1
Authority for Shaping Goals Lies in the Hands of the People
Democratic schools recognize the right of citizens to shape and contest educational goals and outcomes. Placing children in authoritarian, top-down environments and removing parents and teachers from policy setting, experimentation, reflection, and change teaches children, parents, and teachers that the needs of outside interests are more important than their own.
Benjamin Barber argues that "the secret to our strength as a nation our respect for difference." If this is true, an education that standardizes ultimately weakens the U.S. If we are to remain strong through respect for difference, diversity, and innovation, then legislators must allow for teachers and teaching that nurture and engender difference.
While there may appear to be a danger of extremism in some communities, democratic schools must ultimately abide by the Constitution, which should exist to protect individuals from coercion and oppression. As Amy Guttman explains,
education is not democratic if citizens do not collectively influence the purposes of primary schooling nor if they control the content of classroom teaching so as to repress reasonable challenges to dominant political perspectives.
Schools that repress forms of knowledge due to political, market, or religious ideology inhibit discourse and diversity making them fundamentalist or authoritarian rather than democratic. Students and teachers in democratic schools must critique various ideologies ensuring that one, including democracy, does not ascend to oppress
There are over 299 million Americans. While they undoubtedly share many traits and values, American communities reveal a great deal of diversity. Educational goals in hurricane-prone Florida might necessarily be different from educational goals in earthquake-prone California. Atlanta, Georgia’s growing Latino population might have needs different from those students living in Chinatown, New York. Minority students might need different types of education than children born into the dominant culture; boys might need different types of education than girls; poor students might need different types of education than wealthier students; students struggling with sexual identity, who are five times more likely to skip school due to fear, might need different types of education than students comfortable with who and where they are; all students might benefit from education which responds to the unique ways they interface with their worlds.
In democratic schools student experience should be central to a student’s education. Who is this student? Where has she been? Where does she want to go? Why must we force this student to read about and think about the same exact same things as the next?
2
Education is Political
Democracies cannot exist without people participating in them. If students are to become citizens who participate in and protect their democracies, communities must educate them with that end in mind. "Education not only speaks to the public," argues Benjamin Barber,
it is the means by which a public is forged. It is how individuals are transformed into responsible participants in the communities of the classroom, the neighborhood, the town, the nation and (in schools that recognize the new interdependence of our times) the world to which they belong.
Ultimately, schools with a myopic focus on accountability and test scores fail in the preparation of democratic citizens due to how they spend their time and resources: policing, disciplining, and punishing. In order to avoid the authoritarianism and fundamentalism such curricula might lead to, Kurt Salamun argues that there are three "political intentions" that must guide education in democratic societies. These intentions include:
• teaching as many people as possible to appreciate and to justify basic values of political democracies, such as pluralism, tolerance, individual freedom, social justice, respect for human rights, and especially freedom of speech and the press;
• influencing as many people as possible to resist antidemocratic tendencies in policy making; and
• enabling as many people as possible to criticize thought patterns and worldviews that are spread by the enemies of a democratic, open society.
These three intentions require a flexibility, an appreciation for diversity, and a critical consciousness that might make some individuals uncomfortable. How much freedom should students have to speak? If children are taught to sit obediently, never questioning the teacher, will they grow into citizens capable of and willing to challenge "worldviews that are spread by the enemies of a democratic, open society?"
3
Democratic Participation Requires a Specific Type of Voice and Literacy
If democracies require citizens to participate in the institutions that shape their lives, citizens must acquire a specific type of voice, and a specific type of literacy, to do so. "Voice," explains Peter McLaren, "suggests the means that students have at their disposal to make themselves ‘heard’ and to define themselves as active participants in the world."
A state cannot be maintained in "integrity and usefulness" if the citizens of the state do not have the ability to level complaints which "make themselves heard." Doing so necessitates a certain type of voice, one comfortable with expressing needs and challenging status quo givens.
Democratic schools empower student voice by valuing and exploring who students are, where students have been, and what students have to say. As students grow and develop in varied and unique cultures, they also develop varied and unique voices. Public schools must respect cultural, racial, gender, sexual, and class differences, and the voices expressing them; otherwise, they teach children that neither their lived experience nor their cultural heritage matter.
Such a lesson is ultimately oppressive and miseducative. As Freire argues, schooling is oppressive when teachers legitimate one set of values and marginalize others. This oppressive behavior ultimately creates a miseducative environment, causing some students to reject schooling completely. John Ogbu asserts that some students resent and resist the teacher’s efforts, no matter how well intentioned or creative, leading to "counteracademic attitudes" and behaviors. These behaviors result in low grades, student-teacher conflict, suspensions, and dropouts, thus reducing the child’s chances of becoming an engaged, contributing, and free (relatively) member of society.
When teachers deligitimate student voice, or ignore it altogether, they forward authoritarianism and fundamentalism, as both –isms reject the belief that an individual’s voice matters. At best, in authoritarian and fundamentalist institutions, students learn to keep their voice down so as to avoid mockery and abuse. At worst they shed their voice entirely, appropriating a pony-show voice to please the teacher.
In addition to valuing student experience, democratic schools help students explore and develop their voices through engendering a specific type of literacy. Memorizing vocabulary words, learning algebra, identifying bodies of water, and running computer programs represent a very basic notion of literacy (and an important one at that), but being able to complete any of these tasks does not necessarily give a student the ability to define themselves in a world where marketers, elites, and their still-developing peers are constantly telling them who and how to be. If students are going to mature into citizens capable of raising their intelligent, critical, and compassionate voices, they need a type of literacy above and beyond factual comprehension.
Unlike authoritarian and fundamentalist regimes, democracy requires a "critical literacy," a literacy which disrupts the commonplace...
