On the Necessity of Radical State Education: Democracy and the Common School

There needs to be a tighter connection than is often the case between contested theories of democracy and debates about the viability and desirability of the common school. Because radical traditions of state education take that connection much more seriously, in both theory and practice, than most dominant accounts, it is to those alternative traditions that we might usefully look for guidance in the furtherance of explicitly democratic aspirations. In arguing for the importance of prefigurative practice, this paper proposes seven key analytic strands of radical democratic praxis. A common good animated by the affirmation of a reconfigured, inclusive 'fraternity' is preferred to the fearful, atomistic interdependence of neo-liberalism.