Democracy and Education in the 21st century

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Preface

In the past few decades, our society has witnessed unprecedented changes that give us the sense that we are witnessing a metamorphosis that is either interesting or disturbing, depending on which point of view you look at it from. The traditional conception of representative democracy is now facing a crisis of social legitimacy evidenced in many contexts around the planet by social protests demanding that human agency have greater control over matters that affect our lives. Some of these protests range from the Arab Springs (various, depending on each context) to the demands of 15-M in Spain, Occupy Wall Street in the United States, the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong or Iceland’s Saucepan Revolution among others. Many of these citizen protests denounce the concentration of economic power in large corporations, the increase in economic and social inequalities and the complicity of the political class with the hegemony of economic power. These demands are not only reactive, of denunciation, but also contain multiple specific proposals concerning which political and economic reforms can promote greater social justice and a strengthening of democracy.

At the same time, however, other emerging social movements also openly criticize globalization and the need to become entrenched again in nation-states. Most of these movements generate a nativist anti-immigration or anti-Islam discourse, achieving some significant changes such as the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union or the reinforcement of economic protectionism. These conquests are based on discourses that tend to connect emotionally with their followers by relativizing notions of truth and falsehood, reinforcing the differences between “ones” and “the others” and spreading an image of loss of national identity and sovereignty.

While the clamour for a deepening of democracy or xenophobic retrenchment are not new chapters in our history, what is new is the informational context in which these outcries are spread, as well as the use that these social movements make of internet and social networks. The fact that more information than ever before is available to everyone, and that ← 1 | 2 → the reliability of this information is questionable in many cases, inspires us to seek educational responses that provide citizens with a critical spirit and that enable schools to address existing social conflicts through a research process based on dialogue and cooperation. In this respect, the “classics” of education such as John Dewey or Paulo Freire, who have demanded the need for all citizens (workers, peasants, immigrants or refugees included) to experience democracy and empowerment, are more alive than ever. Having said that, however, many questions and debates arise between education professionals, academics and politicians on how to deepen democracy in educational centres, going beyond theory and discourse. When reference is made to the democratic school, this adjective connotes multiple interpretations according to the context and the interlocutor being referred to. From the DEMOSKOLE group, we understand that democracy in schools goes beyond participation in representative bodies and that we must advance in enhancing and strengthening this in educational centres, especially, in how it is lived and experienced in first person by all the agents that participate in the reality of education. To this effect, from the University of Girona and the University of Vic joint work began in early 2010 with the objective of identifying and analyzing specific cases in which schools and institutes are working on democracy and whether, in some cases, as Erik O. Wright would say, real utopias can be identified in the world of education. More explicitly, this can be understood as the institutionalization of practices that challenge neoliberal hegemony and promote emancipatory spaces. Despite being imperfect realities and practices, what unites these practices is the deepening and sustainability over time, beyond specific charismatic people who can lead these projects or educational centres.

The main objective of this book is, then, to describe how educational initiatives are emerging that are hopeful in terms of strengthening democracy in a real way in a convulsive world like the current one. Recently, some of the neoliberal educational reforms that have been implemented in many countries have fostered, in a macro-systemic way, the weakening of democratic practice in various ways. On one hand, they tend to devalue the structures of representative democracy in schools (school boards for example) to give more powers to the directors of educational centres while promoting training programs to manage schools as private businesses. On the other hand, some reforms have encouraged ← 2 | 3 → schools to be governed by an external council of selected or assigned citizens who have the authority to ensure that the school is accountable to the logic of the market and competition. While it is true that bureaucratization of public school in modern states has tended to defeat the purpose of community and family participation in schools; there is evidence of schools and educational contexts that have been able to institutionalize participation mechanisms in which students, families and the community have a voice and participate actively in the majority of the decisions of the centres. Sometimes, these experiences of direct democracy have had to be developed outside the public education system as a response movement and to not adapt to the rules of the system. At other times, teachers, families and students have been able to find gaps in the education system to create ad hoc structures that enable democratic participation in a sustainable and prolonged way. This is a challenge in a context where priority is given to the bureaucratisation of the system and decision-making according to accountability standards (based on standardized tests). For this reason, education professionals are needed with a critical capacity to know how to interpret the world they are in and with the ability to relinquish or share the power granted to them by the system with other agents, especially those who tend to have less of a voice.

