If ..
I write a book about democracy and education, the
introduction would go like this
American
democracy is in crisis, again. This is
not the first time, nor will it be the last, unless this crisis leads to its
complete collapse. This crisis comes in
the midst of a wholesale change in economic underpinnings of the culture. A manufacturing economy anchored by concerns
over labor and equity is being replaced by a monetarist economy where labor is
being replaced by technology. As a
result, wealth has become concentrated in the hands a few, much like the
earlier Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century. The institutions that rose to meet that
crisis, public education, universities and labor unions, for instance, will not
prove to be very effective in meeting this new crisis. In fact, it is clear, on an almost daily
basis, that those institutions are themselves in decline. I am going to focus on one of those
institutions, education. It is my
premise that without revolutionizing the way we think about education, we will
never be able to adapt and rebuild a democracy capable of solving the current
crisis.
The
last iteration of our educational institutions paid lip service to democratic
values, but it is an institution firmly grounded in principles of economics and
social mobility. That is, it is a system
dominated by the specter of work. At all
levels of education we promote careers as the crowning accomplishment of an
education. The problem with that is that
work is changing. Work may even be
disappearing. America is no longer a
society filled with mobility and promise.
We have less mobility than almost any other industrialized country. School does more to solidify social status
than it does to change it. Our system of
education is locked into serving an economic and social ideal that no longer
exists. It is time to rethink what education
for a democracy would look like and how it would function.
Like
all the institutions we have grown up with, education is under attack. Like the rest of the infrastructure of post
WWII America, it has been underfunded and left to rot. The political energy so far has been to try
and revive what it was, to create access and opportunity. The problem is that it was never meant to
confront a political economy so devoid of civic intention. We have been training people to go along and
get ahead, but that game is over. The
conservative kleptocrats who have seized control of our economy and our
government have no intention of opening up their world to fair competition and
ingenuity. Schools are dangerous when
there is no more room at the top. We
need to let the schools we have die. We
need to stop using them as branding agents and sorting mechanisms that
reproduce the status quo. If democracy
is going to survive in America, and that’s a big if, it will have to do so on
the back of an educational system that vigorously practices and supports
it.
The
chapters that follow will outline and discuss ways that democratic learning
will change the school and the culture.
They will challenge the very idea of school, teaching and learning. They will challenge the notion of ‘experts,’
and question who gets to ask the questions.
My guide in much of this is John Dewey.
Roughly a hundred years ago he undertook a similar project. His vision created a lot of valuable and
important progress in public education. Like
every version of American education, however, that vision was degraded by the
confines and pressures of economic servitude built into American
capitalism. With that system in tatters
all around us, it is time to strike off in a new direction. It is time to recast education as a
democratic and democracy enhancing force as we try to work our way out of this
crisis.
