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.

Democratic Data

                If you’ve been around a school lately, you know how ubiquitous conversations about data are.  We are told we should make ‘data driven’ decisions, although that usually means having some cherry picked and poorly understood data that supports an administrator’s idea.  Every school pumps out reams of data that no one really understands or, in the worst cases, even looks at.  I’m not trying to argue that all data is useless, although much of the data about education we currently produce clearly is.  What I want to argue is that there is a democratic and a non-democratic way to use data in trying to understand and improve education.

                The non-democratic way looks like what we’re doing now.  The data is produced using evaluation instruments that are not part of the daily work of the teachers or students.  If students start doing too well, the instruments change so that scores produce a distribution pattern that matches the intended outcome.  There is no real feedback loop, so whether the students do well or poorly there is no real way to use that to improve the school.  We’ve invested billions of dollars in a testing system that exactly reproduces the pattern of wealth and privilege that already exists in the country.  Since the ‘Nation at Risk’ came out in 1983, we have basically used data to justify the declining mobility that education used to produce.  We are fixated on the ‘failure’ of education because that failure excuses the increasingly unequal and undemocratic distribution of wealth in our country.  That inequality is not the fault of education, nor can education really solve that problem, but we use fraudulent educational data to soothe our conscience. 

                Undemocratic data is generated and controlled by elites who use to explain and justify their actions and privileges.  Democratic data is produced by people engaged in what Dewey called ‘inquiry.’  For Dewey, democratic citizenship produced a series of inquiries that brought people together to address and solve the problems they faced.  In education, that means using data not just to meet outcomes but to establish them.  A curriculum should be built from the inside out.  That is, a curriculum should reflect and honor the learning goals of a community in coordination with ‘educators’ who can frame and implement that curriculum for the specific students it’s designed to help.  Now, a curriculum is a list of things other ‘experts’ think students need to know, regardless of who they are, where they live or what motivates them to learn.  Democratically generated and published data would help that process develop and succeed.

                If we’re serious about democratic education, we should stop using data as a way of judging students in some social competition.  The competition is over before the students even enter kindergarten – the rich win.  Instead, we need ‘assessments’ that hold the students and the teachers accountable for generating and learning what they have mutually (parents and community members are included in this) decided on as a curriculum.  The purpose of democratic education is not to produce a few bright individuals who can become wealthy serving the wealthy, the purpose of a democratic education is to produce a civic basis for inquiry, a basis for addressing and solving the issues and problems that people are actually living through. 

                Our schools have become instruments of social inequality and division.  They use data to promote and expertise about learning that is fraudulent to its core.  Learning in a democracy is not something you do for someone else’s benefit.  Democratic learning is done for yourself and your community.  The notion that there is a curriculum or set of content that everyone does or should know is absurd.  Educational elites and the textbook and testing companies they work for have obscured the real purpose and function of education by spewing ‘data’ that distracts us from what learning is and should be.  A democratic education starts by cutting through these lies and obfuscations to ask simple and fundamental questions about learning and knowing.  Inquiry produces its own data.  It doesn’t buy it from Pearson.

Languaging and Democratic Knowledge

                We tend to think of knowledge as something that is transmitted.  This is especially true in school settings.  We assume an objective reality that we all share, and we assume we have the obligation to transmit what we know about that objective reality in school.  Maturana’s concept of ‘languaging,’ which I have written about earlier, cuts against these assumptions in some interesting and important way.  Languaging assumes that rather than a fixed and objective reality we constantly bringing forth a reality in the dynamic interchange we call culture.  In a languaging model of education, transmission is never a completely adequate description of how knowledge is created and shared.  In a democratic production of knowledge, languaging is a key component of describing how we make and share our view of the world.

                Even Maturana recognizes the need for transgenerational transmission of knowledge.  An autopoietic model of consciousness preserves the parts of the ‘background’, in this case cultural knowledge and protocols, that allow the members of a culture to coordinate behaviors with each other.  If every encounter were new and unscripted and every action was unprecedented and unknown, we would be in a constant state of anxiety and ignorance.  Without transgenerational transmissions, we would never develop the complex ways of being that characterize our world.  The issue is not that transgenerational transmissions shouldn’t happen, the issue is that they are only part of the knowledge making process.  An autopoietic view of our interactions also has to account for change, the part of the background that is being replaced or rearranged.

