Democracy as agency is radically different than the shriveled sense of "democracy" in today's public discussion, where tools substitute for substance. The larger meaning is hollowed out.

In her last blog in our conversation in Education Week, Deborah Meier explored ways the schools she founded in New York and Boston sought to implement democratic decision making. These are important questions, but I'd argue that voting and other decision structures are tools -- and when they work well, symbols for democracy. They're not the essence of democracy.

So, "what is democracy?" And related, why, in the American context, did democracy have overtones of immensity? "A word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawakened...a great word, whose history remains unwritten," as Walt Whitman put it in Democratic Vistas.

Democracy means agency, citizen power, capacity of people to act to build a common life. In a time of bitter electoral division, when tools replace substance, remembering the larger meaning is crucial.
This brings me back to the "Citizenship Education Program," CEP, in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King's organization which I worked for from 1963 to 1965.

CEP organized "citizenship schools" across the south, informal learning sites drawing from Danish folk school traditions. Myles Horton, co-founder of Highlander Folk School which birthed the citizenship school movement, travelled through Denmark and was inspired by the folk school philosophy, "education for life." N.F. S. Grundtvig, the Danish philosopher of folk schools, saw them as sites for "the fostering of all our vital efforts." Grundtvig emphasized individual awakening and the potential of all occupations to contribute to a flourishing society.

Citizenship schools, like Meier's schools, were based on respect for the intelligence and other talents of everyday citizens. They included, of course, tools like elections for struggle against segregation. Restrictive voting disempowered people. More broadly they emphasized developing agency, capacity of people of all backgrounds for action on collective problems of all kinds (at one point a group of poor whites led by "Preacher Red" attended the Dorchester training center in Georgia, as Dorothy Cotton, SCLC's CEP director, describes in her book If Your Back's Not Bent).

Thus citizenship schools taught nonviolence, community organizing skills, literacy to help people overcome restrictive voting procedures. They were full of singing. Like Grundtvig, they conveyed love of country built through the labors of ordinary people, strange to postmodern, cynical ears ("We love our land, America!"), while also identifying with freedom struggles around the world. They described figures in black history who made people proud. Overall, the curriculum stressed the potential of people to act. I have the SCLC Citizenship Handbook from 1964 and look at it often.

Septima Clark, an early teacher and philosopher of citizenship schools, said that the purpose was "To broaden the scope of democracy to include everyone and deepen the concept to include every relationship." Here, the citizen is a co-creator of an empowering democratic way of life.

Dorothy Cotton sings a song which conveys this idea: "We are the ones we've been waiting for." Everyone has potential. There is no outside savior. Education is about "freeing the powers," a phrase of Jane Addams. Citizenship schools are "freedom schools."

Democracy as agency is radically different than the shriveled sense of "democracy" in today's public discussion, where tools substitute for substance. The larger meaning is hollowed out. The collapse of content feeds a diminished view of human potential, a mood of scarcity, a sense that we're in a dog-eat-dog fight for shares of a shrinking pie. All the candidates for president on both sides define democracy as elections, though there are hints at something more -- Bernie Sanders' "political revolution," John Kasich's reminder that Republicans and Democrats are neighbors.

It's helpful to go back to the Greeks. According to Josiah Ober, the Greek classicist, the Greeks saw democracy as agency, the capacity to act (Ober's book, Democracy and Knowledge, is one of my favorites). In his essay "The Original Meaning of 'Democracy': Capacity to Do Things, Not Majority Rule" (Constellations 2008) Ober analyzes the roots of "democracy," demos, whole people, and kratia, power.

In modern usage, observes Ober, power is assumed to mean "a voting rule for determining the will of the majority." But he shows that for the Greeks "demokratia ...more capaciously, means 'the empowered demos ... collective strength and ability to act...and, indeed, to reconstitute the public realm through action."

We are the ones we've been waiting for. Peter Levine, a leader in our movement called "civic studies," based on agency and citizens as co-creators, has a book from Oxford by this title.

