumptions around the presence and meaning of ‘democracy’. We argue, an example of the reaccentuation processes of authoritative discourse is the assimilation from ‘democracy/democratic’ to ‘freedom’ in the sense that the speaker is uttering ‘democracy/democratic’ but is actually describing notions of ‘freedom’. In excerpt 4 this is illustrated by the question from speaker A in excerpt 3 (line 1 to line 3), and the keynote speaker’s utterances on line 7 and line 14 whereby both speakers describe ‘freedom’ whilst uttering discourses about ‘democratic schools’. These excerpts show the totalising and generalising ways ‘democracy/the democratic’ is uttered but, also, the totalising logics which support utterances on ‘democracy/the democratic’—in this sense, these excerpts can show how ‘democracy/the democratic’ is a distanced other which can be uttered frequently without critique, in an omnipotent and omnipresent way. As Bakhtin ( 1975 , 1981 ) notes, when discourse functions in an omnipresent way it imparts to everything ‘its own specific tones and from time to time breaking through to become a completely materialised thing, as another’s word fully set off and demarcated (Bakhtin, 1981 , p 347)’, it is this omnipresent function of ‘democracy/the democratic’ which means that, in this context, discourses on ‘democracy/the democratic’ can simultaneously function as authoritative and internally persuasive discourse.

‘Democracy’ as pathos

In order to show the constant metamorphosing of ‘democracy/the democratic’ as authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse at the conference under review we show how ‘democracy/the democratic’ are used as discursive strategiesn in what follows.

By 'pathos' we mean discourses which invoke an emotional response through text and/or speech which are used as persuasion techniques for the purposes of argumentation (Marinelli, 2015 ). Here it is important to note that pathos can function as a metadiscourse in the ways it can shape public opinions and attitudes within a given context (Ho, 2016 ). Excerpt 4 is taken from the keynote speech entitled ‘The importance of democratic higher education and social systems in making democratic futures’. The speaker is a Japanese academic and the speech predominantly focuses on the Japanese context of education using the Japanese concept of ‘Hikikomori (social withdrawal)’ to justify the necessity of ‘democratic higher education’ in Japan and throughout the world. This excerpt offers an insight into the discourse strategies and discourse styles behind utterances on ‘democracy’ and ‘democratic schools’.

Excerpt 4. IDEC 2016 Keynote Speech (iii) ‘The importance of democratic higher education and social systems in making democratic futures’.

This keynote speech was 30 min long and it was not necessary for us to transcribe all of the speech. Instead we show the speech in a number of fragments.

Ah, so, why do they have such a fear for the other people? It explains a little bit, so this is another [form of]

statistics [the speaker shows Fig.  1 on the presentation]. So international statistics, it says… less than half

Taken from IDEC keynote presentation ‘The importance of democratic higher education and social systems in making democratic futures’

of Japanese youth are satisfied with the person. So comparing with the other statistics, Swedish, French,

American, German, British, Korean… majority of young people are satisfied with themselves, but less than

half of Japanese are like that.

[the speaker then moves to Fig.  2 on the presentation]

So I need to explain a little bit about Japanese social background.…..quite often in Tokyo we have a

very funny phrase at the railway station, so they say, ‘we apologise the coming train will be 2 min late’,

1 min late or something like that. So it maybe very strange for you. But in Japanese society they have to

apologise, a minute late or something like that, because it must be on time and it means efficiency is so important

in Japan, and, … it connected with the … next element, so standard is also very important, so very

efficiently things to do, we must to things in a very certain way… [the speaker coughs]…excuse me… and then,

another phenomena is going on, so now a days not only young people but also older …elder people, not

so old people, quite a few Japanese people … have a music device or a smartphone and so on so if you come

to Japan and you ride on the train maybe you will see many many Japanese people using digital devices and they

concentrate, in, on their world. So some scholar says studies self area they concentrate on their world. They do

not pay attention to outside of their persons world.

