Educating for Democratic Consciousness

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the contributors to this volume, as well Daniel Schugurensky, who wrote the foreword, for their complicity in pulling together a collection of writings that we hope will enhance the literature. We have known many of the contributors for a number of years, and it has been a pleasure working with them on this project. It is also a pleasure working with Peter Lang Publishing, and we benefited greatly from the support provided by Chris Myers, Sophie Appel, and Heather Boyle.

From Ali: a long overdue thank you to all the students I have worked with over the past decade in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Alberta. Without their energy, intelligence, and commitment to the critical categories of learning and academic living, my epistemic and analytical locations would have been so much more limited and less inclined to assume a global, humanist perspective on the primary categories of educational and social well-being. And a special thank you to one of these students, Nada Shaban, for her excellent work in putting together the index for this book. At a more personal level, I deeply appreciate and am certainly grateful for the delightful moments of discussion and discovery I continuously share with my two sons, Elias and Yonis.

From Paul: I would like to acknowledge and thank many colleagues and friends who have engaged, supported, and pushed me over the past several years to develop more critical scholarship, including David Zyngier, Marc Pruyn, Darren Lund, Brad Portfilio, Shirley Steinberg, Antonia Darder, Dave Hill, Peter McLaren, and a number of those in the Paulo Freire SIG and the Comparative and International Education Society of Canada. At a personal level, I continue to be inspired by Chelsea and Sarah, and joyously overwhelmed by the next generation in the form of Noah and Luka. Lastly, I would like to recognize and thank Bob, who has been a truly wonderful companion and supporter these past two decades, making every celebration a true event.

—AAA & PRC ← viii | ix →

← vii | viii →

Foreword

Democracy Does Not Fall From the Sky

DANIEL SCHUGURENSKY

When we learn in school about the origins of democracy, textbooks and teachers often direct us to Ancient Greece as a main reference point. We are taught that democracy flourished in that part of the world around 2,500 years ago, but we are told little about how it came about. Greek democracy did not fall from the sky. It originated in successive protests of the common people (the demos) against debt bondage. At that time, as a result of exorbitant interest rates and the need to use their own bodies as collateral to get loans to feed their families, many free laborers who had lost their land became slaves to the wealthy. The tensions between the rich and the “new poor” generated much political instability, and the risk of a mass rebellion was on the horizon. It was in this context that in 594 BC, in order to regain governability, Solon promulgated a series of democratic reforms that opened the door for the political participation of the poor. Democracy, then, from its beginnings, has been connected to struggles for economic and political justice.

Another important reference point in the long road to democracy is Magna Carta, issued in England in 1215 by King John. This important document was not a product of divine inspiration or of the benevolence—or the wisdom—of the king. It was the product of the rebellion of a group of his subjects, who wanted to limit the power of an authoritarian monarch to raise taxes, seize properties, and impose service obligations. Among other things, Magna Carta ensured protection from illegal imprisonment and immediate access to justice, and prohibited the king from imposing new taxes without consent. These provisions eventually led to the now common practices of trial by jury, habeas corpus, and the principle of “no taxation without representation” that inspired the American Revolution. The barons who benefited from Magna Carta also pledged not to impose new feudal services and fees from their own vassals, and when serfdom was abolished, the rights of Magna Carta were extended to other groups.

Likewise, many other features of contemporary democracy that in the twenty-first century we take for granted, like the right to vote, were not gifts ← ix | x → from the dominant groups in society but the product of many difficult struggles. Moreover, the expansion of the franchise to universal (adult) suffrage, where the right to vote is not restricted by sex, race, social status, wealth, or sexual orientation, was the result of the hard work of a variety of social movements. We could continue with other examples, but the point I am trying to make is that democracy should not be perceived as a static structure but as a long historical—and probably endless—process shaped by the struggles of subordinated groups for freedom and equality.

