Teaching in and for Democracy

Abstract

Teaching in a democracy must have some special defining feature, some specific and manifest demands, but what are they, and how would we recognize them when we see them. What does it mean concretely--and distinctly--then, to be an excellent teacher in and for a democratic society? What makes a democratic classroom unmistakable? Charles Dickens published Hard Times in London in 1854, over 150 years ago. In the opening paragraphs, Dickens describes with raging fidelity the first harsh lesson drummed into the heads of unsuspecting new teachers: Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, Sir! ... The speaker, and the schoolmaster ... swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim. (p. 1) This fraught description of nineteenth century English schooling sounds weirdly resonant, oddly close at hand, a bit like the school-world teachers face here and now in twenty-first century America. You might be forgiven for imagining that education and schooling in contemporary society would be remarkably different from the tyrannical classrooms of Victorian England, or that education and schooling in a democracy would look and feel different from education in a monarchy, or education under a dictatorship. It is likely that school leaders even in fascist Germany, communist Albania, medieval Saudi Arabia, or apartheid South Africa agreed that their students should be well-behaved, stay away from drugs and crime, do their homework, study hard, and master the subject matters. We can easily find common ground here. Teaching in a democracy must have some special defining feature, some specific and manifest demands, but what are they, and how would we recognize them when we see them? Surely many teachers in those other societies worked hard, struggled with management and discipline issues, brought energy and commitment and concern for the young with them into their classrooms, and most of us do, too. Those systems and schools sometimes produced great scientists and artists and athletes, as many of our schools do. What does it mean concretely--and distinctly--then, to be an excellent teacher in and for a democratic society? What makes a democratic classroom unmistakable? Democracy is a special form of associative living in which people make the decisions that affect their lives, and teaching in a democratic society offers teachers unique challenges and opportunities. Democracy, after all, is built on a particularly precious and fragile ideal: every human being is of infinite and incalculable value, each a unique intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, moral, and creative force, each born free and equal in dignity and rights, endowed with reason and conscience, and deserving, then, a community of solidarity, a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood, recognition and respect. Children and their families are the central and natural concern of teachers, but any honest and moral accounting of the lives of students sweeps us immediately into the wider world, and opens our eyes to the grinding effects of poverty, the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots both here and around the globe, the horrors of war, and the gaping abyss of environmental catastrophe. We cannot pretend to be child-centered, after all, and at the same time ignore the concentric circles of context that both shape our students' lives here and now, and illuminate the possibilities and perils they will face in the future. …