                The inevitable need to change, to adapt, must also be part of a democratic production of knowledge.  In traditional models, the change is controlled by elites and institutions who decide what gets preserved and what gets let go.  The hope is that some benign oligarchy of ‘experts’ is steering the ship in a prudent and safe direction, one that benefits the majority of the society.  As America has become less and less democratic, those elites have taken advantage of their role to steal the majority of the people blind and use our cultural institutions to insulate them from critique.  In the process, our role in bringing forth a world that we want to live in, one that conforms to our hopes and desires, or even just one that is environmentally sustainable, gets lost.  We need to think about how we use our institutional knowledge production to insure the role languaging plays.

                When children have to only learn what other people think they should learn, their minds are colonized in ways that make it hard for them to generate the energy and imagination it takes to bring a new order into being.  A nation of informed but uneducated and unimaginative people afraid of sharing the world with others leads to a collapse of democratic society.  We have educated our children not to participate but to spectate, and the result is a destruction of civic and democratic values and energy.  A real democracy needs the countervailing and dynamic postionalities that make a diverse and democratic society possible.  We learn about ourselves from interacting with others.  We learn about our world by seeing it through multiple sets of perspectives.  We learn about democracy by refusing to settle for one story.

                Life is dynamic.  Learning should be, too.  The saddest thing that happened to me every semester I taught was watching a new group of students trudge in and slump in a chair, already convinced that was about to happen was dead and deadening.  Some would revive, like hikers coming in from the cold, but many would not.  They didn’t want to play.  I assume at one point in their life they did.  I assume at one point they were the scared but excited kindergartener who couldn’t wait to climb on a bus and start a journey.  Their eyes told me that time was long past.  In a society where the 10%, the experts, make all the decisions, maybe the ones who still wanted to play will do.  In a real democracy, that’s not nearly enough.

               

Democratic Knowledge

                We tend to think of knowledge in individual and proprietary terms.  People possess knowledge and use it to leverage their interests and status.  We seem to think that knowledge is just ‘out there’ for the taking, and that having more of it is proof of hard work and intelligence.  We don’t even blink at the notion that some people have a right to have more knowledge than others or that the people who seem to have it deserve to have it.  If we were truly democratic in the way we approach knowledge, we would see that these assumptions are problematic.  I want to draw on two books, Cognition In The Wild, by Edwin Hutchins and States of Shock, by Bernard Stiegler, to propose an alternative approach to the way we think about knowledge.

                I am writing this in the wake of the college admissions scandal that made headlines across the country.  Rich parents had faked and bribed people to insure their children could go to elite institutions.  The public outrage was over the fact that the sanctity of these institutions was tarnished by the unseemly behavior of these rich parents.  The outrage should have been focused on the supposedly ‘elite’ designation of those institutions in the first place.   Put aside for a moment the ‘legacy’ students who gain admission through family ties and donorship that already dilute the notion that the students at these institutions are some how more ‘worthy’ than other students.  The more fundamental problem is the idea that a democracy can function on an elite definition of knowledge.  As Hutchins makes clear, knowledge is a cultural formation not an individual trait or characteristic.  Elite institutions promote the idea that an oligarchy is necessary to govern a democracy, a notion the ‘founding fathers’ believed to their core. 

                The problem with that notion is that the knowledge created is created by and for the people who need and use it.  The knowledge of the world produced at Harvard or Yale is not knowledge of an objective reality shared by everyone, it is the knowledge of a world that recognizes and perpetuates the positional advantage of the people at Harvard and Yale.  The system works to vigorously protect the advantage of their perspective against the perspectives and interests of other groups of people with different experiences and interests.  In some ways, it is a continuation of Plato’s philosopher kings who were the only class of people who could be trusted to know the good.  When poverty is studied in the Ivy League, it never includes an examination of the system that created an unequal distribution of wealth and status which form the basis for the Ivy League in the first place.  That is, it never includes the world view or knowledge of the people who are actually impoverished or their positionality in the system that creates knowledge about them but does not actually include them.  Luhmann once said that the people studied end up being more like the characters in a 19^th century novel than real people.