[the presentation continues]

Excerpt 4 starts with a number of generalised and essentialised utterances about peoples and ‘cultures’. By essentialism we mean discourses that present people’s behaviour as defined and constrained so stereotypes become the essence of who they are (Holliday, 2011 ; Dervin and Machart, 2015 ). The speaker argues that Japanese students are ‘less satisfied’ with their self than ‘Swedish, French, American, German, British, Korean’ (line 3 and 4) as juxtaposed to Japanese students (Fig.  1 ) and Japanese society (Fig.  2 ). At no time does the speaker problematise what it means to be ‘satisfied with myself’, or indeed, what is/are one’s self/selves. The self and satisfaction are assumed without critique. The speaker then goes on to utter a number of social and cultural stereotypes about Japanese society, such as, ‘the coming train will be 2 min late’ (line 7), that ‘efficiency is important’ (line 9), that Japanese people ‘have to apologise’ (line 8 and line 9), that many Japanese people use digital devices (line 13 and line 14), and, finally the speaker engenders imagery and symbolism of Japanese people being like robots ‘they concentrate on their world. They do not pay attention to outside of their persons world’ (line 15 and line 16). Here the context of the speaker’s presentation is built upon cultural essentialism and the use of exteriorising speech acts to engender boundaries, categories, and, labels between differing peoples. The speaker, as an other, ‘others’ Japanese ‘culture’/society though reproducing stereotypes on Japan.

[the speaker shows Fig.  3 on the presentation]

from that [Hikikomori] I want to share the story of one girl, Fumi is the name of the girl. So, … she

came to _____ she had bullying, she was okay about bullying, but she didn’t like the way of the school, so

everything is decided by the school and they have to compete with each other for academic marks, competition,

____ is 12 years old, she wrote an essay, so she doesn’t like this part and that part and she cannot understand this

way of doing things at school, she wrote an essay and she handed it to the principal. After she handed the essay

to the principal she decided to leave the school. But in Japan of course we ‘have a compulsory education’ [the

speaker actions quotation marks] so she left the school but there is no place for her to go. …by the society.

[the speaker shows Fig.  4 on the presentation]

So, … it is a very sad story about Fumi until that point. …but, Fumi’s story is not exceptional, we have

many Fumi in Japanese society. And actually, not only school refusing people but also many Japanese people

have a similar kind of experience so, … more and more young people are having a depression experience.

… young people experience wrist cutting, especially girls, and the biggest number of the death of young

people in their twenties is suicide, and … we had a, some indiscriminate killing, sometime they say they

cannot commit suicide, so they … did such a killing, so that … we had a very difficult situation.

Combined with the essentialised utterances of the speaker which we can see from the speakers’ utterances and from Fig.  1 and Fig.  2 , in the next section of the speech the speaker tells the story of a student in Japan to generate an emotional response between the speaker and the audience. By using Fig.  3 and Fig.  4 , in conjunction with the speakers’ utterances, the speaker uses the strategy of pathos to justify the importance and need of ‘democratic schools/democratic education’. Pathos, here can be understood as a discursive legitimation strategy whereby the speaker is legitimising their argument through an emotional narrative (Vaara, 2014 ). It is important to stress, as the authors of this paper we may agree with the speaker that overt competition in education may have a number of consequences, however, we would warn against overtly simplistic generalisations and assumptions about student bullying and student mental health especially when being used as a persuasion technique. The speaker assumes that ‘Fumi’ ‘was okay about bullying’ (line 18), although this may or may not be true, the speaker does not explain this any further. The speaker then continues the narrative of how Fumi was upset about the way the school was run, as a result Fumi gave an essay to the school principal and later left the school (line 18 to line 22). The speaker then engenders further boundaries through their speech act exteriorisation of Fumi’s story by making a moralistic judgement about the whole of Japanese society, the speaker utters ‘so she left the school but there is no place for her to go …. by the society’ (line 23). Here the afterthought ‘by the society’ indicates a repair mechanism in unplanned speech to reinforce the speakers’ argument through strategies of persuasion (Marinelli, 2015 ).

