The assault on democratic values is not new--nor is the effort to promote the critical literacy skills necessary to understand the cultural, economic, moral, and social issues that underline these social concerns. Unfortunately, in modern society we have conflated an associated way of living with government, and government with politics, and…

This book turns to political theory as a framework for understanding the rise of political and religious extremism, and in particular the Christian Nationalist position, identifying solutions to civic challenges, and arguing for the vital role that public schools play in providing the civic education that prepares young people for participation in…

How should the curriculum for older school students address the transition to sustainable futures? This article seeks to answer this question by reference to the marginalisation of education for sustainability (EfS) in England after 2010; its re-emergence around 2020, prompted largely by students' protests over climate change: and the continuing…

This article seeks to introduce a new historical explanation as to why left-wing working-class women engaged in liberal, middle-class organisations during the first wave of feminism. The article specifically deals with middle-class associations and clubs that had educational purposes. Instead of focusing on the larger explanatory scheme of the…

This article explores the possibility that John Dewey's silence about which democratic means are needed to achieve democratic ends, while confusing, makes greater sense if we appreciate the notion of political technology from an anthropological perspective. Michael Eldridge relates the exchange between John Herman Randall, Jr. and Dewey in which…

In this paper, we sought to analyze if the internet and social networks usage could be impacting the constitution of an assertive political culture among young people in South Brazil. We hypothesize that although these new socialized agents are widespread among the young, apathy and disinterest in politics remain. To test our hypothesis, we…

This article investigates the relation between democracy and education in the context of radical student activism. Drawing upon participant observation and interviews with left-wing student activists in New Zealand in 2012 and 2015, it argues that a one-sided preoccupation with the student activists' public actions as attempts to unleash…

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…

This article draws on psychoanalytic theory to reconsider democracy, education and their relationship. The author argues for the pervasive presence of fantasmatic thinking in relation to both democracy and education in much media and policy discussion, which fuels our subjection to ideology through cruelly optimistic promises about the future…

An exploration is presented of how education policy and practice may be used to transform society. Specifically, connections are made between Paulo Freire's teaching strategies and radically democratic organizing. The connections are contextualized within the prefigurative tradition, which explores how the democratic process is central to…

In this article Henry Giroux discusses corporate school reform movement and its detrimental impact on the public school system such as the closure of public schools in cities such as, Philadelphia, Chicago and New York to make way for charter schools. Giroux argues that corporate school reform is not simply obsessed with measurements that degrade…

In theory, a strong democracy rests on robust citizen participation. The practice in most democracies is quite different. This gap presents a challenge, which can be narrowed by augmenting civic education to bring it up to date with the current information environment and thus give citizens the opportunity to participate. Robert Dahl's work on…

"In the Shadow of Authoritarianism" explores how American educators, in the wake of World War I, created a student-centered curriculum in response to authoritarian threats abroad. For most of the 20th century, American educators lived in the shadow of ideological, political, cultural, and existential threats (including Prussianism,…

The neo-liberal move to depoliticise and deregulate governance of public sectors by transferring them to the technocratic and administrative marketplace management endangers the political and democratic processes at all levels. It influences education and educational leadership at their very core: the purpose of education is shifting from…

This article provides new cross-national measures of two dimensions of democratic citizenship with great import for the study of democratic quality, expressive participation, and intolerance of diversity. Using data from the 2000-2001 wave of the World Values Survey, the paper present new ways to measure participation and intolerance, as well as a…