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 19^th 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.