Between Private and Public: Recognition,revolution and political renewal

This paper deals with some issues underlying the role of education in the preparation of students for democratic participation. Throughout, I maintain two basic ideas: first, that a political action undertaken to obtain practical ends reflects a set of privately held values whose recognition is therefore essential to any idea of the political; second, that the continued viability of liberal democracy is dependent upon its openness to alteration through its recognition of private values. In order to bring these ideas to light more clearly, I will develop my position in the form of a critique of some contemporary liberal theories of civic education, most notably Amy Gutmann's, as expressed in her influential work Democratic Education. Maintaining Gutmann's requirement of educational relativism, I intend to show how her emphasis on individual deliberation as a goal of education fits within a system of deliberative democracy, and that the two serve to minimize, on the individual level, the ability of individuals to seek recognition within the public sphere, and on the political level, the ability of democratic institutions to be renewed through participation.     

A Politically Liberal Conception of Formal Education in a Developing Democracy

As discussed by John Rawls, in a well-ordered society, a public political culture’s wide educational role bears the primary responsibility for developing reasonable individuals for the stability of a politically liberal society. Rawlsian scholars have also focused on the stability and enhancement of developed liberal democratic societies by means of those societies’ education systems. In this sense, one thing that is common to Rawlsian scholars’ and Rawls’s own understanding of the role of education appears to be a concern over the stability of a politically liberal society since it is highly dependent on the character of its citizens. Also, it is usually believed that a politically liberal account of education can be implemented in a developed politically liberal society. In contrast, this study discusses the possibility of implementing a politically liberal account of education in a developing liberal society that may become a developed liberal democracy under an overlapping consensus.     

Educational Justice and the Value of Knowledge

How should a liberal democratic society value knowledge and understanding, and does this valuation inform how we ought to reason about the justice of our educational institutions? In scholarly and public discourse, it is orthodox to argue that because educational institutions bring about various goods—goods of character such as wellbeing or economic goods such as social mobility – they ought to be structured by principles of political justice. In this paper, I argue that knowledge and understanding valued for its own sake should also inform judgements of educational justice.     

Is Inquiry Learning Unjust? Cognitive Load Theory and the Democratic Ends of Education

Cognitive load theorists Paul Kirschner, John Sweller and Richard Clark argue that an array of inquiry-based pedagogies widely promoted in teacher preparation programmes are out of step with current cognitive science and should be eliminated for novice learners. According to these cognitive load theorists, inquiry-based pedagogies are likely to increase achievement gaps between the lowest and highest achieving students while reducing total learning. On almost any theory of justice in educational provision, an educational practice that results in the acquisition of fewer total educational goods by students and greater inequality in the distribution of goods will be considered unjust. I argue that inquiry-based pedagogies can be defended, even for novice learners, not as means to other goods but as embodiments of the least controversial liberal-democratic educational ends. I claim that once understood as part of the ends of liberal democratic education, inquiry-based pedagogies cannot be rightly eliminated from educational pathways. In addition, I argue that by interpreting cognitive load theory in light of uncontroversial liberal democratic educational ends, central claims about instructional design that are advanced by both cognitive load theorists and their opponents are either moderated or overturned. Most notably, the claim that there are no domain-general inquiry skills which need to be taught, which is advanced by cognitive load theorists against inquiry theorists, is revealed to be self-refuting. Integrating cognitive load theory into processes of liberal democratic problem-solving turns out to be a biologically secondary domain-general inquiry skill of just the sort cognitive load theorists deny exists.     

The reforming trajectory of the Italian educational system. Site‐based management and decentralisation as a challenge for democratic discourse

This article aims to present some tensions embedded in the Italian educational reform, arising both from the enactment of neo‐liberal policies and the possibilities of democratic development opened up by the introduction of schools’ site‐based management and decentralisation. The article uses discourses as heuristic devices and presents two case studies regarding the enactment of policies of educational governance promoted in 2003 by a local authority (the Italian Provincia) and inspired by the democratic discourse. These policies were intended to promote the participation and collaboration of schools and heads in educational planning. It illustrates how the neo‐liberal discourse re‐shaped the Italian educational system and challenged welfarism. At the same time, we also attempt to illustrate the action of cultural path dependencies and the space emerging for a democratic discourse, which could be interpreted both as an alternative to its neo‐liberal counterpart and as an attempt to re‐discover democratic participation and promote more equity‐oriented practices in the educational field. Two different understandings of educational governance and headship seem to emerge. The study underlines how the intertwining of national and local policies inspired by contradicting discourses could result in the spread of competitive practices and consequently in a further differentiation of the educational provision and stratification between schools, or have an egalitarian outcome, where processes of collaboration, collective empowerment and reflexivity are enacted. Our work demonstrates how democratic and collaborative spaces opened up by site‐based management and policies of educational governance implemented at a local level are always at risk, due both to the rise of competitive pressures and the resilience of welfarist discourses and practice.     

