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Democratic Socialism and Education: New Perspectives on Policy and Practice

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-18937-2

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Democratic Socialism
and Education:
New Perspectives on
Policy and Practice






Neil Hopkins
Faculty of Education and Sport
University of Bedfordshire, UK






SpringerBrief series


for Dara


Acknowledgements


I would like to thank my Head of School, Juliet Fern, for research time in which to
complete the first draft of this book and colleagues at the University of
Bedfordshire’s Faculty of Education for their support and encouragement during
the writing of this project. Constructive criticism from reviewers during the peer
review process was invaluable regarding improvements made to the text. I also
would like to thank Astrid Noordermeer for her editorial support at Springer.

As always, this book couldn’t have been completed without the loving support of
family and friends.





Neil Hopkins
Hertfordshire
March 2019


How can the bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing?
How can a child, when fears annoy,
But droop his tender wing
And forget his youthful spring?

O! father and mother, if buds are nipp’d
And blossoms blown away,
And if the tender plants are stripp’d
Of their joy in the springing day,
By sorrow and care’s dismay,

How shall the summer arise in joy,
Or the summer fruits appear?
Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy,
Or bless the mellowing year,
When the blasts of winter appear?


William Blake, from ‘The Schoolboy’, Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794)

 Contents





Chapter 1: Contemporary Education and Education Systems

Chapter 2: Democratic Socialism in a Complex Political World

Chapter 3: Towards a Democratic Socialist Curriculum

Chapter 4: In Search of a Democratic Socialist Pedagogy

Chapter 5: Democratic Socialism and Governance in Education

Conclusion

Full Bibliography

 Introduction


This book’s main aim is to reintroduce ideas associated with democratic
socialism and their application to current trends in state education across
jurisdictions. Over the past several decades, there has been a trend towards
neoliberal policy and practice in relation to education. This has shown itself
through the increasing emphasis on competition between educational institutions
on the issue of parental and student choice, and the ranking of these institutions
according to measureable outcomes and achievements. Indeed, such rankings
have now escalated to the international level through the co-ordination of PISA,
TIMSS and other international education assessments. Alongside this, there has
also been a particular focus on education as a way of ensuring students are
employable at graduation and that the institutions themselves adhere to tight
monetary efficiencies and responsibilities. Paradoxically, neoliberalism has often
led to increased government control, particularly in the area of the curriculum, to
ensure the agenda of employability, efficiency and measurability is carefully
maintained.

A democratic socialist perspective seeks to challenge many of these ideas. In
the book I will argue that viewing schools as competitors diminishes their role as
hubs of their given communities. The neoliberal trend often pushes to the
periphery those public goods that schools and colleges facilitate and epitomise. If
we are hoping that state education, in the manner of John Dewey, acts as a
laboratory in which students learn to collaborate and cooperate as emerging
citizens in both the educational community and the wider community, then its
consumerisation potentially negates that hope. My view, as a democratic socialist,
is that education is something more than institutional competition and student
employability and I will make the case that citizenship and other social/public
goods are at least as important in any student’s compulsory education. To that
end, the communities in which schools and colleges live need to be given the
agency to control and decide aspects of education in their area – the education
system needs to reflect and enhance the wider democratic culture.

I have used the work of Norberto Bobbio, Chantal Mouffe and Axel Honneth as
important thinkers in the democratic socialist tradition. Noberto Bobbio was an
academic at the University of Turin and was an important interpreter of Marx and
Gramsci in relation to contemporary ‘western’ democracies. His books include
Liberalism and Democracy (2006) and Which Socialism? (2007). Bobbio’s work is
influential in the debate between liberalism and democratic socialism and it is
this part of his work I will draw upon particularly. Chantal Mouffe has worked at
a number of universities (including the University of Essex and the University of
Westminster) and, like Bobbio, has worked on the interface between democratic

socialism and liberalism. Mouffe can be distinguished from Bobbio in her critique
of philosophical liberalism (in the work of John Rawls and others) and her
advocacy of radical democracy. Mouffe is an important voice for ‘agonism’, the
belief that democracies are inherently in tension between competing groups and
that, historically, political progress and emancipation has been as a result of
conflict rather than consensus. Mouffe has also explored how democratic
socialism and liberalism interact with current strains within feminist political
theory. I will be using The Return of the Political (2005) and Agonistics: Thinking
the World Politically (2013). Axel Honneth is currently a professor at the
University of Frankfurt and Columbia University. In his book, The Idea of Socialism
(2017), Honneth has challenged the over-emphasis socialism has placed, as a
tradition, on economic relations and the ownership of the means of production.
Because of this, in Honneth’s view, concepts such as individual rights and
democratic systems of governance have played a minor role in the struggle for
economic emancipation. Democratic socialism in the twenty-first century needs
to grapple with a politics that is more identity-based and centred around rights.
Honneth’s discussion of Dewey is especially pertinent in the relationship between
democratic socialism and education.

