The authors' 2019 book, "A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy," is their effort to make sense of the startling appearance of conspiracy charges enveloping American politics. In this article, they expand on that discussion of the ways conspiracy allegations threaten democracy, and describe the…

There has been a growing consensus among authorities, especially in the Trump era, that the U.S. is in an epistemological crisis that threatens its democracy. President Barack Obama, for example, in a recent "Atlantic" interview, said: "If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what's true from what's false, then by definition…

The current political climate is characterized by an alarming pattern of global democratic regression driven by authoritarian populist leaders who deploy vast misinformation campaigns. These offensives are successful when the majority of the population lack skills that would allow them to think critically about information in the political sphere,…

As the smoke cleared from around the United States Capitol in January, the phrase "conspiracy theory" quickly became an epithet. However, history shows us that conspiracies do exist and have altered the course of history. Citizens, therefore, need the skills and dispositions to examine and intelligently assess the merits of conspiracies.…

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…

Philosophy for Children (henceforth P4C) is a program and a pedagogy for teaching philosophy in k-12 school that was first developed by Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp. The P4C approach is generally presented as a valuable form of education for democratic citizenship. This relationship is so obvious that it often remains underdeveloped: P4C…

This article explores relationships of youth power in a set of threads leading to the potential of today's youth activism to combat the climate crisis. Following an introduction featuring Sweden's Greta Thunberg, the threads are these: First from an American context is history of youth development, with one emphasis on the construction of…

To engage in critical readings of literary texts, in ways that are also ethical and compassionate, requires readers to enter emotionally and imaginatively into the complex, textual worlds of others as they are portrayed in stories. Such stories have the potential to create new worlds that make visible our collective being in ways that allow us to…

Librarians, who have long promoted the criticality of information literacy, were quick to identify a role for themselves in confronting the challenges of mis/disinformation through library instruction. Nevertheless, little research has been done to examine discipline faculty's perspectives on mis/disinformation or the extent to which they are…

In this article, we discuss the rise of what we call ABC schools: Anything but Civics. These are STEM/STEAM schools and programs that orient their focus around teaching science, technology, engineering, and math subjects (sometimes adding the arts). We trouble the tendency toward individualistic and narrowly economic orientations in these programs…

Our current political situation and the demographic realities of our country require Political Science educators to be more intentional about integrating Asian Pacific American (APA) histories and experiences in the Political Science curriculum. By including the multifaceted ways in which APAs have and continue to participate in American civil…

Growing polarization in European societies has changed not only political landscapes but also public debates about the past, which has, in turn, had an impact on the way history is taught and talked about in schools. This article explores how these trends are experienced by history educators across Europe and asks which issues history educators…

Recent decades have revealed a gap between promises and realities of accountability in education governance, as well as further afield. Despite efforts identifying and analysing cautionary tales of accountability interventions, a systematic approach to support progressive improvements for managing accountability in complex education systems is yet…

This article suggests that John Dewey's "Democracy and Education" does not describe education in an existing society, but it conveys a utopia, in the sense coined by Mannheim: utopian thought aims at instigating actions towards the transformation of reality, intending to attain a better world in the future. Today's readers of Dewey (his…

This paper revisits "Democracy and Education" with the purpose of recuperating Dewey's understanding of the nature and importance of "discipline" and conforming education to the "interest of the child," two parts of Dewey's work (and therefore of progressive education) widely misunderstood by both Dewey's critics and…