The March Is Not Over Yet: A Different Education for the 21st Century
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Selma details, the March played a critical role in the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.]]>
Author Archives: Harry Boyte
Civic Agency and Executive Function: An Emerging Conversation
A conversation is just beginning between practitioners and theorists of civic agency and scholars and educators promoting educational experiences which develop Executive function. It may have large potential.
Civic Agency
Today, most people feel powerless to do much of anything other than complain or protest about public problems from the local traffic sign to racial profiling, from school bullying to global warming. Young people in low income and minority communities especially feel powerless. The work of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, which I founded more than 20 years ago at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute, has sought from the outset to develop theory and practice of effective self-organizing civic action -- what can be called civic agency, or the public work framework of citizenship -- to help overcome the gap between concern and capacity to act.
We began Public Achievement (PA) in 1991 to teach young people the self-organizing approaches to change and the larger view of democracy which I learned as a college student in the civil rights movement. In Public Achievement, teams of young people work on issues of their choice in real world settings, schools or communities. They meet through the year, coached by adults, often college students, who help them develop achievable goals, learn to navigate their local environment, and learn everyday political skills and political concepts. Public Achievement is an example of what is called "civic studies," an interdisciplinary action-oriented field focused on agency and citizens as co-creators.
St. Bernard's Elementary School, a Catholic school in a low-income and working class neighborhood in St. Paul, was the early incubator. There, PA became the centerpiece of the school's culture in the early and mid-1990s through the leadership of then principal Dennis Donovan. He wanted young people to learn everyday skills of making change and he saw all forms of work in the school, including teaching, as having potentially public, empowering dimensions. Public Achievement has since spread to several hundred communities and schools in the United States and more than two dozen countries.
At Augsburg College where the Center for Democracy and Citizenship is now merged into the Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship, the Special Education pre-service program adapted Public Achievement as a response to the challenge to Special Education emerging within the field, as well from outside critics including parents. Special Education students are often segregated from mainstream students because they are identified with a disability deemed to interfere with educational achievements.
Those placed in Special Education, which include disproportionate numbers of poor and minority children, often suffer lifetimes of trouble with mental illness, unemployment and incarceration.
A growing number of scholars and educators argue that the problem is school culture rather than individual young people. As Susan O'Connor, head of Special Education program at Augsburg puts it, "Special Education still uses a medical model where teachers try to 'fix' kids." The Special Education pre-service program adapted Public Achievement because it wanted to shift to an empowerment model instead.
Three years of testing Public Achievement in Fridley Middle School near Minneapolis produced dramatic results. "Problem" students, mostly low-income and minority, became public leaders on issues like reduction of school bullying, promoting healthy lifestyles, and preventing animal cruelty. They developed working relationships with school administrators, community leaders, elected officials, and gained attention of media like Minnesota Public Radio.
Executive Function
We have begun to think about ways in which civic agency in PA fosters skills of "Executive Function." Executive Function, akin to "self-regulation" or "self-control," is a concept emerging from thousands of studies in brain development. It has been shown to be highly relevant to what makes for young people's academic and social success. Phil Zelazo, a scientist with the Institute for Child Development (ICD) at the University of Minnesota and a pioneer in the field, defines it as "brain processes involved in goal-directed modulation of attention, thought, emotion, motivation and action."
Though connections between Executive Function, civic agency, and democratic society have been rarely made explicit, they are beginning to appear. Zelazo and Stephanie Carlson, another scientist at the ICD, contributed to a White Paper for the launch of a movement called "Civic Science" at the National Science Foundation in October, 2014, based on a view of science as a set of practices and values essential for democratic society like cooperation, free inquiry, and the testing of ideas in practice. At the ICD symposium described in my last blog, Carlson argued that Executive Function is "about democracy," based on choice. It brings back the view of children as agents of their learning. Programs which increase Executive Function "engage students' passionate interests," "cultivate joy, pride, and self-confidence," and "foster social bonding."
Deepening the Connections
Skills of Executive Function clearly overlap with capacities developed through Public Achievement. According to observers, at Fridley PA impacted students' self-image, confidence, sense of agency, pride, and relationships. "They believed that they were more capable than they had ever thought they were in the past," said Alyssa Blood, who wrote her Master's thesis on Public Achievement. "The students believe that they can be positive citizens and that the people who believed differently about them are wrong." Many students express pride and confidence. "I feel more mature and happy," said one. Blood observes that participants "began to express feelings of power beyond the realm of Public Achievement." Another described his feeling that "we can change a lot of things in the world [like] Martin Luther King did."