I will be using the work of these three thinkers in a dialogue with other
philosophers and educationalists to explore how contemporary democratic
socialism can inform the current educational landscape. Each of the writers I have
chosen to focus on has vital things to say, whether it’s regarding the political
infrastructure, the relationships between people or our aims and goals as
communities. As will be shown, there are varying levels of agreement and
disagreement between them on the nature of democratic socialism and its place
in contemporary societies. My intention in the chapters that follow is to extend
this conversation to the specific area of state education.



*


In Chapter 1 I will set the scene with regards to education and educational
systems. One of the main questions under discussion will be how far educational
systems have followed a ‘neoliberal’ or marketised path in their endeavor to meet
individual student needs, foster a sense of community, improve standards and
maintain a competitive ‘edge’ vis-à-vis their perceived competitors. Are these
educational aims and ideals mutually compatible or incompatible? In what sense
is a state education there to meet the needs of individual students and in what
sense is it a vehicle for perceived national priorities? I will use this chapter to

explore the current educational landscape before moving onto an exploration of
the political and philosophical theories I will adopt to critique education systems.

In Chapter 2, the thinkers I have chosen to highlight (Mouffe, Bobbio and
Honneth) will be related and compared with some important themes in
philosophical and political liberalism. Liberalism, in its philosophical guise at
least, has been the dominant strand in the Anglo-Saxon world and, increasingly, in
European circles as well. Bobbio, Mouffe and Honneth acknowledge that we are
living in a period where democratic socialism needs to engage and confront
philosophical and political liberalism on a range of fronts including education. The
work of John Rawls1, particularly in Political Liberalism (Rawls 2005), is of
importance when investigating how societies establish agreement when citizens
have different (and sometimes conflicting) systems of belief; what constitutes
‘political society’ in states that differentiate between public and private worlds;
and the tensions between equality and liberty in our efforts towards justice or
fairness. How democratic socialist thinking addresses these issues without
straying into authoritarianism or old-style centralisation will be of interest here.

Chapter 3 takes the curriculum as its focus. The curriculum, it could be
argued, has become increasingly politicised over recent decades as governments
have decided to take significant control over what goes into school and college
curricula. I will argue that a democratic socialist view of the curriculum needs to
challenge a predominantly economic aim or focus to programmes of learning. If
democratic socialism is as concerned with the social as the individual, then a
contemporary take on Dewey’s philosophy of education begins to emerge – a
curriculum that is not exclusively academic nor vocational, one that views the
pursuit of knowledge as a collective endeavor, a curriculum that supports the
notion that we should learn as much about participation in society as the study of
specific subjects.

What are the implications for pedagogy from adopting a democratic socialist
approach? This will be the focus of Chapter 4. The idea of dialogue and dialogical
education, as indicated by Paulo Freire, is one that has considerable scope for any
pedagogy claiming to be socialist oriented. The use of dialogue as a form of
teaching and learning goes back at least to practice of Socrates as immortalised in
the works of Plato. Effective dialogue, including the use of a range of question
types within it, works on two levels: it helps to establish our foundations of
knowledge (or whether, indeed, we have any firm foundation on which to erect
knowledge) and embodies the notion that we come to knowledge through
ongoing interaction with other people. This chapter will draw especially on

1 Interestingly, William A. Edmundson has recently identified Rawls as a ‘reticent socialist’ – see

Edmundson, W. A. (2017), John Rawls, Reticent Socialist, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Honneth’s discussion of Dewey, particularly Dewey’s emphasis on the nature of
communication and human relationships and how these are critical to the process
of learning.

In Chapter 5, I will move on to the question of how democratic socialist theory
can inform the organisational and power structures within contemporary schools
and colleges or whether the creation of alternative structures is a more effective
option. From a democratic socialist point-of-view, this offers fundamental
challenges and potential opportunities. The challenges revolve around concerns
that teachers and students are increasingly under pressure due to high-stakes
testing which has a focus on economic competitiveness and the demands of the
job market. The opportunities this situation presents are offered by all three of
the democratic socialist thinkers under focus in this book. Each of them presents
a potential way forward by envisaging societies that are not solely predicated on
economic norms or efficiencies. Such ideas enable us to ask what the aims of
education are and how students, teachers and other stakeholders should play an
important role in their devising. This has implications for democratic education
and whether educational institutions should be democratic (in terms of
negotiation, consultation and discussion).