                If we are serious about being a democracy, we need institutions that bring everyone represented by or impacted by the knowledge we create.  Stiegler proposes just that in States of Shock.  Instead of universities that represent the narrow and self-serving interests of the elite, he proposes universities that foster inquiry by and about the people who live around them.  We should be less interested in what pharmaceutical companies want than what patients think they need.  As feminist critics of science have long maintained, who interests are behind the questions that generate research means everything in what kind of research is done and what results are produced.  In a democratic educational system, the research, learning and production should be based on what the people need to know.  We need to know what the effect of an unchecked assault of social media means to the way we relate and raise families.  We need to know how to feed ourselves and organize our lives in ways that are healthy and sustainable.  Too much of academia is either feeding corporate greed or academic egos instead of generating knowledge that is useful to the people.  We have promoted a system that makes a few people smart (and rich) and a lot of people dumb.  That may serve a capitalist vision of the world, but it can’t produce a democratic society.

                So, be amused or horrified or scandalized by what a few insanely rich parents did to help their kids get laid at an elite institution instead of a state school if you must, but don’t miss the larger scandal about the way we produce, distribute and share knowledge in the process.

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.

               

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.

Re-Languaging Democracy 

                We tend to think of democracy as a thing, a series of institutions and laws that is meant to churn out some idealized result.  Maybe it’s time that we adjust the way we think about and conceptualize what it means to live in a democracy.  It is particularly important to do so in the midst of the assault on those institutions and laws currently underway.  If we want to revitalize our democratic roots, we have to radically and fundamentally re-language them.  We have a Platonic view of democracy even though it’s more Aristotelian in its essence.  We are trying to cobble together institutions and practices meant for an agrarian oligarchy that are hopelessly out of step with the broader enfranchisement and rapid access to information and communication of our era. 

                The most important thing to do is to see democracy as an experience and not just a governmental structure.  Too many people see the government as this ‘thing’ out there that is not really a part of their daily lives.  We claim to be a democracy, but we have always practiced more autocratic tendencies in our schools, our jobs and our families.  We offer one semester of High School civics as a band aid to the disparity between what we claim to value and how we really act.  Chomsky is famous for making this point.  When Dewey wrote about democracy, he saw it as a process of inquiry, one that had to expand participation and scope.  If we want to save or reclaim a democratic society we have to start teaching ourselves how to be a different kind of citizen, one that does more than vote sporadically in an election or two.

                The experience of democracy is hard work.  It means real engagement with people that are different from us and see the world from a different perspective than we do.  What we do now is to put these differences into a competition with each other and let the winner have their way.  If the process is contaminated with large sums of money, it’s easy to see how little understanding or accommodation ever happens.  In Dewey’s sense of inquiry, he strives to frame these conflicts as opportunities to learn and perfect our collaboration instead of playing a zero-sum game of diminishing returns.  Educating people to do this has to start very early in their lives; it can’t wait until they are adults already habituated to win at all costs.  Democracy is a way of making knowledge that reframes the way we understand the world through our encounters with others.

                One of our challenges is that there are so many more players in the game now.  Our democracy was never meant to be this inclusive.  Its institutions and practices served the oligarchs that designed it pretty well.  As long as they were mostly benign and progressive, the country thrived.  But that good thing never included everyone and never was meant to.  The great triumph of American democracy is that it ever so gradually pushed itself to actually include, albeit in often limited form, more and more people.  The institutions that were created by oligarchs have been modified to work for a more representative cross-section of Americans, although by no means all Americans.  One way to understand where we are politically is to recognize the regrettable, but probably inevitable, move by people who see their privilege being eroded to dial back and restrict the access so many have fought so hard to create.  It is no coincidence that their efforts have been so focused on schools.  The way we learn to think about our engagements in a common sphere are the key to what our democracy will look like.

                How do we learn to talk to each other and learn from each other?  One sign a democracy is in trouble is when it can no longer produce a “we.”  I’m not suggesting some homogenized “we” that erases our differences or back doors a hegemonic view.  But out of our individual and group identities we have to find a way to produce a “we.”  Not because we have to agree; we won’t.  Not because we have to all be the same: not happening.   We have to create it so we can engage each other in the process of change and renewal.  We are not looking for an ‘answer;’ we are looking for a beginning.  Dewey believed we can learn to do this.  He believed we could learn how to not just govern democratically but to think democratically.  I believe that, too.