Political Education in/as the Practice of Freedom: A Paradoxical Defence from the Perspective of Michael Oakeshott

Creating education systems that promote democratic sustainability has been the concern of political thinkers as diverse as J. S. Mill, Dewey, Benjamin Barber and Derek Bok. The classic dichotomisation of democratic theory between deliberative democrats and Schumpeterian democrats suggests that education in the service of democracy can be constructive—that is, provide a student with the skills necessary to elect her leaders without changing her nature—or reconstructive—that is, fundamentally and radically reshape the student to produce a citizen whose goals are transformed to be congruent with society. Michael Oakeshott, who has written extensively both on political regimes and on the purpose of liberal education, offers a third way to assess the connection between government and education. Despite his own dismissal of civic or political education as fundamentally vocational and thus beyond the boundaries of the liberal arts, this paper provides a potentially surprising Oakeshottian defence of political education within the liberal arts with reference to the importance he places on experience as a pedagogic tool. Thus, Oakeshott's educational philosophy has a certain resonance with the recent calls to locate the relevance of liberal arts within the burgeoning development of experiential civic engagement programmes in American universities.     

ON THE PUBLIC AND CIVIC PURPOSES OF EDUCATION

A bstract .  In this review essay, Kathleen Knight Abowitz discusses three recent books related to democratic public life and schooling: Susan H. Fuhrman and Marvin Lazerson's The Public Schools , Walter C. Parker's Teaching Democracy: Unity and Diversity in Public Life , and Kevin McDonough and Walter Feinberg's Education and Citizenship in Liberal-Democratic Societies . Abowitz details how each text is inspired by meanings of liberal democracy that evolved during the Enlightenment era, in which individual rights were constitutionally coded and equality came to be a powerful social and educational ideal, and how each book also takes up different sorts of Enlightenment traditions of public life and education, attempting to revitalize their meanings for public education today. Yet while these books are inspiring and instructive in numerous ways, they are also notable for the issues they fail to take into theoretical account, particularly the colonization of public spheres by the private and market-based spheres of commerce, and the ways in which increasing ecological crisis calls for new ways of conceiving our political and educational frameworks.     

Critical Thinking Versus Vocationalism: A Matter of Class?

Popular demands for greater access to higher education may have diluted the “college isn't for everyone” claim, but some members of the privileged class are making a more subtle argument: A classical liberal arts curriculum should be reserved for the elite with low and middle income students receiving vocational training. In this article, we examine the historical and contemporary manifestations of differentiated educational experiences based on class and highlight how this bifurcated phenomenon continues to surface within post-secondary's newest venue—online education. Drawing upon the theoretical tenets of knowledge production and class formation, the methodology section of this article constructs a multilayered sequence model to analyze how the college admission process reinforces this binary in stark, yet unassuming, ways. We present the resulting social justice implications in terms of students’ participation in a classist educational system as well as the antidemocratic repercussions for public institutions. Lastly, we call for recommendations designed to bolster public education's commitment to critically educate all students and to restore its bedrock democratic mission.     

Educational commons and the new radical democratic imaginary

This article reflects on emergent (radical-progressive) languages of democracy to consider what common educational institutions might mean today. It explores distinct philosophical and political tensions that cut across these languages in relation to educational organization and pedagogy including – antagonism versus exodus, transcendence versus immanence, pluralism versus multiplicity, democracy versus communism. In contrast to other theorists in education who have tended to privilege certain conceptual positions in these debates to address a wide range of educational issues, the author argues that these tensions should be read selectively and generatively for linking political questions concerning democracy to educational transformation. In conclusion, the article calls for a language of insurrectional democracy that integrates aspects of each approach and where strategic engagements with, and creative lines of flight out of, public institutions and the State play a role in reimagining a common education for a democratic society to come.     