The Conclusion provides a short summary of the main points addressed
within the book.


Note on the use of ‘equality’:
I will be using the term ‘equality’ as shorthand for ‘equality of treatment’. One interpretation of
equality of treatment, as defined by Winch and Gingell, is that

all children follow the same [curriculum] and are taught together, irrespective of ability
and motivation. Equality of treatment is often associated with comprehensive education
and mixed-ability teaching, as well as the absence of segregation on any grounds,
including sex, race and disability (Winch and Gingell 2008: 76).

I will endeavor to show how such equality of treatment will have implications for the curriculum
(in Chapter 3) and pedagogy (Chapter 4).




References

Bobbio, N. (2006), Liberalism and Democracy, London: Verso.

Bobbio, N. (2007), Which Socialism?, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Dewey, J. (2008 [1938]), Experience and Education, New York: Free Press.

Edmundson, W. A. (2017), John Rawls, Reticent Socialist, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Freire, P. (1996 [1970]), Pedagogy of the Oppressed, London: Penguin.

Gramsci, A. (2000), The Antonio Gramsci Reader (tr. David Forgacs), New York:
New York University Press.

Honneth, A. (2017), The Idea of Socialism, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Mouffe, C. (2005), The Return of the Political, London: Verso.

Mouffe, C. (2013), Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically, London: Verso.

Rawls, J. (2005), Political Liberalism (Expanded Edition), New York: Columbia
University Press.

Winch, C. and Gingell, J. (2008), Philosophy of Education: The Key Concepts (Second
Edition), London: Routledge.


Chapter 1:

Contemporary Education and Education Systems



The trend in many education systems over the past several decades has been
towards increasing emphasis on measurement, performance and cost efficiency.
Stephen Ball has described this process as ‘”renewed capitalism” … The teacher
and student are made into “enterprises” … in relation to which the state is
regulator and market-maker’ (Ball 2013: 108). The link between education and
the economy is a long-standing one. The drive towards state education systems in
‘advanced’ industrial nations during the nineteenth century was, in part, due to
the concern of maintaining economic superiority or parity with competitors.
What makes the current situation different is the depth of focus on quantitative
data in order to compare and critique education systems against very specific
targets, scores and measures. The introduction of international testing in the form
of PISA, TIMSS and others has reinforced and exacerbated the movement towards
using numerical data as the primary means of establishing standards and quality
in a given educational jurisdiction. There is nothing inherently bad regarding the
use of this type of data in relation to education – what is of concern is its overuse
and the tendency to submerge important educational aims and objectives in the
wake of meeting ‘key performance indicators’. This is often conceptualised as
‘performativity’, defined by Anna Kilderry as:

visible where performance related practices, such as teaching and
learning, are expected and regulated through measurable criteria …
Furthermore, performance criteria can function in such a way that …
teachers are coerced into an accountability discourse, one that is focused
on outcomes, achievements and performance, and where teachers have to
‘prove’ the quality of their teaching practice (Kilderry 2015: 634-635).

Alongside this trend towards ‘performativity’ (for institutions as a whole as
well as individual teachers and students), there has also been a parallel
development viewing education through the lens of business and economics. As I
stated above, this is nothing new but the emphasis accorded to it today is
distinctive. After the financial turbulence caused by the OPEC oil crisis in the
1970s, governments in various countries began to question the levels of finance
devoted to the public sector and whether this was being allocated and spent as
efficiently as in the private sector. The onset of ‘monetarism’, a philosophy of
government expenditure and fiscal policy based on the work of the Chicago
School of economics and notably embodied in the Thatcher and Reagan

administrations in the UK and USA, created an environment where ministries of
education (and other key public services) increasingly had to justify the budget
granted to them on the basis of tightly-controlled efficiencies. With the advent of
such an economic philosophy, the market was seen as the final arbiter of price,
value and service. Education and other public facilities were expected to adopt the
discipline of the market to a greater or lesser extent. The language of ‘parental
choice’, the student as ‘consumer’, ‘voucher systems’, institutions operating in a
‘competitive’ environment – this is the vocabulary increasingly used by education
ministries when describing policy.

