On the Necessity of Radical State Education: Democracy and the Common School

Abstract

There needs to be a tighter connection than is often the case between contested theories of democracy and debates about the viability and desirability of the common school. Because radical traditions of state education take that connection much more seriously, in both theory and practice, than most dominant accounts, it is to those alternative traditions that we might usefully look for guidance in the furtherance of explicitly democratic aspirations. In arguing for the importance of prefigurative practice, this paper proposes seven key analytic strands of radical democratic praxis. A common good animated by the affirmation of a reconfigured, inclusive ‘fraternity’ is preferred to the fearful, atomistic interdependence of neo-liberalism. Richard Pring’s paper on ‘The Common School’ (2007) not only helps us to understand some of its origins as a driving force in the English education system over the last six decades, but also foregrounds some of the key issues its advocates are currently wrestling with in a political context dominated by neo-liberal policy frameworks that have only the most tenuous of grips on commonalities, other than those of central prescription, incessant audit, compulsory choice and an increasingly sophisticated populism. The first, historical, undertaking is important, both because it implies we need to take history seriously and because in doing so its manner of philosophising demonstrates not only that, as H. D. Lewis would have it, ‘clarity is not enough’, but that clarity never could be. To attempt a philosophically engaging exploration of the challenges of ‘The Common School’ without a rich understanding of its cultural and historical placement would be inevitably and persistently disappointing. The second, more overtly philosophical, undertaking is important too and of a piece with Pring’s earlier championing and more recent defence of the comprehensive school. His brisk insistence that we go beyond the emergence of the common school from the dissatisfactions, manifest inadequacies and multiple injustices of the tripartite system of schooling in order to embrace political and moral arguments for ‘greater social justice and equality, respect of persons and preparation for citizenship