Students developed civic identities and new habits and skills such as relationship-building, negotiation, compromise, planning, organizing, and public speaking. Public Achievement also developed agency of the teachers, including new relationships with families. Since the success of PA in Fridley Middle School, the Special Education program at Augsburg changed its curriculum so that all pre-service students coach in more than a dozen Public Achievement sites.
Both civic agency and Executive Function educators and scholars are focused on developing the agency of young people and their capacities to shape the world around them.
And both raise basic questions about the pedagogies and purposes of today's education.
Civic Agency
Today, most people feel powerless to do much of anything other than complain or protest about public problems from the local traffic sign to racial profiling, from school bullying to global warming. Young people in low income and minority communities especially feel powerless. The work of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, which I founded more than 20 years ago at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute, has sought from the outset to develop theory and practice of effective self-organizing civic action -- what can be called civic agency, or the public work framework of citizenship -- to help overcome the gap between concern and capacity to act.
We began Public Achievement (PA) in 1991 to teach young people the self-organizing approaches to change and the larger view of democracy which I learned as a college student in the civil rights movement. In Public Achievement, teams of young people work on issues of their choice in real world settings, schools or communities. They meet through the year, coached by adults, often college students, who help them develop achievable goals, learn to navigate their local environment, and learn everyday political skills and political concepts. Public Achievement is an example of what is called "civic studies," an interdisciplinary action-oriented field focused on agency and citizens as co-creators.
St. Bernard's Elementary School, a Catholic school in a low-income and working class neighborhood in St. Paul, was the early incubator. There, PA became the centerpiece of the school's culture in the early and mid-1990s through the leadership of then principal Dennis Donovan. He wanted young people to learn everyday skills of making change and he saw all forms of work in the school, including teaching, as having potentially public, empowering dimensions. Public Achievement has since spread to several hundred communities and schools in the United States and more than two dozen countries.
At Augsburg College where the Center for Democracy and Citizenship is now merged into the Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship, the Special Education pre-service program adapted Public Achievement as a response to the challenge to Special Education emerging within the field, as well from outside critics including parents. Special Education students are often segregated from mainstream students because they are identified with a disability deemed to interfere with educational achievements.
Those placed in Special Education, which include disproportionate numbers of poor and minority children, often suffer lifetimes of trouble with mental illness, unemployment and incarceration.
A growing number of scholars and educators argue that the problem is school culture rather than individual young people. As Susan O'Connor, head of Special Education program at Augsburg puts it, "Special Education still uses a medical model where teachers try to 'fix' kids." The Special Education pre-service program adapted Public Achievement because it wanted to shift to an empowerment model instead.
Three years of testing Public Achievement in Fridley Middle School near Minneapolis produced dramatic results. "Problem" students, mostly low-income and minority, became public leaders on issues like reduction of school bullying, promoting healthy lifestyles, and preventing animal cruelty. They developed working relationships with school administrators, community leaders, elected officials, and gained attention of media like Minnesota Public Radio.
Executive Function
We have begun to think about ways in which civic agency in PA fosters skills of "Executive Function." Executive Function, akin to "self-regulation" or "self-control," is a concept emerging from thousands of studies in brain development. It has been shown to be highly relevant to what makes for young people's academic and social success. Phil Zelazo, a scientist with the Institute for Child Development (ICD) at the University of Minnesota and a pioneer in the field, defines it as "brain processes involved in goal-directed modulation of attention, thought, emotion, motivation and action."
Though connections between Executive Function, civic agency, and democratic society have been rarely made explicit, they are beginning to appear. Zelazo and Stephanie Carlson, another scientist at the ICD, contributed to a White Paper for the launch of a movement called "Civic Science" at the National Science Foundation in October, 2014, based on a view of science as a set of practices and values essential for democratic society like cooperation, free inquiry, and the testing of ideas in practice. At the ICD symposium described in my last blog, Carlson argued that Executive Function is "about democracy," based on choice. It brings back the view of children as agents of their learning. Programs which increase Executive Function "engage students' passionate interests," "cultivate joy, pride, and self-confidence," and "foster social bonding."