The collective label that has been attached to this set of circumstances is
‘neoliberalism’. However, like many other political terms, neoliberalism, through
excessive use, is in danger of becoming something of a ‘catch-all’ term. In the
relationship between government services and citizens, Hayek, in The
Constitution of Liberty, offers a typically robust account of what neoliberalism is
most concerned with:

though the government may at any moment be best qualified to take the
lead in [certain] fields, this provides no justification for assuming it will
always be so and therefore for giving it exclusive responsibility. In most
instances … it is by no means necessary that government engage in such
activities; the services in question can generally be provided, and more
effectively provided, by the government’s assuming some or all of the
financial responsibility but leaving the conduct of affairs to independent
and in some measure competitive agencies (Hayek 2006: 196).

The language of neoliberalism associates education and other public services with
concepts such as ‘efficiency’, ‘performance’ and ‘competition’ that have been
adapted from the private sector. It is important, however, not to view these ideas
are inherently bad as some commentators and thinkers (especially on the left of
politics) have done. A case can be made, for example, for efficiencies in education
and other public services where there is perceived corruption or the widespread
waste of resources. Where this becomes problematic is when the focus on
efficiency, competition, performance or other allied concepts begins to take
precedence over other important values and beliefs that we hold dear in relation
to education. It is hard to measure quantitatively the increased confidence or
assertiveness a student might gain in a supportive classroom environment, for
instance.

However, the impact of educational policies and practices associated with
neoliberalism have had, in my view, a largely negative effect on the education of
children, young people and adults. There is a tendency, once measures have been
created, to bias the direction any given course or programme in order to fulfill

those measures. Sometimes, the measures can have a beneficial effect, especially
when there is a perceived inequality or failing with regards to the educational
entitlement of specific students within certain contexts. But the danger is when
the need for measures, especially of a quantitative sort, begin to override other
ways of determining what is important in education and how we establish what
an effective or valuable education actually means.

In English education, for example, we have a current situation where the
centralising and decentralising factors are in tension – the influence and power of
the local authorities over their schools have steadily decreased while control has
moved upwards (to central government in the form of the Department for
Education) and downwards to the individual schools (or networks of schools).
Schools that opt out of local authority control are no longer required to follow the
National Curriculum although they are still under the regime of the national
inspectorate and national awarding bodies which create their own centralising
tendencies. This system (it might be more appropriate to call it a set of systems)
has created interesting consequences. Senior leaders in schools, especially
headteachers, have had to take on much more of the financial and budgetary
responsibilities than would have been the case in the past. The circumstances are
not dissimilar to those in the National Health Service in recent decades where
there is a more direct funding relationship between the government and
individual health ‘trusts’. Ball describes these trends in the public sector as ‘[t]he
move from the welfare state to the neo-liberal state [which] involves a
redistribution of responsibilities and the emergence of new forms of government
– self-government’ (Ball 2013: 130).

On one level, the partial devolution of power (in terms of finance and
curriculum) to individual schools has an intuitively ‘correct’ feel for those who
believe authority in education should be grounded at the grassroots level.
Something similar is being sounded by Paul Hirst in his explanation of
‘associationalism’:

Associationalism challenges both the centralization of the state and its
claim to ‘sovereignty’. It proposes that authority be as far as possible
divided into distinct domains, whether territorial and functional, and that
authority should be as localized and small-scale as possible [my emphasis]
(Hirst 1996: 34).

Clearly, there are elements of the current state education system in England that
accord with associationism. Power has been delegated so that some of the
decision making can now be made at ‘source’ and this is something that should be
welcomed. What is of concern, nevertheless, is the potential lack of public
accountability within the current structures. The local education authorities

created through the 1944 Education Act were not always exemplars of local
democracy – many teachers can relate tales of the bureaucracy, inefficiency and
even, at times, bare-faced corruption that sometimes occurred in the corridors of
county and city halls. That being said, the one thing that local authorities had was
a clear link back to their local electorate – if people in a given community were
unhappy with the education being provided in their area, they could vote out
those councillors they deemed responsible and vote others in their place. One of
the main concerns with the existing state of affairs is that this link to the local
authority has now been broken for those schools who have decided to opt for a
direct funding connection with Westminster. Yes, these schools do have a board of
governors that include staff, parent and other local representatives who can
provide a voice for those affected by the school’s policy on pupil intake, the
direction of the curriculum or provision for special educational needs (to name
but a few examples). The problem arises when academies (the term used for
schools who have left local authority control) are taken over by agencies who own
schools over a wide geographical area and where the schools themselves become
branches of a network or a brand. It is in these circumstances where education
comes closest to the corporate world – these ‘academy chains’ are often run by
people using terms such as chief executive, financial or operating officer. Local
accountability is compromised because the power is now no longer located at
source (ie. the local school) but at the head office of the academy chain. In the
worst examples, these school networks are run as companies, sometimes even
with a built-in demand for profit (I will be discussing ways of addressing this
potential problem in Chapter 5).