In the first chapter, Feu, Serra, Canimas, Lázaro and Simó-Gil present a proposal for a theoretical framework for the analysis of democratic processes in educational centres that goes beyond describing who governs and how this power is shared and exercised. According to the authors, we must go beyond democratic governance to understand how democracy takes place in a specific space. Analysis of democracy in schools must be sufficiently thorough to identify other significant and related elements, including, for instance, how “the other” is recognized (people belonging to a cultural minority or counter-hegemonic group), how conditions of social inequality and equity are treated and, finally, how to promote a series of values and virtues that favour democratic participation. Schostak then analyzes the recent growth of cooperative schools in the United Kingdom that are governed by respect for the values of mutual aid, democracy, equality and solidarity in a capitalist and competitive context. It is interesting to observe, the author says, how schools can favour counter-democracy, understood as the research practice that students can undertake to identify the false truths promised by governments and delve ← 3 | 4 → deeper into one’s own truth. In the third chapter, we travel to Iceland where Jónsson describes in detail how just before the economic collapse of 2008 an educational reform was approved in which the neoliberal values of privatization and the emphasis on individualism were central. He also points out, though, how the economic crisis and the democratic context of the Saucepan Revolution stimulated a new curriculum in 2011, where greater emphasis is placed on the moral and community objectives of education. These community and moral values are fundamental in the next chapter where Fielding presents his concept of radical democracy. Educational centres should not only try to promote democracy but must also create spaces, and generate roles and relationships to make it possible. In this direction, he provides us with a typology of ways of interacting between adults and young people in educational contexts that either fosters more instrumental or market relationships, or civic relations and democratic comradeship, which favour egalitarian relationships between adults and young people. Taking the voice of the students into account is the axis of the chapter by Messiou where she describes, through illustrative examples, a series of innovative strategies that have been put into practice in school contexts in different countries that favour schools that are more inclusive. For his part, Collet analyzes the importance of including families and the community in school as well as students. The participation of all stakeholders must be intrinsic in schools and should be carried out through the three areas detailed in this chapter: inclusion, equity and empowerment. In turn, Prieto-Flores, Feu, Serra and Lázaro present case studies of schools that deepen democracy through institutionalizing new forms of governance. The authors examine in depth how some educational centres analyze or expand the existing representative bodies stipulated by law to give a voice to more people, especially individuals from traditionally excluded groups, or generate new ones. This chapter explains the strategies followed by these centres. Next, Simó-Gil and Tort analyze how democratic participation occurs in secondary schools. Specifically, they emphasize challenges facing secondary education in promoting democracy in four areas: tutoring and assemblies, a more community-based approach to the curriculum by fostering service learning, agreement on the spaces and times for learning and teacher participation in leadership and democratic management of the centre. To ← 4 | 5 → conclude, the last chapter shows how countries with a high degree of democratization of their societies address the training of their teachers.

We hope, therefore, that in this book you find relevant information that will help to reflect and debate on the deepening of democracy in schools; on the context of economic crisis and prosperity, the intrinsic values of the capitalist society in which we live and how they can be translated to education, but also on the contrary, how education can become a niche of resistance and change. This resistance and change involves giving visibility to strategies implemented by some primary and secondary schools that promote greater presence of the voices of both students and families in the decision-making and the practical and everyday life of the centres. These realities would not be possible without the excellent and anonymous work of the teachers, students and families that have the capacity to de-bureaucratize the educational space and to endow it with meaning. This book is a small tribute to the effort of these people to move towards a more humane and just education and society.

Jordi Feu and Òscar Prieto-Flores, University of Girona