In this constant dynamic of domination and liberation, education matters. As the editors of this book observe, education often favors the elites and provides legitimacy to the status quo. However, as suggested in the subtitle of this volume, it can also contribute to a counterhegemonic and emancipatory project. It is with the background of this historical tension that we can examine the issues raised in the different chapters of this book, and discuss their relevance to the context of the second decade of the twenty-first century. This is, after all, an interesting decade, as we may be living in the first stages of an important shift. We are in the midst of yet another economic crisis, with high levels of unemployment, foreclosures, wealth concentration, and social inequality. The neoliberal project, while still hegemonic, is being contested in several regions of the planet. The World Social Forum has been active for more than ten years and has established itself as a recognizable counterpoint to the World Economic Forum. The Arab Spring, the Indignados in Europe, and the Occupy Movements in North America may prove to be more than a passing fad and mark an important turning point in the path toward the democratization of economic, social, and cultural life. The proliferation of participatory democracy experiments around the world may provide the basis for a new political culture. Governments of several Latin American countries are showing that there are alternatives to the neoliberal package of privatization, deregulation, and budget cuts and that it is possible to combine progressive policies with sustained economic growth. New social media are starting to challenge the monopoly of media conglomerates, and open source journals are facilitating the free circulation of knowledge within and across borders. The social economy is slowly growing in many localities, and cooperatives are becoming more visible than ever before. An ecological perspective is rapidly permeating human consciousness, probably because we have realized that we are running out of time to save the planet.

This brings us back full circle to the first part of the title of this book, which calls our attention to the development of a democratic consciousness. ← x | xi → If we accept the premise that we are still living in a world that is profoundly undemocratic, that the fragile and imperfect democracies that we have today are the product of centuries of struggles, and that a more democratic world will not fall from the sky, it is clear that democracy is an unfinished project. This project is not only about a better form of government, more transparent and participatory governance, and more fair and equitable policies. It is also an ongoing process of community building, of healthier relations with other community members and with nature.

From the preceding discussion we can extract at least five educational implications. The first is that the democratic project requires the development of a democratic consciousness, and this, in turn, requires experiences with democratic practices in a variety of institutional settings, including, but not restricted to, classrooms and schools. Another is that education for democracy must be conceptualized and implemented in connection with related fields such as citizenship education, global education, environmental education, intercultural education, peace education, and gender education, and in general with the more institutionalized field of social studies education. A third is that the role of schools is not only to help students adapt to society, but also—and fundamentally—to help them change society for the better. This, in turn, requires the development of a sense of individual and collective agency, particularly among traditionally marginalized groups. Courses that promote community engagement, service learning programs, student councils, student participation in school councils, and school participatory budgeting are just a few areas with potential to develop this sense of political efficacy. Contrary to prevailing stereotypes, today’s youth is eager to participate when they perceive that they have an opportunity to make a difference, be at the local or international level, particularly if they identify a just cause. The recent student protests in defense of public education in different parts of the world, youth engagement in social and environmental movements seeking an alternative future, or the current Stop Kony 2012 campaign show that young people want to be part of something larger than themselves and are willing to contribute to build a better world when they have a chance to do it.

A fourth implication is that education for democracy needs to have a more clear presence in preservice and in-service teacher education. This is not easy in an educational system that emphasizes “back to basics,” testing, and measurement, but it is not impossible. After all, many educational systems around the world mention among their objectives the development of informed, critical, caring, and engaged citizens. A fifth implication is that ← xi | xii → education for democracy, to be consistent, must include efforts aimed at the democratization of educational institutions. Presently, there is an international movement of more than 200 “democratic schools” that can be traced back to Leo Tolstoy’s incipient experiments in Yasnaya Polyana in the late nineteenth century and the work of people like Francisco Ferrer y Guardia in Barcelona, Emma Goldman in New York, and Alexander Neill in Summerhill in the early twentieth century. This movement has many lessons to offer the field of education for democracy, but most of these schools are in the private system. It is pertinent to ask whether some of these innovations are applicable to public schools, and what are the necessary conditions to develop a vibrant network of democratic schools in the public education system.

These five implications present several challenges for research, for policy, and especially for practice to the education for democracy movement, a movement that is not constrained to the formal education system but also includes the so-called nonformal education system. The development of a democratic consciousness includes the development of critical analytical skills as well as the development of democratic values and attitudes that are best learned through democratic practices. All this runs counter to a formal educational system that emphasizes testing, measurement, and rankings and is reinforced by a particular structure of rewards and punishments. For this reason, in certain contexts it may be easier to advance education for democracy in the nonformal sector, and particularly in popular education, because of its flexibility, openness to innovation, and commitment to democracy and social justice.