Schools and other educational institutions are being required or encouraged to
mirror corporate behaviour in other ways as well. Increasingly in the past few
decades, government and policy-makers have viewed parents and students as
customers in an attempt to create an internal market where institutions compete
for student numbers. In Britain, it was the Thatcher administration in the early
1980s that first attempted to radically change the perspective in which schools,
parents and pupils would be viewed:

The idea was beguilingly simple. Parents would get a voucher with which
to ‘buy’ education at the school of their choice. Schools, forced to compete,
would become more responsive. Good schools would expand, bad ones
would improve or close. Parents – not teachers, the educational
establishment or local or national politicians – would thus determine the
nature of schools and would more than likely reopen the door to selection.
Education would become consumer- not producer-run and local authority
control of it would be broken. It was the first attempt at a thoroughly
Thatcherite change to the welfare state: the introduction of markets within
a state system (Timmins 2017: 451).


As stated above with regards to school funding, giving parents or carers a
significant say in the education of their children has a sense of fairness and
appropriateness to it. After all, parents and carers are vital stakeholders,
particularly for children in the compulsory stages of education. What is much less
agreeable, from a democratic socialist point of view, is the idea of parents
becoming consumers in an educational marketplace. There are intrinsic problems
with comparing schools (or hospitals or welfare offices) to businesses in trade
and retail because what exactly are schools supposed to be selling? Is there a
definable educational product or service that the consumer receives within a
clearly-established transaction? Does the consumer role gradually shift from the
parent to the student as the latter moves through the phases of education? Each of
these questions provokes significant queries or challenges from those who find a
neoliberal interpretation of education troubling.

An area that has proven to be especially fertile when criticising the neoliberal
turn in education is on the grounds of education as a public rather than a private
good. Gerald Grace has neatly encapsulated how a shift in paradigm from the
private to the public can radically change the perspective in which education is
viewed:

To substitute the individual as consumer of education for the individual as
citizen in the education service changes fundamentally the nature of the
education process itself. Customers are concerned to maximize private
good and individual return in their transactions. The concept of citizen
implies a set of wider social and political responsibilities (Grace 1994:
129).

If education is seen as a public good, the processes in which knowledge and ideas
are introduced and developed are more collaborative than purely transactional.
What do I mean by this? When we see education as a product, with a
provider/seller and a consumer, there is a danger of regarding the transaction as
essentially linear in nature. The parent or student has a voucher or cheque that is
‘cashed in’ for a service in the same way they might buy a holiday. The dynamic is
one where one gives and another receives – that is the ultimate logic of education
or any other public service when the laws of the marketplace are introduced or
prioritised. In contrast, if education is thought of as a public rather than a private
good, the process of acquiring and furthering knowledge is something shared as a
good we have in common as opposed to an acquisition bought through financial
transaction. Education is less a form of currency than a collective endeavour
(these points will be extended further in my discussion of pedagogy in Chapter 4).

 Grace, in the extract quoted above, alluded to the agent or stakeholder in
education as a citizen rather than a consumer when viewing education in the
public realm. If education is, indeed, a collective endeavour then the image of the
citizen is apt – we can imagine working together to build, maintain and challenge
the basis of knowledge and key ideas in similar ways to how we, as citizens,
support and change society. Such notions have a long heritage – John Dewey was
writing over a century ago of ‘the school as social center [sic] … the school as a
thoroughly socialized affair in contact at all points with the flow of community
life’ (Dewey 1902: 73, 75). The school or college is both a community in itself and,
as Dewey states, part of the wider community. Indeed, democratic socialists and
other democrats (including Dewey) have frequently viewed schools as the places
in which students are inducted into democratic culture and practices – students
learn to act as citizens whilst in education in the belief that this prepares them for
the role when they graduate into their respective societies. I will discuss this in
more detail later on when I discuss ideas around democratic education in
Chapters 3, 4 and 5.



