Education and Conceptions of Democracy: a reply to Bonna Haberman

Against Bonna Haberman, this article asserts that democratic theory contains diverse models of democracy with markedly different values, visions and experiences of the good life. Education in democratic societies is similarly diverse because of the corresponding difference in values between these models, and in almost all of these cases it is strongly content-based. In one model only, that of the critical citizen of moral democracy, is there any ground for neutrality concerning life choices. All other models are strongly partisan in their visions of the good life.