Participatory Democracy

All schools serve the societies in which they're embeddedauthoritarian schools serve authoritarian systems, apartheid schools serve apartheid society, and so on. Practically all schools want their students to study hard, stay away from [Page 631]drugs, do their homework, and so on. In fact, none of these features distinguishes schools in the old Soviet Union or fascist Germany from schools in a democracy, and indeed those schools produced some excellent scientists and athletes and musicians and generals. They also produced obedience and conformity. In a democracy, one would expect something different and something morea commitment to free inquiry, questioning, and participation; a push for access and equity; a curriculum that encourages independent thought and singular judgment; a standard of full recognition of the humanity of each individual.

The core lessons of a democratic educationan education for citizenship, participation, and active engagementinclude these: Each human being is unique, induplicable, and of incalculable value, and everyone has a mind of his or her own; we are each a work in progress swimming through a dynamic history in the making toward an uncertain and indeterminate shore; we can choose to join with others and act on our own judgments and our own imaginations; human enlightenment and liberation are always the result of thoughtful choice and action.

There is a more fundamental purpose to public schooling in a democracy than either loyalty to the state or fealty to the leaders or job training, and that is teaching citizens to think about the issues that affect their lives and how they might act to change things. Pressure from government to make schools little outposts of patriotism and military recruitment, or from business to make the goals of education identical to the needs of corporations jeopardizes the democratic foundations of education. We must ask ourselves whether schools geared to preparing loyal subjects or obedient workers also build thinking, literate, active, and morally sensitive citizens who carry out their democratic responsibilities to one another, to their communities, to the earth.

Students in a vital democracy must learn the values of self-governance: to care for other people; to accept wild and vast diversity as the norm; to acknowledge that the full development of each is the condition for the full development of all; and to value participation, free thought and speech, civil liberties, and social equality. Curriculum that contributes to these commitments involves analysis and exploration, diverse political expression, and independent thought and action.

Participatory democracy rejects formal and structural markers of self-governance in favor of a system based on people actually making the decisions that affect their lives. Voting is surely an important right, for example, but it is not, in and of itself, a singular or sturdy marker of democracy. Again, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Baathist Iraq all held elections, but none was a recognizably democratic society. In our own country, we've seen elections stolen and manipulated, voters disenfranchised and their rights suppressed, electoral colleges overturning the popular vote. This is all to say that elections may be a necessary aspect of democracy, but they are also by themselves an insufficient expression.

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