*


The way schools are governed in a neoliberal paradigm has implications for
what is taught in the classroom. It would be wrong to state that the move towards
measurable outcomes and targets or closer connections between schools and
central government is the only driver for the content in a particular curriculum or
programme of study (there are other factors which have a significant role to play
in determining what should be studied and when). However, the connection
between schools and government is possibly the most instructive when it comes
to analysing the curriculum. When I am speaking of a neoliberal paradigm in this
regard, I am specifically referring to a view of education that sees it inextricably
linked to students’ future employment prospects. The rhetoric used in many
educational jurisdictions on ‘skills’, ‘transferable skills’ and ‘employability skills’ is
a symptom of this stance. I have said elsewhere:

The skills learnt are seen as a means to an end – to make the students
more employable, more productive, less likely to seek or need benefits.
These factors are not necessarily bad things in themselves but there is a
poverty of vision nevertheless. Skill [becomes] an ability or competence
performed in isolation without a true awareness or engagement with the
community in which these very skills are requested and valued (Hopkins
2014a: 65).

There is something functional or instrumental in this approach. As I stated earlier
in this chapter, it conveys education as a transaction – students are encouraged to
acquire skills that are then applied in their future employment. There is nothing
inherently wrong with this being part of a student’s education – students are
themselves hoping and expecting to gain a set of skills to enable them to find
satisfying and well-compensated work. The problem occurs when this becomes
the sole or primary focus of education and pushes aside other equally valuable
aspects of a person’s development.

In many countries, this tendency has led to state education concentrating on
subjects that are perceived to be the ‘basics’ necessary to ensure students are able
to compete in the labour market. With this in mind, the educational focus has
been towards competency in the native language (and sometimes a second
language), mathematics and science. Indeed, the OECD’s PISA rankings are based
upon comparative tests in these three disciplines. While it cannot be denied that
these subjects are important in any student’s education, the emphasis upon them
has led to other subjects being marginalised from the curriculum (and some
barely covered at all). Concerns have been raised about the squeeze being applied
to the arts, humanities, sport and vocational disciplines and how this is limiting
the opportunities children and young people have for pursuing their versions of
the good life. The narrowing of the curriculum to ‘core’ subjects has even raised
concerns amongst some employers. In an economic situation where business is
increasingly dynamic and global, companies are searching for recruits who can
exhibit initiative, cultural sensitivity, creativity and entrepreneurship. These skills
are sometimes labelled as ‘soft skills’ to distinguish them from those abilities or
aptitudes that are more amenable to ‘hard’ data. The neoliberal focus on
educational targets and measurements can often make it very difficult to
accommodate such skills within the native language, mathematics and science,
and can also mean subjects that emphasise them are marginalised and pushed to
the periphery. On a wider front, the European Union has devised a set of key
competencies that it sees as vital in an age where people are working for longer
and are likely to change their occupation several times throughout their careers.
These competencies are:

1. Communication in the mother tongue;
2. Communication in foreign languages;
3. Mathematical competence and basic competences in science and
technology;
4. Digital competence;
5. Learning to learn;
6. Social and civic competences;
7. Sense of initiative and entrepreneurship; and
8. Cultural awareness and expression.


According to the European Union, the key competencies ‘are those which all
individuals need for personal fulfillment and development, active citizenship,
social inclusion and employment.’ (European Union 2006: 13). It is clear that
students in the twenty-first century cannot live on a diet of the ‘core’ subjects
alone.

One area that has seen interesting developments over the past two decades is
citizenship education. Countries in Western and Central Europe, North America,
and Australasia have all devised or refined programmes of study due to concerns
with low voter turnout and the rise of political and religious extremism. However,
as Gert Biesta and Robert Lawy indicate below, this turn towards citizenship
education has also tended to veer in the direction of neoliberalism:

[One] problem with the idea of citizenship education is that it is largely
aimed at individual … people … This [therefore] individualises the problem
of … people’s citizenship – and in doing so follows the neo-liberal line of
thinking [emphasis in the original] (Biesta and Lawy 2006: 71).

As well as the issue with individualism, citizenship education in some educational
jurisdictions has also raised controversy around the idea of nationhood in
multicultural societies where people might have very different attitudes to loyalty
and belonging. One of challenges for democratic socialists in education is to
articulate the importance of collective identity without compromising a student
or teacher’s sense of individuality or to drift into forms of cultural or political
chauvinism. I will be discussing this in more detail in Chapter 2.


*


This chapter has taken, as its main theme, the nature of current state education
systems. The trend towards neoliberal practices in education has often led to
circumstances where quantitative data and measurements take priority over
other aspects of education. This has been exacerbated by the increased
importance attached to international assessment rankings as a means of
establishing the ‘effectiveness’ of national education systems. In some
jurisdictions schools and colleges are being run on business lines, thus reinforcing
the neoliberal agenda in education.