Political Liberalism,Civic Education and the Dutch Government

Abstract

Recently two members of the Dutch government, the Minister of Justice and the Minister of Education and Science, have stressed publicly the importance of “the transmission of norms and values”. In this paper their public statements are evaluated from the perspective of a liberal conception of civic education. Such an assessment seems to be fair, since both people are, in their public role as ministers, key representatives of a liberal constitutional state. First, a brief analysis of the concept of civic education is presented. Subsequently, an explanation of the central aims of liberal education for citizenship is given. Finally, the educational statements of the ministers are tested against the explained liberal conception.     

Education,Democracy and the Economy

This paper provides a critique of neo‐liberal political economy of education. It is argued that neo‐liberal ideology trades off democracy against ‘economic efficiency’. However, the consequence of the application of neo‐liberal principles to education is that overall standards of education are likely to decline, thereby creating the conditions for a low skilled, low morale workforce. It is suggested that this outcome is consistent with the Neo‐liberal creation of a low wage low technology economy. On the basis of the critique, an alternative education system concerned with meeting the aims of an education for a democratic, economically sophisticated, society is sketched.     

RECONSTITUTING THE DEMOCRATIC SUBJECT: SEXUALITY, SCHOOLING, AND CITIZENSHIP

A bstract .  In this review essay, Robert Rhoads and Shannon Calderone consider how liberalism, as a guiding principle for school practices and educational policy making, reinforces heteronormativity through a doctrine of professed neutrality that circumscribes sexual expression and subjectivity. Through an analysis of Carol Vincent's Social Justice, Education, and Identity ; Cris Mayo's Disputing the Subject of Sex: Sexuality and Public School Controversies ; and Susan Birden's Rethinking Sexual Identity in Education , Rhoads and Calderone argue that the form of liberalism espoused by schools operates in contradiction to any pluralistic democratic project emphasizing social justice and inclusion of the "other." By highlighting the discursive contradictions and structural conditions of schools that lead to the marginalization and disenfranchisement of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer students, each book proposes alternative forms of educational praxis that attempt to disrupt the liberal status quo of schools. Such praxis, Rhoads and Calderone argue, offers possibilities for new forms of democratic organization within schools that conform with a more robust and inclusive notion of citizenship.     

Saving Democratic Education from Itself: Why We Need Homeschooling

We need homeschooling to save education in a liberal democracy from taking a religious form—what I call Democratic Education. Democratic Education emerges when the democratic identity and narrative become elevated to the highest priority when thinking about educating human beings. This elevation becomes particularly dangerous when other nonpolitical ends and aspects of our humanity are ignored, downplayed, or, worse, delegitimized. This article argues that three signs of this danger currently exist in educational theory and practice. First, Democratic Educators are offering a reductive view of human persons in which undue focus is placed upon those skills or educational justifications that relate to students’ political identity and capacities. Second, the liberal tradition of education that seeks to show justice to the diversity of narratives or comprehensive reasonable worldviews that exist in America is being undermined. Third, educational alternatives outside the public system are attacked by Democratic Educators and even considered politically problematic. If we want to recover more human forms of education, we need to reinvigorate more pluralistic forms of humanistic education, such as homeschooling, that nurture philosophies and practices of education that allow for a wider focus upon human flourishing. Ultimately, this is why liberal democracies need homeschooling.     

How and Why to Support Common Schooling and Educational Choice at the Same Time

The common school ideal is the source of one of the oldest educational debates in liberal democratic societies. The movement in favour of greater educational choice is the source of one of the most recent. Each has been the cause of major and enduring controversy, not only within philosophical thought but also within political, legal and social arenas. Echoing conclusions reached by Terry McLaughlin, but taking the historical and legal context of the United States as my backdrop, I argue that the ideal of common schooling and the existence of separate schools, which is to say, the existence of educational choice, are not merely compatible but necessarily co-exist in a liberal democratic society. In other words, we need both common schooling and educational choice. The essay proceeds in four parts. First, I explain why we need to understand something about pluralism in order to understand common schooling and school choice. In the second and third parts, I explore the normative significance of pluralism for common schooling and educational choice, respectively. In the fourth part, I show how the two can be reconciled, given a certain understanding of what pluralism demands.     

