Borderland

I started thinking about this after I read Nani’s, Se Hace Camino Al Andar post pointing to Deborah Meier’s article, Education for What? I didn’t know anything about Deborah Meier until a week ago when I read Jonathan Kozol’s Shame of the Nation, in which he mentioned Meier. I looked for more information about her, and I found that Meier’s view of testing and standards closely mirrors my own. More of her writings can be found on her website.

A post on One Trick Pony pointed me to It’s a Secret, an animated political cartoon by Matt Wuerker that emphasizes the need for citizens to reclaim a voice in the public discourse. Democracy is used in very different senses by Meier and by the Bush administration, a thought that was triggered by the animation. I began to wonder about the power of a word that has become near sacred in its power to confer license on all manner of official policies.

The word democracy gets thrown around so much that its meaning has been rendered ideologically incoherent. The Encyclopedia of Informal Education has an article called education for democracy that helped me clarify this pool of muddled meaning. There are at least two ideological frames for democracy, and it’s important to understand them because they have very different implications for education and the type of society we are creating.

a dichotomy

The contemporary sense of democracy, the meaning that we typically see in official information sources and mainstream media, is that democracy is a representative system of government. This meaning of democracy comes from a belief in market economies and hierarchically-ordered power relations. From this point of view schools are sites for the transmission of information and the production of both leaders and workers who can service the needs of systems and institutions. Citizens are then taxpayers who are publicly invested. Within this frame, schools are accountable to a bottom line and human beings are thereby commodified, becoming human resources with quantifiable social and cognitive attributes.

The classical, romantic, sense of democracy

“envisages a society that itself is intrinsically educative and in which political socialization is a distinctively educative process…

in which

there is a focus on liberal education, a curriculum which fosters forms of critical and explanatory knowledge that allow people to interrogate social norms and to reflect critically on dominant institutions and practices.”

tensions

Divergent views of democracy produce starkly divergent outcomes in schools. Classical democracy encourages communication and deliberation about the values that regulate social constructions, while representative democracy channels discourse through pyramidal organizational structures. In terms of classroom pedagogy the difference between direct democracy and representative democracy is the difference between process and product-oriented instruction. Socially it is the difference between an emphasis on community as opposed to reliance on authoritarian control. Politically we see differences between regulation by distributed power, and accountability to a centralized administration.

pathfinding

Preparing students to participate as workers, consumers, or voters for some future need ignores the real interest they have in actively authoring identities for themselves in the present. A focus on classroom community and social literacies, such as storytelling, art, writing, and other mediated forms of personal expression encourages students to form human connections within their various communities. From this vantage they can begin to critically examine the norms that shape their world. Teachers who still retain sovereignty over their instructional decision-making can create a classroom environment that fosters a classical democratic spirit. What is necessary is a shift of emphasis away from authority, and a willingness to negotiate the sharing of power.