In closing, the education for democracy movement can make important contributions in three main areas that attest to its counterhegemonic possibilities. First, it can contribute to democratizing educational institutions, from changing pedagogical relations and curriculum content at the classroom level to promoting more deliberative and decision-making processes in school governance. Second, it can contribute to democratizing the educational system, starting with tackling educational inequalities by postal code and promoting policies that improve educational opportunities for everyone. Third, it can make a modest contribution to the democratization of society by articulating its educational efforts with social action and with progressive social movements. It is probably here where education for democracy can maximize its counterhegemonic possibilities. Of course, translating these potential contributions into actual realities requires plenty of organized work, but this is the only way to make progress, because democracy will not fall from the sky.

Chapter 1

Framing Contemporary Democracy and the Potential for Counterhegemonic Possibilities

PAUL R. CARR & ALI A. ABDI

Introduction

The role of education in developing human well-being has been discussed extensively by educators, policy makers, and political leaders. The direction of analysis in this case is usually eschewed in favor of learning programs leading to better life (or more specifically, employment) prospects for people. But the focus on human well-being cannot be simply stamped out as a part of nature; necessarily, it has to be nuanced, itemized, and both subjectively and communally located and contextualized. That is, while learning projects could add something good that can be measurable and generalized, they could also omit or even depress many other intersections that define the way people read—and engage with—the world that surrounds them, critically or uncritically interact with the institutions that control their being, and unintentionally disempower themselves in often objectifying systems that attempt to re- and mis-direct them from achieving their potential (Carr, 2010). With these concerns in mind, it is clear that the space between the social and the educational is a very active one, and is more often than otherwise, mediated by the political. With public policy being the most potent intervener in socio-educational connections, being conceptualized, formulated and implemented via political power, the intersections can be heavy and congested, with intense ideological and practical subterfuges that aid the life contexts of some while disempowering many.

While the intentions of the social-educational-political continuum may not deliberately claim so, learning processes and outcomes are never devoid of select philosophical groundings and intentions that bend the directional trajectories of the instructional-pedagogical context. As such, education, if anything, is a very complex enterprise, and its end product within a neoliberal mind-set or more intangible social manifestations in the form of out ← 1 | 2 → comes are never neutral or benignly attachable to the existentialities of all. As has been the case in the past 150 or so years of the proliferation of mass schooling in the world (albeit with divergent temporal happenstances), education has become a project that is desired by all but one that continuously favors the lot of the elites, and, in order to give legitimacy to the philosophical foundation of the institution of education, only selectively those who are not epistemically familiar with its organization, its political and economic values, and its philosophical and linguistic constructions (Abdi & Richardson, 2008). But sometimes it might not be unthinkable to claim something else: that, although in Noam Chomsky’s terms, for example, education doesn’t aim for, or achieve, the welfare of all (2004). Here, the categorizations should sound complex, even irrational; actually for us, they shouldn’t be.

The System

The critical point in the constitution of all education as a hegemonic system that oppresses its recipients should not be detached from the point related to its potential. Let use a simple example. A boy or a girl goes to school, manages to fulfill the requirements, and, over time and space, meets the graduation and certification exigencies that were designed for him or her by those who only knew the learner via the imperatives of the system. It even supposedly gets better; the learner uses the certification outcomes to find a job, buy a house and a car, raise a family, and, via this personal experience, makes sure his progeny repeat the same story. Is that something good? Both technically and less technically, yes and no, and here is where the subtitle of this book takes us by way of another question: Do contemporary educational programs liberate the potential of individuals and groups, or do they actually restrict them? To harmonize this certainly extraneous question within the system, one simple way to start could be explaining what we actually mean by the system. Perhaps we should clarify one point before we seek a short answer for this concern: the example of the boy and the girl above is, despite any shortcomings, a good story, of the mainstream up-side, of education. As we shall see below, the situation of societal-educational interactions is actually much worse for so many others all over the world.