Deepening the Connections
Skills of Executive Function clearly overlap with capacities developed through Public Achievement. According to observers, at Fridley PA impacted students' self-image, confidence, sense of agency, pride, and relationships. "They believed that they were more capable than they had ever thought they were in the past," said Alyssa Blood, who wrote her Master's thesis on Public Achievement. "The students believe that they can be positive citizens and that the people who believed differently about them are wrong." Many students express pride and confidence. "I feel more mature and happy," said one. Blood observes that participants "began to express feelings of power beyond the realm of Public Achievement." Another described his feeling that "we can change a lot of things in the world [like] Martin Luther King did."
Students developed civic identities and new habits and skills such as relationship-building, negotiation, compromise, planning, organizing, and public speaking. Public Achievement also developed agency of the teachers, including new relationships with families. Since the success of PA in Fridley Middle School, the Special Education program at Augsburg changed its curriculum so that all pre-service students coach in more than a dozen Public Achievement sites.
Both civic agency and Executive Function educators and scholars are focused on developing the agency of young people and their capacities to shape the world around them.
And both raise basic questions about the pedagogies and purposes of today's education.
Civic Agency and Executive Function: An Emerging Conversation
A conversation is just beginning between practitioners and theorists of civic agency and scholars and educators promoting educational experiences which develop Executive Function. It may have large potential.
Civic Agency and Executive Function: An Emerging Conversation
A conversation is just beginning between practitioners and theorists of civic agency and scholars and educators promoting educational experiences which develop Executive Function. It may have large potential.
Civic Agency and Executive Function: An Emerging Conversation
Walker’s "Drafting Error" and the Democratic Promise of Executive Function
Walker's attack has traction for the same reason extremist forces have been able to attack education across the country. The purpose and cultural logic of education have shrunk, creating vulnerabilities.
Walker’s "Drafting Error" and the Democratic Promise of Executive Function
Walker's attack has traction for the same reason extremist forces have been able to attack education across the country. The purpose and cultural logic of education have shrunk, creating vulnerabilities.
Walker’s "Drafting Error" and the Democratic Promise of Executive Function
Walker’s "Drafting Error" and the Democratic Promise of Executive Function
I spoke on February 5th at a symposium of the University of Minnesota's Institute of Child Development, held this year on the topic, "The Achievement Gap: Why Executive Function Matters." My charge was to connect the science of what is called "executive function," which Phil Zelazo, a leader in the field, defines as "brain processes involved in...goal-directed modulation of attention, thought, emotion, motivation and action," akin to self-control and self-direction, and civic science, a movement launched with support of the National Science Foundation last October in which Zelazo participated. Civic science seeks to revitalize scientific values and practices such as cooperation, open inquiry, and the test of ideas in practice as wellsprings of a democratic culture.
The timing of the symposium dramatized wider implications. "Executive function" can be a powerful strand of the democracy movement which is stirring - and a resource for countering a growing attack.
The symposium came two days after likely presidential candidate Wisconsin governor Scott Walker proposed a cut of $300 million in the 26 campuses of the University of Wisconsin. Hidden in Walker's budget was a proposal to focus on "meeting the state work force needs" and to delete what is called the Wisconsin Idea, the conviction that the university's mission is "to educate people and improve the human condition" and "to serve and stimulate society."
Walker's substitution - which he described as a "drafting error," though an internal email shows it was intentional - radically shrinks higher education's purpose. As the New York Times editorialized, "It was as if a trade school agenda were substituted for the idea of a university."
But Walker's attack has traction for the same reason extremist forces have been able to attack education across the country. The purpose and cultural logic of education have shrunk, creating vulnerabilities.
Today education is "delivered" to students seen as passive customers. This view has replaced the idea that students are agents and co-creators of their learning, as well as the idea that the purpose of education is not only to prepare students for individual success but most importantly to be contributors to a democratic society. The delivery paradigm produces no ownership. As economist Lawrence Summers, no champion of participatory democracy, nonetheless once usefully quipped, "Nobody washes their rented car."
In contrast, as Stephanie Carlson, another scientist in the symposium, put it, executive function is "about democracy." It brings back the view of children as agents of their learning. Young people learn self-control by having rich opportunities (including old-fashioned play), to practice self-directed, goal-oriented action based on making choices.
A 2011 overview of research by Adele Diamond and Kathleen Lee in the journal Science amplifies. Programs that increase executive function skills, they write, "engage students' passionate interests," "cultivate joy, pride, and self-confidence," and "foster social bonding." These cultural and agency-enhancing dimensions of education are about democracy but rarely described that way these days. Some history can help.