It will be great to see schools integrate democratic decision making into cultures and practices which have agency-building as their aim. What might schools - and societies - look like with a view of democracy that means human potentialities for action? And work to realize it.

We need to name and advance resources for democracy these days. Deborah Meier, in our blog conversation in Education Week about democracy in schools ("How Useful Is 'Academia'?" March 3), draws attention to young people's intelligence, and also the way education often squashes kids' spirit by policing the way they talk and think with concepts like "academic." This is how she puts it,

"I've always hated it when visitors to kindergartens ooh and aah over what 'cute' things the students say. They ignore, in this way, the children's genuine insights. In fact, these 5-year-olds are genuinely expressing interesting ideas, not trying to be cute at all. And if we listened with respect we'd realize that democracy is not a utopian idea--that virtually all 5-year-olds are capable of tackling important ideas and expressing them well until we discourage their intellectual curiosity with [terms like] 'academics.''

I love her blog. For many years, I have seen young people's intelligence, seriousness, and potential for doing substantial democracy work, what we call public work, through the youth empowerment initiative Public Achievement, now active in more than 20 countries. I also know from such experiences that young people's intelligence and capacity are vastly undervalued in society and education. Videos on Public Achievement like "We the (Young) People" and "Public Achievement in Fridley - Transforming Special Education" make the point.

In addition to highlighting young people's intelligence and capacity, Meier's blog has other resources for democracy in hard times. Here are five:

Democratic Deliberation

She describes discussion that is "noisy and maybe even on occasion rude, across generations, where adults and young people listen to each other and sometimes take each other seriously." This is constructive deliberation. It involves learning a set of democratic habits. This is what I was getting at in calling for "Putting the Public Back in Public Education."

Sustained deliberations can teach people to respect the intelligence and contributions of others. They counter anti-democratic trends. We also need such discussions to help reframe policy debates that are now narrow, polarized, and unproductive.

Free Spaces

Meier also identifies places where such deliberations can take place like schools community colleges, and libraries -- free spaces. Here are others. In the civil rights movement beauty parlors and barber shops were often free spaces. So were churches. In the deliberation I described earlier in the New Deal ("Against Political Saviors," January 28), with three million people discussing the future of rural America, land grant colleges and universities played roles through cooperative extension.

"Screens"

My colleague Margaret Finders, chair of the education department at Augsburg College, uses an idea developed by Kenneth Burke, called "terministic screens." These are terms which hide some realities and emphasize others. Screens can squash the democratic agency of students and teachers. She sites "teacher effectiveness," "achievement gap," "accountability," "standards."

"Academic" is such a screen. It's an individualistic, narrow idea of excellence which hides kids' intelligence and capacity for serious discussion in plain sight, in the process dampening their spirits and disempowering them.

"Democratic excellence"

We can only fight negatives with positives. Meier offers an alternative idea to "academic" which could be called "democratic excellence" -- outstanding work which contributes to democracy, giving the example of Jay Featherstone's book, Transforming Teacher Education, which suggests ways teacher educators can work "in the real world" to help change schools. "Cooperative excellence" is a related idea. Lani Guinier's book, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy, is full of stories of cooperative excellence, minority and working class kids helping each other to do well.

Citizen politics

Finally, Meier argues that "democracy assumes 'politics.'" This is the citizen politics we've been discussing - engaging "differences of opinion based on different stories and experiences." Such politics revolves around everyday citizens, not politicians, parties, or partisanship. Politicians can play helpful roles but they are not the center of the universe. Citizen politics, like deliberation, depends on and develops democratic habits.

The other day in the Republican debate Donald Trump hinted at politics by saying that to get anything done you need give and take, flexibility, negotiation rather than ideological rigidity. The problem is that everything in Trump's world revolves around Trump. He puts himself as the "top dog," as Omar Wasow tweeted.

Autocracy is the top dog taking power. There are a lot of worrisome autocratic trends not simply Trump.

Democracy is our collective power, our ability to act, our collective and ongoing work, not someone or a small group doing it for us.

We can only fight autocracy with democracy.