Choices in Liberal and Non-liberal Political and Educational Thought

This article examines the concept of choice with reference to liberal and non-liberal educational settings. It analyses the concept in Western liberal thought and in communitarianism, and discusses the challenges of implementing liberal democratic education in African societies (particularly former socialist countries like Tanzania) where the concept is becoming central in socio-political and curricular reforms. It is argued that the residual collectivist political values rooted in traditional African holistic understanding of the world or the cosmos, that is, the affirmation of life , present a force against the kind of liberal and democratic civic education envisaged.     

捍卫基础教育的公益性

基础教育作为社会公益性事业的本质,决定了当前的基础教育改革必须反对利益至上的市场化改革倾向而坚决捍卫基础教育的公益性。由此,必须强化国家与政府在基础教育改革中的责任主体意识,但同时也应科学合理地认识＂公益＂与＂市场＂之间的关系,处理好当前市场经济环境下营利性基础教育的发展问题。     

探寻康德尔比较教育思想的根基与灵魂--康德尔自由教育思想的再发现

自由教育是美国著名教育思想家康德尔教育思想的重要组成部分。康德尔身处的动荡时代激发了其民主主义的社会理想,早期的生活经历和教育背景则奠定了其历史人文主义的思想底色。康德尔的自由教育思想试图在历史人文主义（传统）与进步主义（现代）之间求得平衡。这种兼容并蓄的特点使康德尔可被称为“现代的传统主义者”。康德尔之所以在美国教育史上未获得足够的关注,是因为他的自由教育思想迥异于当时占主导地位的教育“进步化”和“科学化”潮流。康德尔的自由教育思想不仅具有重要的历史价值,同时对于学界系统地理解其比较教育思想也有一定的启发意义。     

‘Tomorrow's Schools’ in New Zealand: from social democracy to market managerialism

This paper uses one national case to illustrate how diverse ideological agendas of central state agencies contest the discursive space within which major education policy reforms are developed. In Aotearoa New Zealand in 1988, ‘self‐managed’ schools were promoted ostensibly to allow parents more say in their children’s education and local school administration. The Tomorrow’s Schools reform policy texts included an existing social democratic partnership rhetoric, positioning principals as professional leaders working collaboratively with elected parent boards of trustees. However, the new ideology of ‘parental choice’ of school within a local schooling marketplace, underpinned by a chief executive or market managerial model of principalship, was later operationalised through mechanisms of ‘steerage’ from the centre. To explain this shift, we examine selected policy text pre‐cursors to the reforms and identify how contrasting forms of ‘principal’ and ‘teacher’ identity emerged within social democratic, neo‐liberal and market managerial ideologies. We further show that while radical (Treasury) market liberal arguments for labour market deregulation and consumer choice failed to gain widespread support, the State Services Commission preferred market managerialist strategies for promoting public accountability of schools (based on aggregate student achievement outcome data and centrally determined national educational priorities) were successfully embedded during the 1990s.     

The Democratic Potential of Parental Dissent: Keeping Public Schools Public,Legitimate, and Educational

In this essay, Sarah Stitzlein describes the democratic potential of parents choosing to opt out of school testing, explaining how they ought to engage in political dissent to best fulfill their responsibilities as citizens and to practice democracy on behalf of children and schools. Parents' decisions to opt out are often based on rights claims about their oversight as parents; moral claims regarding the potential undue pressure testing places on children and the misuse of students' scores; political and economic concerns with the role of corporations in testing; and educational claims about the validity of scores, the narrowing of curriculum, and the deprofessionalization of teachers who feel they must teach to the test. By building publics around these rationales and shared concerns, parents may increase the political legitimacy of public schools and create public schools that are more deeply public; in some cases, they may also provide an educational model of democratic life for budding citizens in schools to observe and learn from.     

Radical democratic schooling on the ground: pedagogical ideals and realities in a Sudbury school

Sudbury schools, which originated in the USA in the 1960s, are radical alternatives to traditional public schooling that promote egalitarian relationships between children and adults. Given that the Sudbury model has been largely overlooked in educational anthropology, this paper presents findings from a 1.5-year critical ethnographic study of a Sudbury school in California. In analysing participant interactions within the school's ‘democratic’ decision-making group, the paper presents evidence of an informal power structure that privileged older age, male gender and greater experience over youth, female gender and novicehood in determining whose voices wielded power. In doing so, the article provides an illustrative example of how theoretically democratic settings are edited to meet realities on the ground.