The speaker then shifts to Fig.  4 on the presentation. The speaker continues to make generalisations about Japanese society ‘we have many Fumi in Japanese society’ (line 24 and line 25), ‘young people experience wrist cutting’ (line 27) and this is continued throughout this section of the speakers’ presentation (line 24 to line 29). These utterances provide the pathos for the speaker to propose a so-called ‘counter-narrative’ to the ‘descriptions’ the speaker makes about Japanese education and Japanese society, Fig.  5 shows how ‘democracy/the democratic’ is utilised discursively to shape the audience’s perceptions about Japanese culture/Japanese society and mental health issues in Japan—as these components are juxtaposed to the omnipotent and omnipresent ‘democracy’ in the room.

‘Democracy/the democratic’ as pathos here functions as authoritative discourse (Bakhtin, 1975 , 1981 )—democracy is a distant yet present force hanging over the utterances of the speaker as it is juxtaposed (in a binary manner) to the Japanese context ‘described’—it becomes essentialised and stereotyped when generalisations and assumptions are uttered, yet, no one speaks out and critiques it. It becomes a taboo. In this sense, democracy is an example of authoritative discourse. Nietzsche reminds us though,

‘No one would consider a doctrine to be true just because it makes people happy or virtuous, with the possible exception of the darling ‘Idealists,’ who was enthusiastic over the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and let all sorts of colourful, clumsy, and good-natured desiderata swim through their pond in utter confusion. Happiness and virtue are not arguments. But we like to forget (even thoughtful spirits like to forget) that being made unhappy and evil are not counter-arguments either’ (Nietzsche, 2002 , p 37).

Therefore, the very presence of ‘democracy/the democratic’ through its assimilation to ‘freedom’—characterised in Fig.  5 by the assumption that ‘freedom of study’ and in previous excerpts, the idea that if students are ‘free to choose what they learn, how they learn, with whom they learn etc.’ is a way to ‘get the self back’, as Nietzsche makes us consider, this is neither a counter-argument to competition in schools nor an argument supporting the notion that students who are ‘free to….’ are ‘satisfied’/ ‘happy’/ are able to ‘regain the self’. We are left with a number of unanswered questions, such as, what does it mean to be free? Who defines this freedom? Freedom for whom? With whom? By whom? How does freedom come-into-being?

The omnipresence of ‘democracy/the democratic’ in the speakers’ utterances in excerpt 4 means that ‘democracy/the democratic’ can be critiqued from within thus meaning that ‘democracy/the democratic’ can be simultaneously understood as authoritative and internally persuasive discourse (Bakhtin, 1975 , 2012). In this sense, democracy may function as a hegemonial concept whilst simultaneously marking the invocation of the subject by the discourse and a subjectivising inversion. Excerpt 4, along with Figs.  1 to 4 raises a number of potentially worrying perversions of the signs ‘democracy/the democratic’, as potentially generalised ‘cover-ups’ of mental health issues with simplistic ‘solutions’ on how to deal with such issues.

Discussion: discourse, heteroglossia and ‘democratic’ struggles

The 4 excerpts analysed in this article were selected for their representatively of the shared doxa about democratic education at the conference under review. They show potentially alarming trends in how ‘democracy’ is discussed in dialogues, generally within the specific context of a conference on democratic education. The following aspects were examined: discourses on democracy used to hide speaker sentiments, democracy and words such as freedom used as interchangeable and convenient synonyms, and, democracy as pathos. Bakhtin’s work served as a backbone to analyse these important phenomena.

As Mouffe ( 2000 , 2009 ) shows, ‘democratic values’ are inherently antagonistic and discourse in particular plays an important role in antagonistic social relations (ibid). Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism—and to be more specific, heteroglossia—offers a way to trace the discourses of the other-within-the-self (Bakhtin, 1981 , 1984 )—how one’s other[s] are socially and discursively interwoven within one’s speech. Bakhtin reminds us that,

‘The utterance is filled with dialogic overtones, and they must be taken into account in order to fully understand the style of the utterance. After all, our thought itself—philosophical, scientific, artistic—is born and shaped in the process of interaction and struggle with others’ thought, and this cannot but be reflected in the forms that verbally express our thought as well’ (Bakhtin, 1986 , p 92).

