xposted at educatorroundtable.net
During my first year of graduate school I read 2 books that changed my life forever: John Dewey's Democracy and Education and George Counts' The Education of Free Men in American Democracy.
For those of you who don't have the time to read both, I can soundbyte them for you: if we don’t educate with democracy in mind, we’ll never have democracy.
If we wish to have perpetual terror, perpetual fear, perpetual rat-racing towards faster cars, thinner women, longer/harder erections, less respect for the elderly, less respect for children, less-competent representatives, fewer rights, fewer freedoms, and genuinely more of what the Bush administration gives us, then our schools are doing fine.
If we want something much different for our children, for our communities, and for the world, then it is time to do as teacherken suggests and realize a radical different approach to how we teach, how we learn, and who we trust to help us with both...
I. Participatory Democracy
I employ a definition of democracy influenced greatly by John Dewey and two of his biographers: Jay Martin and Robert B. Westbrook Westbrook.
Democracy, as I understand it through Dewey, is a form of associated living that fosters the growth of the individual through his or her participation in social affairs. Free, reflective, critical social inquiry and the welfare of others undergird interaction, communion, and community building.
Unlike authoritarian modes of government, democracy requires its members to participate in the political, social, cultural, and economic institutions affecting their development and, unlike authoritarian states, democracies believe in the capacity of ordinary individuals to direct the affairs of their society, including schools.
Active participation in various institutions—the reshaping and reinvention of norms, laws, and communities—should prevent homogenizing authoritarianism and allow for individual and community re-creation and growth.
Finally, and importantly, democracy is not static. As individuals engage with, reflect on, and critique the worlds they inhabit, democracy itself evolves. As Zygmunt Bauman explains:
Democracy expresses itself in a continuous and relentless critique of institutions; democracy is an anarchic, disruptive element inside the political system; essentially, a force for dissent and change. One can best recognize a democratic society by its constant complaints that it is not democratic enough.
A political system that ossifies cannot take into account new realities or exigencies. Therefore, democracy requires complaint and challenge, as it is through complaint and challenge that democracies evolve with social, political, and environmental realities.
(Arguably, had we educated towards complaint and challenge, Iraqis would not still be enduring our freedom...)
Refusing democratic growth, believing that democracy has for all times been defined, "is an invitation for revolt and revolution." If a state does not invite and allow individuals to participate in its remaking, and if the State does not create spaces for that very challenge, then the State is either a monarchy, authoritarian, theocratic, totalitarian, or fascist; it cannot be called democratic. This organic or evolving understanding of democracy helps avoid the potential for a universalizing or totalitarian employment of the term.
With this caveat in place, there are several central tenets that democracy, as outlined in this diary, embodies. Democracy, always and forever, protects human rights, recognizes sub-cultures, ensures the rule of law, allows for challenges to existing law, and values people power over corporatism, oligarchy, plutocracy, theocracy, fascism, fundamentalism, and totalitarianism.
II. Democracy Through Education
It is the contention of this diary that the cultivation of and the learning for democracy should take place in the spaces traditionally called public schools. In an organic, evolving, and participatory democratic state, students, parents, teachers, and communities would have a shared voice—shared, not equal—in educational agenda setting.
Schools influence the communities that they serve, and in a democracy the individuals being influenced the most should have the largest say, to the best of their abilities, in how they are being influenced. If communities cannot act together democratically to shape school outcomes, which should include the creation of students capable of participating in democratic decision-making and action, then those communities, and the schools within them, cannot be called democratic.
"If social and educational purposes are dictated by forces beyond popular control," explains Michael Engel, "the avenues of reinvention and growth are closed off."
Said differently, if interest groups, ideologues, and corporations dictate educational policy in ways suitable to their needs alone (via curricular control or via privatization), schools cease to be public, inhibiting the reinvention and growth of individuals and communities.
If the debate over the future of the schools is conducted entirely within the limits of one theoretical or ideological framework [i.e. choice and standards, or for that matter, democracy], the quality of that debate degenerates...
Democratic societies must ensure that the quality of debates, whether they concern the reasons for going to war, the reinterpretation of the Constitution, or the purposes of education, never degenerates to authoritarianism or fundamentalism. In order to keep debate free and critical, democratic societies must help their citizens acquire the skills and dispositions to intelligently engage one another in substantive discussions, discussions which should lead to solutions to their most pressing problems.
After discussion, action...
10 Tenets of a Democratic Education
Heeding Engel’s warning, I am not laying out the 10 Commandments of a democratic education; I am merely laying out broad guidelines, as to do otherwise would violate democratic principles. "In a democracy," explains Deborah Meier:
there are multiple, legitimate definitions of "a good education" and "well-educated," and it is desirable to acknowledge that plurality. Openly differing viewpoints constitute a healthy tension in a democratic, pluralistic society. Even where a mainstream view (consensus) exits, alternate views that challenge the consensus are critical to the society’s health.
I recognize multiple, and often conflicting, definitions of "democratic education" or "education for democracy," and I offer a broad outline here in order to begin discussion into what such an education might look like and require...
- Authority for shaping goals lies in the hands of the people.
- Education is political.
- Democratic participation requires a specific type of voice and literacy.
- Justice, while elusive, is worth striving for; injustice, when discovered,requires action.
- Education is more than job training.
- Education serves both productive and reproductive processes.
- Education engenders independence and interdependence.
- Children should not be standardized.
- Democracy requires a certain type of teacher and a certain type of teaching.
- Democratic education requires a certain type of space.
John Dewey warns against establishing a "a hierarchy of values among studies. It is futile," he explains, "to attempt to arrange them in an order, beginning with one having least worth and going on to that of maximum value."
The same holds true with the above list; tenet 1 cannot obtain and maintain without tenet 10. The interconnectedness of each tenet, therefore, leads to a certain amount of unavoidable repetition. For example, while I can discuss standardized testing in at least half of the tenets, It still deserves its own category, as standardization dominates reform efforts today.
Furthermore, the above list is not all-inclusive and is therefore open to debate, revision and extension. I am not suggesting that these ideas and these ideas alone will lead to democratic schools and a more democratic society.
Ultimately I cannot be certain as schools have neither had the freedom nor the support to pursue education for pluralistic and participatory democracy on a widespread scale.