The Institute for Child Development, America's oldest such institute, was founded in 1925 during the period when the movement for democratic science, described in Andrew Jewett's Science, Democracy, and the American University, was in full swing. This was the era when public and land grant universities like Wisconsin were known as "democracy's colleges." The mission deleted from Walker's budget has a revealing descriptor. It involved not only "serving" but "stimulating" society. This meant being "part of" society. Lotus Coffman, then president of the University of Minnesota, described UMN as "social in origin and in nature...represent[ing] the soul hunger and the spiritual expression of the common people" and "the safeguard of democracy."
More insight into the temper of these times and the meaning of "democracy" is gained from the philosophy of Alain Locke, the first African American Rhodes Scholar. The year the ICD was founded, 1925, Locke published The New Negro, the framework of the cultural movement called the Harlem Renaissance. The book passionately challenges the view of African Americans as passive. "The Negro...resents being spoken for as a social ward or minor...the sick man of American Democracy." Locke called for the African American to become "a conscious contributor...a collaborator and participant in American civilization."
Locke also theorized democracy, advancing the view which I learned as a young man in the freedom movement from Martin Luther King and others (King once compared Locke to Plato and Aristotle). "If we are going to have effective democracy in America, we must have the democratic spirit," he told a group of settlement house workers. That requires "more social and more economic democracy in order to have or keep political democracy." He saw democracy's fate as inseparably linked to the freedom struggle, emphasizing "the pivotal place of the minority situation on the present-day battle front of democracy and the crucial need for social and cultural democracy as the bulwark...of democracy."
When "the Wisconsin Idea" resurfaced in Donna Shalala's famous 1989 speech "Mandate for a New Century," Shalala, then chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, challenged the notion of detached, value-free science which, as Jewett described, had come to dominate ("science as utterly deaf to human concerns"). Shalala called for academics' engagement with the world and its problems, from poverty and environmental degradation to racism, sexism and school reform.
But gone was the idea that higher education was part of the society, "stimulating" as well as "serving." Shalala defined the Wisconsin idea as "the idea of a disinterested technocratic elite...the state's best and brightest...in service to its most needy."
After my talk, Megan Gunnar, director of the ICD at Minnesota, responded that the Institute had avoided the lure of "pure science" because it kept its "Lab School" open for children when other child development centers closed theirs. As Zelazo, paraphrasing Gunnar, elaborated in an email, "Kids wandering through the halls served as an important corrective for the mission of ICD when it started to move in the direction of supposedly value-free science."
The science of executive function holds potential to help add another dimension of enormous importance to the identity and practice of science and our view of democracy: individual and collective or civic agency. Scientists are working together with communities and school districts to inform parents and teachers about the importance of executive function skills, how to measure them, and ways to promote their healthy development, while learning themselves from parents and others about unique situations, different cultures, and ways to make change. These are foundational skills of learning, adaptation, and active participation in a democratic society
The emphasis on civic agency science is a contribution never more needed.
Harry Boyte is editor of the new collection, Democracy's Education: Public Work, Citizenship, and the Future of Colleges and Universities (Vanderbilt University Press).
The timing of the symposium dramatized wider implications. "Executive function" can be a powerful strand of the democracy movement which is stirring - and a resource for countering a growing attack.
The symposium came two days after likely presidential candidate Wisconsin governor Scott Walker proposed a cut of $300 million in the 26 campuses of the University of Wisconsin. Hidden in Walker's budget was a proposal to focus on "meeting the state work force needs" and to delete what is called the Wisconsin Idea, the conviction that the university's mission is "to educate people and improve the human condition" and "to serve and stimulate society."
Walker's substitution - which he described as a "drafting error," though an internal email shows it was intentional - radically shrinks higher education's purpose. As the New York Times editorialized, "It was as if a trade school agenda were substituted for the idea of a university."
But Walker's attack has traction for the same reason extremist forces have been able to attack education across the country. The purpose and cultural logic of education have shrunk, creating vulnerabilities.
Today education is "delivered" to students seen as passive customers. This view has replaced the idea that students are agents and co-creators of their learning, as well as the idea that the purpose of education is not only to prepare students for individual success but most importantly to be contributors to a democratic society. The delivery paradigm produces no ownership. As economist Lawrence Summers, no champion of participatory democracy, nonetheless once usefully quipped, "Nobody washes their rented car."