References

Ball, S. J. (2013), Foucault, Power, and Education, Abingdon: Routledge.

Biesta, G. and Lawy, R. (2006), From teaching citizenship to learning democracy:
Overcoming individualism in research, policy and practice, Cambridge Journal of
Education, 36 (1): 63-79.

Dewey, J. (1902), The School as Social Center, The Elementary School Teacher, 3
(2): 73-86.

European Union (2006), Recommendation of the European Parliament and of the
Council on key competencies for lifelong learning(2006/962/EC), Official Journal
of the European Union [English version], L394 (49), 30 December 2006. Available
at: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-
content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:L:2006:394:FULL&from=EN (Accessed 2
November 2018).

Grace, G. (1994), Education is a Public Good: On the need to Resist the
Dominantion of Economic Science, in Bridges, D. and McLaughlin, T. H. (eds.),
Education and the Market Place, London: Falmer Press.

Hayek, F. A. (2006 [1960]), The Constitution of Liberty, Abingdon: Routledge.

Hirst, P. (1996), Associative Democracy: New Forms of Economic and Social
Governance, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Hopkins, N. (2014), Citizenship and Democracy in Further and Adult Education,
Dordrecht: Springer.

Kilderry, A. (2015), The intensification of performativity in early childhood
education, Journal Of Curriculum Studies, 47(5): 633-652.

Timmins, N. (2017), The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State, London:
William Collins.


Chapter 2:

Contemporary Democratic Socialism in a Complex
Political World


It is not my intention in this chapter to recapitulate a history of socialism in
education or elsewhere. My focus is rather on the contemporary political situation
and how democratic socialism informs and affects this. Honneth has
acknowledged the challenges contemporary democratic socialism faces, tracing
these back to the post-1945 environment:

After World War II, when in the capitalist countries of the West the
situation of the working class rapidly began to change and white-collar
workers began to dominate the labor [sic] market, giving rise to the term
‘post-industrial society’ … there was no longer any certainty about the
class affiliation of socialism (Honneth 2017: 40).

The class basis upon which the early socialists formed their conceptions and
organisations has changed radically with the evolution of technology,
globalisation and profound social developments (eg. the increased participation
of women in education, employment and social affairs). There is not now the
same sense of homogeneity, either culturally or demographically, that was often
associated with democratic socialist-informed workers’ parties or movements in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (such as the British Labour
Party and Germany’s Sozialdemokatische Partei Deutschlands). New times have
required new ideas (or, at least, the profound adaptation of original ones). Again,
in the words of Honneth:

As soon as social conditions were radically changed by technological
advance, structural transformation, and political reforms in the 1960s and
1970s, first-generation socialist ideas were bound to become less
attractive given that their socio-theoretical content remained anchored in
the early nineteenth century (Honneth 2017: 48).

It was not so much that the old Marxist notions of base and superstructure were
redundant – these concepts still had a purpose as means of investigating and
critiquing the relations between economic ownership and the wider society in
which these relations operated. However, we have seen remarkable changes over
the past 20 or 30 years in the way companies now conduct business and trade.
Even if a democratic socialist government wanted to nationalise major industries
and services within a particular jurisdiction, because these entities are often

owned by corporations that exist outside of the territory and have supply lines
that are global in scale, the practicalities of bringing production within the ambit
of the national government would probably defy economic and political logic –
the costs would be just too great. The term ‘globalisation’ has become something
of a cliché but it is hard to deny the impact digital technology, mobile supply
chains, access to ‘cheap’ labour forces and efficient international transportation
has had on how we trade. Workers and customers no longer necessarily engage
with companies or employers that speak the same language or share the same
culture. This offers considerable challenges as well as potential opportunities for
democratic socialists. According to Mouffe

Sovereignty has taken a new form … This new global form of sovereignty,
which [Hardt and Negri] call ‘Empire’, has replaced the Imperial Age that
was based on the attempt by nation-states to extend their sovereignty
beyond their borders. In contrast to what happened in the stage of
imperialism, the current Empire has no territorial centre of power and no
fixed boundaries; it is a decentred and deterritorialized apparatus of rule
that progressively incorporates the entire global realm with open,
expanding borders (Mouffe 2013: 66).