Disrupting the commonplace asks students to look at texts and their worlds through multiple lenses, understanding that ideas, peoples, histories, medias, and events shape us in particular ways. Students experience the world through a variety of media and formats. They read newspapers, listen to music, talk with neighbors and friends, watch television and movies, and log-on to various websites. Some of these encounters require attention to what is being said, how it is being said, who is saying it and why, lest students, and citizens, appropriate ideas and ideologies that are not necessarily beneficial or healthy. If we want citizens to identify potential threats to democracy, as discussed under tenet 2, then democratic schooling needs to provide teachers and students with the tools, time, and freedom to read their "commonplace" worlds, and the medias reflecting them, for those very threats.
4
Justice, While Elusive, is Worth Striving for; Injustice, When Discovered, Requires Action
As our country has aged, women, ethnic minorities, the working class, and (more recently) lesbians and gays, have slowly and laboriously made significant gains towards equal treatment under the law; clearly, more work remains to be done. Their struggles would not have led to any form of justice without the loud voices and public activity of individuals and groups committed to their various causes. If democracy allows individuals to reshape the world in more just and equitable ways, then democratic schools should encourage students to explore their realities, identify injustice, and act in concert to alter or end oppressive and unjust conditions.
Are students capable of doing so? Some certainly are...
On March 27, 2006, over 36,000 students from 25 Los Angeles County school districts walked out of class in protest over proposed changes to U.S. immigration laws. They were not alone, as students in Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas also left classes in similar protests. While authorities in Los Angeles have not yet decided how to punish these students, school officials in Texas, where students also left schools in record numbers, want to send a strong message to future protestors. According to Terry Abbott, the spokesman for the Houston school district, "Any student who engages in [protest] today can be suspended for up to three days, and may be removed from school outright....There also are severe academic consequences."
Abott might consider revisiting her history books, as those students were participating in a process fundamental to the creation of this country. The United States of America is a nation founded through protest. Had there been no Tea Party, no Stamp Act protest, no refusal to quarter British troops, it is arguable that there would be no United States of America. If women had stayed in the proverbial kitchen and not gathered and marched banner in hand, it is not likely they would have earned the right to vote when they did. Had there been no protests in the mid 1960s, there would have been no Civil Right’s movement, and without large protests, it is likely that the war in Vietnam would have dragged on for much longer than it actually did. If students are to become active members of a participatory democratic social order, punishing them for engaging in one of the hallmarks of such an order is counter productive. Indeed, given the apathy and consumerist mentality of many students today, the country should celebrate the fact that students rallied in such numbers period.
Can students learn to challenge injustice if they are housed in authoritarian institutions? And, importantly, if students don’t learn to challenge injustice when they are young, are they likely to become adults who do so? If schools punish students for walking in solidarity for the hungry, the poor, and the sick, what lessons do schools send?
5
Education is More Than Job Training
Nearly a century ago, while John Dewey argued for a more democratic approach to public education, Elwood P. Cubberly forwarded another idea. He believed that American public schools were "in a sense, factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life." While it is true that a democratic education seeks to fashion children in a specific manner, all education does, the manner is above and beyond workforce preparation. Children are not products for manufacture and dispersal, though one would not realize that looking at U.S. public schools today.
Arguably, the "products" of schools today are students with a narrow understanding of who they are and what futures they might have beyond their future jobs. If schools are to have any progressive effect on democratizing society, Richard Brosio argues that they must further a "democratic-egalitarian initiative," one that would produce
critical, well-rounded, citizen-workers who are committed to complex roles beyond work—and who may use their critical skills to analyze capitalist work relations and command of the economy. The democratic-egalitarian imperative seeks to have the public schools help develop a society which is based upon authentic, participatory decision making; moreover, it favors the existence of basic equality of opportunity and of ultimate life experience.
A seriously democratic, critical, socially responsible approach to schooling will yield employees. They will just be smarter and able to question more than what neoliberals and neoconservatives want. One must wonder if individuals who view profit as the bottom line truly want a citizenry which questions advertising claims, profit margins, safety records, environmental impacts, living wages, immigration, and so forth. If they did, it is arguable that U.S. curricula, U.S. standards, U.S. schools, and U.S. communities would look and act much different than the way they do.
Rather than "making schools an adjunct to manufacture and commerce," Dewey argued for "utilizing the factors of industry to make school life more active, more full of immediate meaning, [and] more connected with out-of-school experience."
Imagine for a mement that we could "utilize the factors of industry" to make school more meaningful."
The question then, and the question today, is how?
Larry Cuban offers one answer: ask the business leaders currently dominating school reform to conceive of schools as more than factories for workforce production. Cuban asserts:
If business leaders decided that the best ways for them to improve public schools and increase public trust in schools were to better educate their own employees and to encourage schools to stress civic engagement, practitioners’ ownership of reforms, and service to the common good, the entire nation would owe such men and women a deep debt of gratitude.
Giving ownership to educational practitioners may be appealing, but business leaders do not want control of public education in the hands of the people, as that runs the risk of challenging the status quo. Howard Zinn:
in both material goods and in ideas, [oligarchs, business leaders, and neoconservatives] want the market to be dominated by those who have always held power and wealth.
In order to maintain their dominance, they must control the institutions that perpetuate domination, as schools under their present governance do. Furthermore, expecting business leaders to stress civic engagement, when the U.S. is plagued by corporate scandal and price gauging at public expense seems a bit naïve. The "service to the common good" called for by Cuban hasn’t materialized in the corporations underwriting school reform today.
Understanding this, democratic schools prepare students for all sorts of roles in their lives and they do so without corporate intrusion.
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