In contrast, as Stephanie Carlson, another scientist in the symposium, put it, executive function is "about democracy." It brings back the view of children as agents of their learning. Young people learn self-control by having rich opportunities (including old-fashioned play), to practice self-directed, goal-oriented action based on making choices.
A 2011 overview of research by Adele Diamond and Kathleen Lee in the journal Science amplifies. Programs that increase executive function skills, they write, "engage students' passionate interests," "cultivate joy, pride, and self-confidence," and "foster social bonding." These cultural and agency-enhancing dimensions of education are about democracy but rarely described that way these days. Some history can help.
The Institute for Child Development, America's oldest such institute, was founded in 1925 during the period when the movement for democratic science, described in Andrew Jewett's Science, Democracy, and the American University, was in full swing. This was the era when public and land grant universities like Wisconsin were known as "democracy's colleges." The mission deleted from Walker's budget has a revealing descriptor. It involved not only "serving" but "stimulating" society. This meant being "part of" society. Lotus Coffman, then president of the University of Minnesota, described UMN as "social in origin and in nature...represent[ing] the soul hunger and the spiritual expression of the common people" and "the safeguard of democracy."
More insight into the temper of these times and the meaning of "democracy" is gained from the philosophy of Alain Locke, the first African American Rhodes Scholar. The year the ICD was founded, 1925, Locke published The New Negro, the framework of the cultural movement called the Harlem Renaissance. The book passionately challenges the view of African Americans as passive. "The Negro...resents being spoken for as a social ward or minor...the sick man of American Democracy." Locke called for the African American to become "a conscious contributor...a collaborator and participant in American civilization."
Locke also theorized democracy, advancing the view which I learned as a young man in the freedom movement from Martin Luther King and others (King once compared Locke to Plato and Aristotle). "If we are going to have effective democracy in America, we must have the democratic spirit," he told a group of settlement house workers. That requires "more social and more economic democracy in order to have or keep political democracy." He saw democracy's fate as inseparably linked to the freedom struggle, emphasizing "the pivotal place of the minority situation on the present-day battle front of democracy and the crucial need for social and cultural democracy as the bulwark...of democracy."
When "the Wisconsin Idea" resurfaced in Donna Shalala's famous 1989 speech "Mandate for a New Century," Shalala, then chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, challenged the notion of detached, value-free science which, as Jewett described, had come to dominate ("science as utterly deaf to human concerns"). Shalala called for academics' engagement with the world and its problems, from poverty and environmental degradation to racism, sexism and school reform.
But gone was the idea that higher education was part of the society, "stimulating" as well as "serving." Shalala defined the Wisconsin idea as "the idea of a disinterested technocratic elite...the state's best and brightest...in service to its most needy."
After my talk, Megan Gunnar, director of the ICD at Minnesota, responded that the Institute had avoided the lure of "pure science" because it kept its "Lab School" open for children when other child development centers closed theirs. As Zelazo, paraphrasing Gunnar, elaborated in an email, "Kids wandering through the halls served as an important corrective for the mission of ICD when it started to move in the direction of supposedly value-free science."
The science of executive function holds potential to help add another dimension of enormous importance to the identity and practice of science and our view of democracy: individual and collective or civic agency. Scientists are working together with communities and school districts to inform parents and teachers about the importance of executive function skills, how to measure them, and ways to promote their healthy development, while learning themselves from parents and others about unique situations, different cultures, and ways to make change. These are foundational skills of learning, adaptation, and active participation in a democratic society
The emphasis on civic agency science is a contribution never more needed.
Harry Boyte is editor of the new collection, Democracy's Education: Public Work, Citizenship, and the Future of Colleges and Universities (Vanderbilt University Press).
Democracy’s Education: Stirrings of Change
It seems fitting that yesterday was the 113th birthday of the poet Langston Hughes and also the publication date for the collection which I have edited, Democracy's Education: Citizenship, Public Work, and the Future of Colleges and Universities (Vanderbilt University Press). Both Hughes and the contributions to the book collection by a world-class group of policy-makers, presidents, tenured and adjunct faculty, staff, students, community and labor organizers, and public intellectuals hold in tension the challenges of the world as it is and the possibilities of the world as it should be.
