Universities can sharpen their commitment to democracy through institutional change. This might be resisted by a traditional understanding of universities. The question arises whether universities have defining purposes that demarcate possible university policy, strategic planning, and priority setting. These are significant questions because…

Social media has provided challenges and opportunities for education for democracy. There have always been structural elements of communication that are hidden and perpetuate inequalities. Social media has accelerated and empowered these hidden structures through algorithms. In this argumentative essay, we examine how critical media literacy can…

In most schools everywhere, democracy and participation continue to be carried out through the usual channels based on representative democracy and the vote of elected representatives. However, this reality is not monolithic, and we do find centers committed to practise a full and more profound democracy. Based on a case study, the article…

Adult education has historically played a role in modern democracies in support of civic participation and democratic engagement. In the context of a relatively stable and unchanging society, learning "about" and participating "in" the democratic process allow for tweaking the mechanisms of democracy. In present times, taken…

"Because Democracy Is Difficult and Dangerous" is an excerpt from "Woke Is Not Enough: School Reform for Leaders with Justice in Mind" (2022). Each chapter of the book focuses on a domain of school reform relevant to school leadership today: racial justice, democratic governance, restorative justice, student activism, and…

This article argues that contemporary education policies promoted by UNESCO and the OECD are embracing two distinct post-humanist visions, which I call the 'sustainable futures' and the 'techno-solutionist' strand. I will relate these strands to two conflicting agendas of education after World War II: the humanistic-emancipatory perspective…

Critics suggest that youth lack basic civic knowledge and are disengaging from civic action, particularly political action. The validity of these criticisms depends on how civic knowledge and civic engagement are defined. The results of four studies of civic education, conducted by the IEA over a period of almost 50 years, are examined in terms of…

Background/Context: Social scientists, policymakers, and commentators have long assumed that Western democracies enjoy relative stability because of deep commitments to a culture of democratic governance. But those commitments are quickly fading in almost every developed and developing democracy around the globe. In the same period in which…

It is often argued, rightly, that critical thinking is a necessary condition for democracy. This essay looks at the other side of that relationship, how certain democratic conditions are necessary for critical thinking to flourish. In turn, this dynamic, interactive account of democratic culture, institutions, and dispositions has implications for…

Universities play an indispensable role within modern democracies. But this role is often overlooked or too narrowly conceived, even by universities themselves. In "What Universities Owe Democracy," Ronald J. Daniels, the president of Johns Hopkins University, argues that--at a moment when liberal democracy is endangered and more…

In this paper, the argument that we make is that public education emerges from when democracy is put into practice in education. For the purposes of this paper we use pedagogic rights as proposed by Basil Bernstein as a way to frame and support this 'putting into practice'. Democracy, we argue, has to be practiced in two senses: (1) it does not…

In the United States of America, democratic education has evolved philosophically over 200 years from Jeffersonian ideas of educated citizenry to Deweyan principles of democracy as a "mode of associated living." In contemporary society, Dianna Hess has written about democratic education as a process of deliberative democracy. Yet the…

Inequality and injustice in education have been viewed from the perspective of social justice. Since the emergence of John Rawls's "A Theory of Justice," social justice issues have attracted the attention of social and political philosophers. Theoretical consequences of social and political philosophy have been actively incorporated into…

This paper interrogates whether technical democracy is well-suited to contend with possible technical controversies, including the increasing prevalence of EdTech in public schooling. Drawing across Habermasian 'deliberative democracy' that seeks consensus-derived resolution, as well as more agonistic approaches that embrace conflict as the means…

In this article, I examine how forms of new media, or social and digital media (SDM), can serve as conduits of participatory democracy while, at the same time, perpetuate the cannibalization of a cornerstone of democracy: public schools. I discuss how this new era of unprecedented access to content creation and dissemination has opened spaces and…