In this sense, it is important to acknowledge the ‘democratic others’ within ‘democracy/the democratic’—due to its instability and function as a floating signifier (Hall, 1993 ). ‘Democracy/the democratic’ can function as authoritative discourse, and be simultaneously critiqued and reaccentuated as internally persuasive discourse. Discourses on ‘democracy’ in ‘democratic schools’ are simultaneously authoritative and internally persuasive due to dialogism generally, and heteroglossia, specifically. Heteroglossia allows one to deconstruct and reconstruct one’s own utterances (Bakhtin, 1981 ).

Democracy, as we have shown in the excerpts, can function as authoritative discourse when distanced, generalised, stereotyped and tabooed. When democracy is ‘assumed’ it engenders mutually coexisting yet contradictory discourses which open up the possibility of critique and [re]accentuation—meaning that discourses can be simultaneously authoritative and internally persuasive.

The chosen excerpts have hinted at attempts to totalise and generalise ‘democracy/the democratic’ within discourses on ‘democratic schools’, whereby discourses on ‘democratic schools’ can contribute to cultural othering and stereotyping, as well as, simplistic assumptions about how ‘democracy’ functions and comes-into-being. In many instances discussed throughout this paper, speakers on democracy have ‘described’ notions of ‘freedom’—it is important to note that freedom and democracy are not the same thing—many speakers in this paper describe ‘freedom’, but democracy requires antagonisms and instability (Rancière, 2007 ), a contingency of force and power (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001 )—meaning that ‘democracy’ cannot be simply reduced to another sign or concept (such as freedom).

Many proponents of ‘democratic education’ seemingly focus on ‘freedom’ rather than ‘democracy’. As such, many advocates of ‘democratic education’ and ‘democratic schools’ seemingly fail to acknowledge the social and discursive struggles which are characteristic of how democracy comes-into-being. These include pluralistic antagonisms (Mouffe, 2009 ) (including discourses), therefore, the word ‘democracy’ cannot be simply replaced by the word ‘freedom’ nor can it be explicitly ‘explained’ through notions of ‘freedom’.

This paper has also hinted at some of the ‘deeper’ issues of ‘democratic education’ and ‘democratic schools’. ‘Democracy’ in the context of ‘democratic schools’ is often uttered as an objective and/or totalised ‘end’, or ‘assumed’ as being ‘present’, which in turn means, that ‘democracy’ is seemingly never internally critiqued or reflected upon. We argue, this is a potentially dangerous precedent whereby ‘democratic values’ are uttered to justify certain educational and/or social arguments rather, than, problematising what ‘democratic values’ mean and their relevancies for/in society. There is thus a need to shift towards democracy as something to be problematised rather than a mere simplistic answer. Bakhtinian dialogism represents a powerful tool to counter-attack such problematic and ethically questionable uses of the word in education and to make it less distanced.

Data availability

Data sharing is not applicable to this paper as no datasets were generated or analysed in this study.

Change history

12 december 2017.

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML version of this article.

'Unlike externally authoritative discourse, internally persuasive discourse whilst in the process of its affirmative assimilation is tightly intertwined with ‘one’s own word' (our translation).

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Simpson, A., Dervin, F. ‘Democracy’ in education: an omnipresent yet distanced ‘other’. Palgrave Commun 3 , 24 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-017-0012-5

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Wendy Brown: Without quality public education, there is no future for democracy

UC Berkeley professor of political science Wendy Brown was among the more than 200 Berkeley faculty members who traveled to Sacramento on March 4. A co-chair of the Berkeley Faculty Association, she gave the following address on the capital steps during the "Educate the State" rally.

By Public Affairs

March 5, 2010

UC Berkeley professor of political science Wendy Brown was among the more than 200 Berkeley faculty members who traveled to Sacramento on March 4. A co-chair of the Berkeley Faculty Association, she gave the following address on the capitol steps during the “Educate the State” rally.

Not long ago, California public education was an international beacon of excellence. Through much of the 20th century, Californians were committed to quality public elementary and secondary schools and an accessible multi-tiered system of higher education — from guaranteed access to community college for every high school graduate, to great research universities and professional schools.