Hughes regularly brought together seeming opposites in ways that simultaneously asserted their connection and transgressed conventional relations of power. In 1924 at the age of 22, as a transplanted North Carolinian freshman at Columbia, he penned "Theme for English B" in response to his teacher's assignment to write "a page tonight... out of you... it will be true."
"I wonder if it's that simple?" Hughes muses. Then he speaks a youthful truth to power:
"So will my page be colored while I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me --
although you are older -- and white --
and somewhat more free.
This is my page for English B."
No contradiction was more vivid in Hughes' poetry than that between the reality of America, the "world as it is" from the vantage of the black experience, and "the world as it should be," ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy. In "Let America Be America Again," Hughes conveys the irony by juxtaposing the creed and the reality: "Equality is in the air we breathe. (There's never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this 'homeland of the free.')" Hughes also defines the essence of the country as the struggle for democratic ideals. In "Freedom's Plow," expressing themes from the Harlem Renaissance and the popular movements of the Great Depression, he gives ownership to all who "made America":
"The plan and the pattern is here,
Woven from the beginning/
Into the warp and woof of America:
ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL.
NO MAN IS GOOD ENOUGH
TO GOVERN ANOTHER MAN
WITHOUT HIS CONSENT...
Who said those things? Americans!
Who owns those words? America!
Who is America? You, me!
We are America!"
In today's dominant intellectual fashion, conjoining "democracy" and "higher education" seems both uninteresting and far-fetched. Mark Lilla, writing in The New Republic last summer on "why the dogma of democracy doesn't always make the world better," sees "democracy" as simply a set of aphorisms about elections, rights, and free markets, part of a wider intellectual exhaustion. "Never since the end of World War II, and perhaps since the Russian Revolution, has political thinking in the West been so shallow and clueless," Lilla argues. "We all sense that ominous changes are taking place in our societies, and in other societies whose destinies will very much shape our own. Yet we lack adequate concepts or even a vocabulary for describing the world we find ourselves in."
Meanwhile, alarm about higher education appears across the political spectrum, from Republicans like Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, who may well use his lack of a college degree as a credential in his presidential bid, to liberals like William Deresiewicz, whose New Republic essay, "The Nation's Top Colleges Are Turning Our Kids into Zombies," was the most widely read article in the magazine's history.
For many, science itself is at least partly to blame for higher education's travails, to the extent that it has become higher education's leading edge. As the historian Andrew Jewett details in a brilliant recasting of the political and cultural history of science, Science, Democracy, and the American University, since the 1960s the main trends in humanities and humanistic social sciences have come to "validate the narrow, value-neutral conception of science" crafted by positivists. "In part because of that interpretive shift, science and democracy came to seem opposed, rather than mutually reinforcing (p. 367)."
Yet Jewett's book itself (Cambridge University Press, 2012) shows that times are a-changing, to recall Bob Dylan. John Dewey, the pragmatic philosopher who tirelessly promoted the linkage between democracy and education, graces the book's cover. In great detail, Jewett shows that Dewey was not an anomalous figure but part of a vast and diverse movement of "scientific democrats" beginning after the Civil War, becoming the dominant force among scientists until World War II. Scientific democrats drew on many traditions, from American pragmatism and Jane Addams' Hull House settlement in Chicago, to the movement of adult education, whose leader, Edward Lineman, was inspired by Danish folk schools which sought to make education "student-centered," beginning with their unique lives and experiences.
For the movement of scientific democrats, science was anything but "value-free" and politically detached. Scientists were citizens, promoters of practices and values which they saw as constitutive of democratic society such as cooperation, free inquiry, the experimental spirit, and insistence that any proposition meet rigorous tests of real world practice. For all their differences, they shared a populist faith in public deliberation by everyday citizens. This animated the Federation of American Scientists, formed just after World War II to educate and involve the people in the issues raised by the atom bomb. Albert Einstein argued that the fate of the world rested on "decisions made in the village square (p. 309)."
Democracy's Education shares with Science, Democracy and the American University the aim of countering dangerous anti-democratic tendencies by recalling a democratic narrative of higher education vastly different than Ivory Tower detachment and individualist meritocracy. Equally important, it is rich with case studies and concepts - curricular and co-curricular reforms which revitalize an educational model akin to the folk schools, beginning with the lives and interests of students, engaged scholarship, "anchor institution" collaborations with communities, institutional democratization.
In sum, they show that a narrative of democracy is again stirring in and around our colleges and universities.
