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Toward Schools as Sites of Radical Democratization: New Possibilities for Democratic Education

Stewart Riddle

University of Southern Queensland, Australia

Introduction

Schools as they are currently constituted in many capitalist, liberal-democratic nations, including the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and Australia, are not particularly democratic places. Several decades of neoliberal and neoconservative education policymaking have sought to replace the public good of public education-including its collective commitment to improving social justice and equity outcomes for all young people-with the market logics of choice, competition, and individual gain (Connell, 2013), in which schools compete for market share and students are rendered as consumers (Giroux, 2016). However, it need not be so. Indeed, Woods (2011) argued that "the idea that private business, markets and the role of people as consumers constitute the preferred model for all kinds of services and human activity is past its sell-by date" (p. 3). Now is the time for schools to become sites of radical democratization instead of continuing to support the reproduction of existing social and economic inequalities.

Schooling has long held the remit to provide young people with the knowledge and skills to meaningfully contribute to society, not simply as consumers and workers producing profit for a capitalist class, nor as entrepreneurial neoliberal subjects maximizing their personal brands and online influencing statistics via social media. Instead, the promise of schooling is in its potential to nurture young people to become critically engaged and fully participating community members who can critically and creatively contribute to the collective struggle for peace, inclusivity, and sustainable futures. Democracy should be at the center of the struggle for education (Apple, 2011), through the commitment to a collective ethics of responsibility for each other (Gutmann, 1999) within local and global communities.

There can be no doubt that students in school classrooms around the world right now are facing a future of increasing uncertainty and crisis, in which complex and interconnected challenges will shape the coming decades (Riddle, 2022). These include the rapidly growing effects of the global climate catastrophe, with its attendant ecological systems collapse, water and other resource scarcity, and the intensification of catastrophic weather events such as fires, floods, and droughts. Further, social and economic inequality are on the rise across the world (Schostak, 2019) as the corporate oligarchs and elite ruling class continue to get richer while more children are living in poverty than ever before (Dorling, 2019). Added to the mix are geopolitical instability and conflict, rising authoritarianism and the rapid decay of once-trusted public institutions and societal bonds through the pernicious effects of extreme right-wing populism, fake news, post-truth conspiracies, and an increasingly antagonistic public discourse (Mouffe, 2019).

Within this context of increasing uncertainty and crisis, this chapter considers schools as potential sites of radical democratization in the promotion of peace and democracy. This is a direct and immediate challenge for educators and education across the globe working in formal and informal education settings, but especially so in schools, given that "democracy is increasingly viewed as a dangerous concept and an even more dangerous practice" (Riddle & Apple, 2019, p. 3). Schools are uniquely placed to contribute to building new forms of sustainable and engaged democratic modes of being and belonging together in more peaceful and inclusive ways.

Of course, the concept of democratic education can be understood as a floating signifier, both as a normative aspiration and contested idea (Riddle, 2023; Sant, 2019) in its use by progressive and conservative groups alike. Biesta (2010) warned that "what is carried out under and in the name of equality, democracy, and emancipation often results in its opposite in that it reproduces inequality and keeps people in their place" (p. 55). For example, the Deweyan (1899, 1916, 1937) tradition taken up by progressive educators around the world has established democratic education as a core requirement for social becoming and belonging, which is firmly committed to the struggle to make societies more inclusive and peaceful. At the same time, conservatives within liberal-democratic societies well understand that a thin version of democratic education, usually embedded within civics and citizenship curriculum, plays an important role in apprenticing young people into the mechanisms of representative democracy in maintenance of the social, economic, and political status quo. For example, in their book on democratic education, Beane and Apple (2007) observed that:

Claims for democracy could be used to shore up movements for civil rights, expanded voting privileges, and protection of free speech. However, democracy is also used to further the causes of free market economies and school-choice vouchers, and to defend the dominance of major political parties. (p. 6)

Additionally, there is a tension in the very concept of democratic education, which necessarily presupposes a hierarchical relationship, in which teachers either seek to emancipate (via progressive and critical pedagogies) or inculcate (via conservative and traditional, didactic pedagogies) students through school curriculum, which is itself inherently undemocratic in design and delivery (Friedrich et al., 2010). Instead, Rancière (1991, 2015) posed that we could start from a radically different point for democratic education, in which there must be an equality of individual intelligences among teachers and students, which would subvert the stultification of schooling, regardless of the pedagogical ideologies and teaching methods at hand-progressive, conservative, or somewhere in between. For Biesta (2010), this is answered not through the commitment to "equality, democracy, and emancipation, but how we are committed to these concepts and how we express and articulate this commitment" (p. 57). It is very easy to espouse such principles without embedding them into the political and sociocultural fabric of institutions and practices.

Schooling is deeply connected to the development of communication, most obviously through languages, humanities, and social sciences curriculum, but also more generally in terms of schools being sites of formative engagements with difference in sociocultural perspectives, knowledges, and histories of a diverse array of people. This has long been a key strength of public education, which has served a public good of bringing young people together from all walks of life into a public space, living and learning together. As such, the continuing attacks on public education across much of the world are a cause for substantial concern, given the deliberate and direct erosion of social bonds, diversity, and belonging that arise from young people spending time together in such spaces (Aly et al., 2022).

Despite some examples of education policymaking that seeks to engage with notions of the public good, social justice and more collaborative and relational ways of working (e.g., Larsen et al., 2022; Woods et al., 2021), there has been an overwhelming and persistent atomization of neoliberal policymaking in education and other public spheres in places like Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. This has seen the retreat of governments from public policymaking for the public good, and an increased stratification and winner-takes-all approach to education, work, and cultural life (Apple et al., 2022). This has a detrimental impact on the opportunities to develop rich encounters with difference and plurality for young people and has a flow-on to the communication and education implications for promoting peace and democracy.

The Problematic Role of Schooling in Democratic Education

During the twentieth century, the massification of public schooling through much of the world saw societies make a commitment to the education of all young people, particularly those from marginalized and disenfranchised backgrounds who had been previously denied educational access and opportunities. However, there are some remaining exceptions to the global increase in educational access and opportunities, such as the ongoing efforts to increase participation for girls in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, sub-continental Southern Asia, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and other parts of the Middle East. Sant (2019) argued that "the most powerful education for democracy policies are mass schooling policies that are at the roots of most liberal democracies and have had a strong influence in how education is conceptualized worldwide" (p. 682). Despite the opening of access and opportunity through the massification of schooling, there persists an antidemocratic tendency for schools to teach "conformity to the social, cultural, and occupational hierarchy" (Aronowitz, 2008, p. 19), which aligns with neoconservative and neoliberal ideals of schooling as preparing the future workforce and compliant citizens and consumers for the market.

By leaving the exploitation of labor and the stultification of individual and collective agency unchallenged, schooling continues to be entangled with the toxic logic of neoliberalism, which seeks to drive all human activity via the promotion of privatization, competition, and choice (Connell, 2013). As such, schools remain part of the problem....