Democracy First

                Public education in America has always been conflicted, always trying to serve several functions or purposes at once.  David Labaree argues that there are three purposes of public education:  social mobility, efficiency, and democratic equality.  Even the work of Horace Mann and John Dewey had to satisfy the cry for making education relevant to work.  We make students start thinking about careers before they even get to high school, and students who apply to PELL grants have to have a certified area of study to get approved.  One of the most common complaints people who teach general education classes hear is the ubiquitous “I’ll never use this” argument, as if ‘use’ was restricted to what they have to do to get a job.  The assessment regime brought on by Bush’s NCLB reforms drives the efficiency purpose in today’s schools.  Teachers spend hours generating and collecting data that has little to do with anything except to prove the school is efficient.  What gets lost in the fog is the idea of democracy and education.

                When democracy is thought of as part of public education, it is usually framed as a subject or content area, as in making students pass a civics class.  It is as if democracy can be reduced to a set of state or national objects that can be measured in a multiple- choice test and then forgotten.  Americans are notoriously ill-informed about their own government.  (I once had a student tell me that they remembered learning that we had a bi-caramel form of government).  As Dewey, in particular, argued, democracy is a set of lived relationships and not something that can be memorized for Friday’s ten question true/false test.  In a society where education plays a more and more limited role in economic and social mobility and ‘work’ is a less and less reliable indicator of financial stability, the priorities we set for public education have to be realigned.  It makes no sense promoting efficiency if that efficiency doesn’t produce real outcomes for the students after they leave school.  It is time, if we want to rebuild the democracy in tatters all around us, to democracy the central purpose of public education.

                To make democracy central to the purpose of public education means changing the institutions that provide that education, both in their structure and their relationship to the communities that surround them.  The only way to build a democratic education is to bring democracy into the process, not as just a subject, but as an operating principle.  We still have schools that are creations of an industrialized society based on office and factory work.  We serve a narrow band-with of students, hoping to push enough of them into an economy that is no longer in synch with the education provided.  What we need are schools that are more interested in how knowledge is made than in the mindless transmission of information.

                Schools used to be an information rich environment, sometimes the only one in town.  Today, information is more readily available outside of school.  We do a terrible job of helping students navigate that environment.  We use tests that are more about distribution patterns than they are essential elements of learning, and we assume that every child/student should want to learn the same thing at the same time in the same way.  Brilliant.  If democracy is a set of lived experiences, those experience should be tied to the interests and specific circumstances of the learners.  A school in Flint, Michigan, for example, can teach everything we consider important by learning together about the water crises.  Instead of leaving school dulled into a stupor, they should continue learning and engaging their world.  Right now, some schools are at war with their communities instead of supporting their communities.  Let students practice democracy in their own learning instead of being directed to follow the narrow path some undereducated legislator prescribed for them.  Let teachers create and engage with students and parents.  Let them connect to the resources and problems in the local community so they can learn how to engage with and change the political system.  A democratic education is dynamic.  It feeds our desire to learn instead of killing it.  If you’re worried that we’ll lose the rigor or the foundational knowledge that we so often want school to provide, you’re ignoring the fact that we’ve already lost it.