Education and Democracy

                In 1916 John Dewey published Democracy and Education in the twilight of the Gilded Age.  He wrote about democracy being under siege by the newly felt powers of industrialization and promoted education as a remedy.  He saw the need to build democratic relationships and citizenship as proof that an educational system was needed.  A hundred years later, we are entering a new Gilded Age and democracy is once again under siege.  It is time to rewrite Dewey’s idea about the relationship of education and democracy to address the new realities and new threats we face.

                Dewey, and Horace Mann before him, faced an uphill battle in arguing for a free and public education for all.  Like Mann, Dewey’s ideas were wrapped up in the need for work.  In the age of robots and AI, it is questionable whether or not work should still play such pivotal role in education.  What the educational reforms in the last century brought us was a Fordist institution full of daily schedules, whistles and bells and teachers that operated like foremen.  Those schools prepared people to enter the new industrial workforce and even prepared a few of them to take managerial positions in the evolving economy.  Eventually, laws such as Taft-Hartley helped those workplaces become more democratic.  The explosion of the American economy after WWII set off three decades of economic expansion and investment in public education as both an economic and civic necessity.  America built schools to house the baby-boomers, expanded university access and kick-started the community college movement.  Heading into the 1980’s, it seemed like the central role education and educational access played were essential to American prosperity and civic involvement.

                Beneath the surface, however, the tides were starting to shift.  Nixon pushed to make university education less accessible to curtail the student demonstrations that he hated.  In the seventies, the connection between productivity and wages was severed, and while productivity soared, wages stagnated and declined.  Union membership started to decline, and the rift between the ‘silent majority’ and the universities started to grow.  The integration of public schools brought on by Brown v Board of Education started to stall out.  By the early 80’s, public education came under a withering thirty- year smear campaign launched by the Carnegie Commission Report, A Nation at Risk.  What followed were decades of manufactured and deceptive studies that purported to show the schools of America were failing.  All of this culminated in the George W. Bush program called No Child Left Behind (NCLB).  By then, the narrative was all too familiar.  Schools were gulags and teachers were unionized thugs.  Education need good old capitalistic competition to bring it around.  Hidden beneath this was the right-wing attack on public education because they didn’t want to pay for it or send their precious children to public schools.

                There were and are things that are certainly wrong with American schools, but these attacks exaggerated and sometimes falsified the data showing the decline of schools.  Students were not getting dumber, but politicians were, and their legislative programs devastated school communities by underfunding and over-regulating what went on in schools.  The post-secondary institutions were underfunded to the point that getting a college education was out of the reach of more and more of the population.  Education became and extractive exercise of charter schools and testing and text book giants eating up more and more of the money available with no corresponding uptick in performance. 

                Which brings us to this new call to rebuild the crucial role education plays in democracy.  A Jeffersonian democracy demands a well informed and well- educated electorate.  Any country that elects Trump as president obviously doesn’t have one of those.  We cannot simply remake the schools we used to have any more than we can recreate the economy and politics from fifty years ago.  We are going to have to rebuild our schools to reflect the current state of the economy and democracy.  I am going to spend the next few posts to this blog concentrating on how that might be done.