Wendy Brown, professor of political science

After decades of demonstrating that this was possible — that there could be affordable mass access to high-quality education — California begin to unravel its own accomplishment. The 1978 passage of Prop 13 marked the beginning of this unraveling, pitching our elementary and secondary schools into the downward decline that today finds teachers facing overcrowded classrooms, insufficient books and supplies, inadequate compensation and lay-offs, and throwing a spectacularly successful higher education system into the mud.

This devastation of our public education and the rest of our public sector is not the consequence of our state being poor. Certainly we have suffered from the recession, the financial meltdown, the collapse in housing wealth, unemployment and the foreclosure crisis. But California still generates nearly one sixth of U.S. Gross Domestic Product, and were it a nation unto itself, our GDP would place us among the top 10 nations in the world.

California, rich in resources, rich in human talent, rich in industries, and very rich in the rich, can afford a first rate education system. But our quagmired political system (minority rule), anti-tax political culture, upsidedown state budget priorities, and the configuring of higher education itself on the model of a business — these have demoted public education to the status of a failing discount store.

Indeed, there is more at stake here than the loss of a great system of education, than the madness of permitting oil wealth, real estate wealth, Silicon Valley wealth, banking wealth, Hollywood wealth, agribusiness wealth and prisons to grow ever larger while starving our schools. There is more at stake than the madness of cutting the fuel to the economic engine that generated so much innovation and capacity in California during the last century. It is also the case that there can be no democracy without an educated citizenry.

Without quality public education, we the people cannot know, handle, let alone check the powers that govern us. Without quality public education, there can be no substance to the promise of equality and freedom, no possibility of developing and realizing individual capacities, no possibility of children overcoming disadvantage, or of teens reaching for the stars, no possibility of being a people guiding their own destiny or of individuals choosing their own course. Above all, there is no possibility of being a self-governing people, a democracy:

As the world grows more complex and integrated, as the media grows ever more sophisticated and powerful in shaping events and ideas, what maintains democracy is not the technical instruction into which resource-starved schools are rapidly retreating. It is not the reduction of high school to 2 years, college to 3, not vocational training for the many, but the kind of education through which future citizens learn to understand and engage the complexities of this world.

For democracy to survive, let alone thrive, the people must be able to know and analyze the powers organizing our lives. The people must be able to reflect on the perils and possibilities of our time and develop considered views about how to navigate them. The people must be able to analyze written and oral arguments, journalistic accounts, images and sound bytes…distinguishing the reasonable from the sensational, the serious from the simplistic, the well founded from the fatuous.

If such capacities have always been important to democratic citizenship, our increasingly complex world demands them all the more, and quality public education is the keystone to their acquisition. Without quality public education in our future, there is no future for democracy.

Without quality public education in our future, we face a huge divide between the educated and uneducated, corresponding to a divide between the rich and the poor and magnifying the power of the former, the powerlessness of the latter. This is plutocracy, not democracy.

Without quality public education in our future, we face a populace taught only the skills needed for work, ill-equipped to understand or participate in civic and political life. This is corporate oligarchy, not democracy.

Without quality public education in our future, we face a people manipulable through their frustrations, mobilizable through false enemies and false promises. This is the dangerous material of democracy’s opposite — despotism if not fascism.

So California’s disinvestment in education not only entrenches and deepens inequalities, not only breaks the promise of opportunity for every able student, not only chokes the engine of invention and achievement that built California’s 20th century glory. It destroys the fundament of democracy itself — an educated citizenry capable of thoughtful analysis and informed judgment.

California must recommit to first class K-12 education and the California Master Plan for higher education. We must come to our senses, quickly, about preserving the most esteemed public university system in the world. And we must do so not only because education is what lifts people from poverty, equalizes opportunities, reduces crime and violence, builds bright individual and collective futures, but makes democracy real.

Educate the state. Sí se puede.

Wendy Brown Heller Professor of Political Science Co-chair of the UC Berkeley Faculty Association