This chapter explores the duties of college teachers to teach and mentor undergraduate students. It argues that teaching and mentoring are currently suboptimal because college teachers are not trained to do either, and have little incentive to improve. The result is that students emerge from college suboptimally prepared both to participate productively in the economy and to participate reasonably and responsibly as democratic citizens. This is a cost to them, and to the public good. Reform is needed. But the second half of the chapter argues that, even absent reform, and even absent improvement from their colleagues, individual college teachers have stringent responsibilities to improve their own teaching and mentoring.

Whether patriotism has a valuable part to play in the educational system of a democratic society is now a highly contentious matter. This chapter argues that it does, principally because such a society is a kind of cooperative practice that requires its members to enact, enforce, and – in most cases – obey the laws that govern their self-governing polity. Democracies rely on rules, and especially the rule of law, to provide the reasonably clear expectations necessary to coordinate public activities and to overcome collective-action problems. By encouraging citizens to set aside personal advantage and play a cooperative part in democratic life, patriotism contributes to the public spirit essential to democracy. For that reason, promoting patriotic attitudes is a worthy aim of democratic education.

This chapter addresses Aristotle’s conception of the civic purposes of education, how the education he proposes would serve those purposes, his stance toward democracy and democratic education, and the compatibility of the education he proposes with a democratic society and system of government. It argues that his educational proposals aim to facilitate a partnership of all citizens in living the best kind of life and are thus focused on cultivating moral and intellectual virtues and educating diverse children together with a view to nurturing civic friendship. It concludes that Aristotle defends forms of shared governance in the common interest that would qualify as limited forms of democracy and that the education he proposes is recognizably democratic. Despite their elitist limitations, his works offer significant resources for understanding democracy and democratic education, most notably his conception of the role of common schools in promoting civic friendship and shared governance.

Education professionals regularly confront challenging ethical questions in the course of their work. Recently, education scholars and practitioners have embraced normative case studies – realistic accounts of the complex ethical dilemmas of educational practice and policy – as a key tool both for theorizing the ethical dimension of education work and for supporting the development of education professionals as moral agents. This chapter zooms in on the second, pedagogical aim of the normative case study and makes the case that this approach to professional education is best understood as a form of democratic education. Through careful facilitation and a structured discussion protocol, the normative case study approach: (i) allows participants to discuss ethical dilemmas that arise in their work in relations of democratic equality, fostering their development of moral sensitivity and moral agency; and (ii) supports participants in learning to sustain dialogue across reasonable disagreement.

This chapter reviews contemporary discussions in political philosophy and educational theory about the character of children’s rights and their importance to debates about the character of democratic education. It focuses on five areas in which there is contestation about the interpretation and implications of children’s rights: (i) issues about the appropriate content of democratic education; (ii) issues about children’s rights of access to education and the degree to which educational inequalities are acceptable; (ii) issues about the kind of control parents should exercise over the kind of education children receive; (iv) issues about the degree to which schools are themselves sites of democratic activity; and (v) issues about how educational institutions should be designed or reformed in order respect the educational rights of children.

Within liberal societies, citizens endorse a range of religious, moral, and philosophical views (e.g., Buddhism and utilitarianism). Despite this doctrinal diversity, John Rawls’ account of political liberalism holds that there is a form of democratic equality that is realizable by all citizens. Citizens can be equally politically autonomous if they enjoy equal political power and justify the exercise of that power with public reasons. A political liberal education for democratic citizenship would teach students how to participate in political decision-making, and how to use public reasons when helping to decide fundamental political questions. Political liberalism also can accommodate diverse educational options for families, but this accommodation is limited by political liberalism’s concern for the future political autonomy of students. This concern distinguishes the political liberal account from the “convergence” account of public justification. Unlike political liberalism, the convergence account fails to respect adequately the future political autonomy of students.

This chapter illuminates the irreplaceable value of poetry in cultivating a cosmopolitan and democratic imagination. The authors contend that poetry evokes unanticipated or overlooked ideas, emotions, and possibilities; it provokes people to look beyond their settled views. Poetry uniquely fuels their ability to engage new thoughts, values, and practices. This ever-renewing quality of mind can, in turn, help people reimagine the nature and value of education continuously as circumstances and the needs they call out evolve. The authors suggest that these imaginative capacities are significant given the cosmopolitan and democratic challenges, and prospects, generated by an intensifying process of political, economic, and cultural globalization. The chapter features a reading of Walt Whitman’s well-known epic poem, “Song of Myself” (first published in 1855), which the authors show both articulates and enacts the most profound promise in a cosmopolitan and democratic imagination.

Rabindranath Tagore was a progressive educational philosopher whose ideas were far ahead of his time but are most relevant to the contemporary challenges of today. The first Asian Nobel Laureate, his cosmopolitan, democratic ideas, and experiments in education were pioneering. But he was primarily known as a literary genius, and his image as a mystical poet from the East obscured his educational vision and philosophy in the West. The purpose of education was to him the development of critical consciousness and of freedom not only from poverty and oppression, but of the mind from ignorance and prejudice. Strongly against British colonial rule he, nevertheless, loved English literature and music and admired Western science and technological developments. Although proud of India’s glorious past, he was strongly opposed to chauvinistic nationalism and imagined a world of unity of all peoples, a synthesis of the East and West. He built a university which would represent his international liberalism.