Hughes regularly brought together seeming opposites in ways that simultaneously asserted their connection and transgressed conventional relations of power. In 1924 at the age of 22, as a transplanted North Carolinian freshman at Columbia, he penned "Theme for English B" in response to his teacher's assignment to write "a page tonight... out of you... it will be true."
"I wonder if it's that simple?" Hughes muses. Then he speaks a youthful truth to power:
"So will my page be colored while I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me --
although you are older -- and white --
and somewhat more free.
This is my page for English B."
No contradiction was more vivid in Hughes' poetry than that between the reality of America, the "world as it is" from the vantage of the black experience, and "the world as it should be," ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy. In "Let America Be America Again," Hughes conveys the irony by juxtaposing the creed and the reality: "Equality is in the air we breathe. (There's never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this 'homeland of the free.')" Hughes also defines the essence of the country as the struggle for democratic ideals. In "Freedom's Plow," expressing themes from the Harlem Renaissance and the popular movements of the Great Depression, he gives ownership to all who "made America":
"The plan and the pattern is here,
Woven from the beginning/
Into the warp and woof of America:
ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL.
NO MAN IS GOOD ENOUGH
TO GOVERN ANOTHER MAN
WITHOUT HIS CONSENT...
Who said those things? Americans!
Who owns those words? America!
Who is America? You, me!
We are America!"
In today's dominant intellectual fashion, conjoining "democracy" and "higher education" seems both uninteresting and far-fetched. Mark Lilla, writing in The New Republic last summer on "why the dogma of democracy doesn't always make the world better," sees "democracy" as simply a set of aphorisms about elections, rights, and free markets, part of a wider intellectual exhaustion. "Never since the end of World War II, and perhaps since the Russian Revolution, has political thinking in the West been so shallow and clueless," Lilla argues. "We all sense that ominous changes are taking place in our societies, and in other societies whose destinies will very much shape our own. Yet we lack adequate concepts or even a vocabulary for describing the world we find ourselves in."
Meanwhile, alarm about higher education appears across the political spectrum, from Republicans like Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, who may well use his lack of a college degree as a credential in his presidential bid, to liberals like William Deresiewicz, whose New Republic essay, "The Nation's Top Colleges Are Turning Our Kids into Zombies," was the most widely read article in the magazine's history.
For many, science itself is at least partly to blame for higher education's travails, to the extent that it has become higher education's leading edge. As the historian Andrew Jewett details in a brilliant recasting of the political and cultural history of science, Science, Democracy, and the American University, since the 1960s the main trends in humanities and humanistic social sciences have come to "validate the narrow, value-neutral conception of science" crafted by positivists. "In part because of that interpretive shift, science and democracy came to seem opposed, rather than mutually reinforcing (p. 367)."
Yet Jewett's book itself (Cambridge University Press, 2012) shows that times are a-changing, to recall Bob Dylan. John Dewey, the pragmatic philosopher who tirelessly promoted the linkage between democracy and education, graces the book's cover. In great detail, Jewett shows that Dewey was not an anomalous figure but part of a vast and diverse movement of "scientific democrats" beginning after the Civil War, becoming the dominant force among scientists until World War II. Scientific democrats drew on many traditions, from American pragmatism and Jane Addams' Hull House settlement in Chicago, to the movement of adult education, whose leader, Edward Lineman, was inspired by Danish folk schools which sought to make education "student-centered," beginning with their unique lives and experiences.
For the movement of scientific democrats, science was anything but "value-free" and politically detached. Scientists were citizens, promoters of practices and values which they saw as constitutive of democratic society such as cooperation, free inquiry, the experimental spirit, and insistence that any proposition meet rigorous tests of real world practice. For all their differences, they shared a populist faith in public deliberation by everyday citizens. This animated the Federation of American Scientists, formed just after World War II to educate and involve the people in the issues raised by the atom bomb. Albert Einstein argued that the fate of the world rested on "decisions made in the village square (p. 309)."
Democracy's Education shares with Science, Democracy and the American University the aim of countering dangerous anti-democratic tendencies by recalling a democratic narrative of higher education vastly different than Ivory Tower detachment and individualist meritocracy. Equally important, it is rich with case studies and concepts - curricular and co-curricular reforms which revitalize an educational model akin to the folk schools, beginning with the lives and interests of students, engaged scholarship, "anchor institution" collaborations with communities, institutional democratization.
In sum, they show that a narrative of democracy is again stirring in and around our colleges and universities.