To speak of democracy is often to speak less of a fact than of a hope. In his introduction to "Democracy in America," Alexis de Tocqueville admitted that '… in America I saw "more than" America; I sought the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices and its passions, in order to learn what…

From the first co-operative trust school at Reddish Vale in Manchester in 2006, the following decade would witness a remarkable growth of 'co-operative schools' in England, which at one point numbered over 850. This paper outlines the key development of democratic education by the co-operative schools network. It explains the approach to democracy…

Cognitive load theorists Paul Kirschner, John Sweller and Richard Clark argue that an array of inquiry-based pedagogies widely promoted in teacher preparation programmes are out of step with current cognitive science and should be eliminated for novice learners. According to these cognitive load theorists, inquiry-based pedagogies are likely to…

How should a liberal democratic society value knowledge and understanding, and does this valuation inform how we ought to reason about the justice of our educational institutions? In scholarly and public discourse, it is orthodox to argue that because educational institutions bring about various goods--goods of character such as wellbeing or…

This article explores the context for the accompanying suite of papers on creating and sustaining democratic spaces in education. Prompted by the centenary of Summerhill, the internationally famous democratic school founded in Suffolk, England, in 1921, by A.S. Neill, this collection of papers explores and broadens out the central questions at the…

This article is an exploration of a democratic school where the author spent several years researching and engaging with teachers and students while investigating the practice of Philosophy for/with Children (P4C) within Irish Educate Together schools. I offer an account of how teachers in these contexts seek to reconcile and harmonise their P4C…

Making liberal democratic values meaningful to study in schools is a more complex issue than being a question of turning values into explicit educational goals (Schleicher) or of curing a motivational deficit (Critchley). Since values seem to play an important role in the practices and commitments of people's everyday lives, values are calling for…

In his early lectures, published as "On the Future of Our Educational Institutions," Nietzsche attempts to expose contemporary education as overly extensive and being weakened, and as such, failing to turn pupils and students into men of culture. The aim of my paper is to present a comprehensive consideration of the present condition of…

The aim of this article is to demonstrate the respects in which private schools are unfair, and why they pose a threat to the well-being of not only those who are excluded on financial grounds, but to democratic equality and social cohesion in general. The shortcomings associated with relying on a form of educational provision that is merely…

This paper traces the changing status of the school as a counter culture in the anthropological and historical literature, in particular from the moment when compulsory mass schooling assumed the function of ideological state apparatus in the post-revolutionary 19th century West. It then focuses attention on what may be called the New School,…

Criticisms of autonomy-based justifications of toleration as an educational aim and as a political principle assume that personal autonomy can provide only a partial justification of toleration and that it serves as a basis for illiberal educational enforcements of a particular conception of the good. In this article, I defend an autonomy- and…

The study of literature needs a kind of justification that it currently does not appear to have. It needs a justification that can articulate its role in relation to democratic social and political values, and it needs to do so in ways that are able to distinguish those from the economic motives and the interests of science that also drive…

This article examines the concept of 'radical otherness' from the perspectives of John Rawls' political liberalism and Chantal Mouffe's agonistic pluralism, and studies the relevance of these approaches to contemporary citizenship education. In this context, the notion of 'radical otherness' refers to such ethical, political or religious doctrines…

The orthodox view on higher education financing is that students should bear some of the costs of attending and, where necessary, meet that cost through debt financing. New economic realities, including protracted economic slowdown and increasing austerity of the state with respect to the public funding of goods and services has meant that the…

In this article we address the issue of why democratic citizenship education should be incorporated more meaningfully into Islamic education discourses in formal institutions in the Arab and Muslim world. In the Arab and Muslim world civic and national education seem to be the dominant discourses. We argue that the latter discourses are inadequate…