This chapter attempts to answer two questions. First, what does democratic education informed by critical theory minimally entail? Second, what does it take for a critical democratic education to succeed? The chapter argues that attention to local contexts is a necessary aspect for developing critical and democratic virtues. The chapter first sets the stage by offering a sketch of both democratic education and critical theory. The following section draws out a common occluding characteristic of both democratic education and critical education, namely, their preoccupation with national and global scopes. The next two sections draw on the work of Iris Murdoch and John McDowell to argue that cultivating moral attention to one’s local setting must be seen as an essential aspect of critical democratic education. The chapter concludes by offering brief educational applications and responses to objections related to objectivity and the threat of parochialism.

The current retributive system of school punishment conflicts with the aims of democratic education because it impedes the cultivation of essential democratic values and capabilities. To be legitimate, however, school punishment in democratic societies ought to align with, or at least not impede, the aims of democratic education. This suggests that punishment should be consistent with the communicative and inclusive nature of democracy and support the cultivation of essential democratic capabilities. Restorative justice provides such a model of school punishment by prioritizing communication and inclusion, facilitating the cultivation of democratic capabilities, and legitimizing punishment as a means of communicating remorse instead of inflicting retribution to wrongdoers. The authors argue that for school punishment to align with and support the aims of democratic education, it must shift from the retributive justice model currently employed in most schools to a restorative justice model.

This chapter explores the conceptual, educational and political challenges involved in articulating a postcolonial perspective on democratic education. It understands democracy as a universal aspiration, a critical practice with a deliberative range that accommodates particular, local contexts. Colonial rule has both provoked and rejected demands for self-determination, while rendering democracy difficult to establish in newly independent states after formal decolonization. Following a description of colonial education, a currently influential yet problematic approach to decolonial education is considered. While some sense might be made of the notions of postcolonial knowledge and epistemology, the decolonialist position – at its most extreme – is epistemologically unviable. The chapter ends by outlining a perspective on postcolonial democratic education as a form of liberal education, universal in some shared features, that needs to resist the universal presence of neoliberal capitalism as a recent form of coloniality that is universally inimical to both education and democracy.

What kind of characters might develop in a flourishing democratic culture? What citizen virtues are needed to safeguard democracy against its ever-present enemies? This chapter explores John Dewey’s answers to these questions and illuminates their bearing on his educational philosophy. It argues that Dewey is important not just because of his insights into “progressive” schooling, but also because of his affirming vision of the educative and enriching quality of democratic life. In our day, his conception of education for and by democracy can still serve as a vital antidote to democratic disenchantment.

In this chapter, Hannah Arendt is characterized as a “pedagogue of the public realm” and, at the same time, as an antipode to John Dewey and his ideas of democracy and education. Arendt’s understanding of the political sphere – the so-called “political” – is illuminated and questioned in its proximity to political thoughts of Jacques Rancière. The elementary political dimension of education is asserted in line with, or even despite, Arendt’s insights and skepticism.

Public education is crucial to the health of democracy. Recent educational initiatives in many countries, however, focus narrowly on science and technology, neglecting the arts and humanities. They also focus on internalization of information, rather than on the formation of the student’s critical and imaginative capacities. This chapter argues that such a narrow focus is dangerous for democracy’s future. Drawing on the ideas of Rabindranath Tagore, the chapter proposes a three‐part model for the development of young people’s capabilities through education, focusing on critical thinking, world citizenship, and imaginative understanding.

Debate and deliberation are two commonly promoted strategies for democratic education. Both strategies are designed to unearth different points of view and then engage in reason-giving and argumentation; in other words, they help students to recognize pluralism. When done well, both also model inquiry and deepen understanding about the issues being investigated. In this chapter, we discuss the theoretical justification for each and show how the adversarial aspect of debate engages a different set of democratic skills than the more collaborative approach of deliberation. These differences require teachers to make judgments about how best to use these strategies in the classroom. We conclude by addressing some critiques of these strategies and discuss how alternative discussion designs might overcome some of the limitations of deliberation and debate.

The work of Paulo Freire has had an enduring impact on the development of progressive, democratic pedagogies around the world. Freire’s ideas on democracy emerged from his experiences with impoverished communities in Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s. For Freire, democratic education is a part of the process of humanization: becoming more fully human through transformative, critical, dialogical reflection and action. From a Freirean perspective, democracy is not just a form of government but a mode of being: a distinctive approach to living, with others, in a world that is always dynamically in the making. Democratic life demands a willingness to live uncertainties and an acknowledgment of our incompleteness. Freire delineates a number of key democratic virtues, including humility, openness, tolerance, and a willingness to listen. He argues against both authoritarian and “anything goes” pedagogical orientations. This chapter discusses Freire’s views on democracy and education in the light of his wider ontological, epistemological, and ethical position, and considers the ongoing significance of his ideas in the twenty-first century.