Even ownership of a country’s natural resources are often now in the hands of
multi-national companies (especially those countries that embraced the
economics of Thatcher, Reagan and others in the 1980s). However, various left-
wing thinkers (including Marx) have envisaged progressive forces working across
national and linguistic lines in order to further the interests of workers and other
classes oppressed by the capitalist system and the ‘divide and rule’ arrangement
of bourgeois nation states. The question for democratic socialist thinkers and
activists is whether such coalitions are possible in a postmodern world. Mouffe
appears to think it is possible but not by using the same language or concepts as
Marxists and socialists from previous eras. Mouffe, discussing the idea of a
“Multitude’ taken from the work of Paolo Virno, states:

The democracy of the Multitude expresses itself in a ensemble of acting
minorities that never aspire to transform themselves into a majority and
develop a power that refuses to become government (Mouffe 2013: 69).

These thoughts are connected to Mouffe’s contention that ‘[t]he world is a
pluri-verse, not a universe’ (Mouffe 2013: 64). The situation that contemporary
democratic socialists find themselves in reflects the fluid and dynamic nature of
communication and human relations generally. People do not identify themselves
within basic class distinctions that might have been the case fifty or one hundred
years ago. This is not to say that societies were simpler or that life was somehow
more straightforward in earlier periods – Mouffe is acknowledging that existing

movements cannot be homogenised, incorporated into monolithic groups that are
unable to tolerate diversity and difference. A similar point is being made by
Michael Newman when he states:

21st-century socialists will need to accept that particular identities
(including those of nationality, ethnicity, and religion) have enduring
importance to people, who often possess multiple identities (Newman
2005: 149).

Indeed, it is personal identity that is the pivot from which many people in
modern societies establish their affiliations (although it needs qualifying to the
extent that different societies or cultures will place a different premium on
individual self-expression). Personal relations form an important part of this
tendency and it is here, in particular, where early socialism ran into major
difficulties. The language of base and superstructure reduces everything,
ultimately, to where people are in the matrix of economic production – personal
relations are themselves integrated within this matrix. Honneth has spoken of
how such a vision had a stifling effect on early socialism’s ability to work with the
emerging women’s movement:

The only thing that the early socialists could offer in terms of solidarity
with the emerging women’s movement was formulated in economic
categories, and correspondingly amounted to emancipating women from
male domination by integrating them into associative relations of
production (Honneth 2017: 85).

As class and party affiliations become looser and more difficult to define, so the
challenges become greater for democratic socialists in their efforts to attract
people to their ideas and beliefs – contemporary identity has a fluidity that does
not lend itself readily to older categories or means of grouping people. From its
beginnings, according to Honneth, democratic socialism has held in tension the
potential conflict between the individual and the communal:

Because the hope for reconciling freedom and solidarity rested entirely on
the prospect of a communitarian reorganization of the economic sphere,
socialists felt they could dissolve all individual rights into a cooperative
community, leaving no legitimate place for the individual (Honneth 2017:
35).

The sophistication of modern advertising, technology and communication has
created a set of circumstances where people feel a sense of attachment or
identification that often transcends boundaries or their immediate environment.
A sense of mutual vested interests can be cultural as much as economic. If we look

at the social movements that have transformed the political landscape since the
Second World War, it could be argued that the catalyst for change has often been
cultural as well as (or instead of) economic interests whether we are speaking of
the independence movements in Africa and Asia in the 1940s and 1950s, the
agitation for civil rights in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, the
burgeoning feminist demand for women’s rights from the 1960s onwards, and the
increasing voice of gay, lesbian and transgender people in their articulation of
tolerance and equality for all irrespective of sexual orientation or gender identity.

What I am not arguing here is that economic interests have become peripheral
to current democratic socialist thinking – far from it. The fallout from the
recession of 2008 has made obvious the deep and continuing disparities in wealth
and power within individual countries and between the Global North and South.
The Occupy Wall Street movement and the demonstrations that have
accompanied G7 and G20 conferences are only a few of the many protests (violent
and peaceful) that have occurred as a result of prevailing economic interests.
When CEOs award themselves salary increases and bonuses fifty or a hundred
times the average wage for a worker in the company (and justify it as the ‘going
rate’ for people in these positions even when they don’t meet their targets), then
something is seriously wrong with the current economic system and democratic
socialists should (and do) expose such inequalities and agitate for change. What I
am stating, after Honneth, is that focusing on economic interests as the sole
means of bringing people together will be insufficient in terms of creating lasting
democratic socialist movements in the twenty-first century.

What Bobbio reminds us of, however, are the dangers of conformity and ‘mass
culture’ that come with increasing technology and the widening parameters of
communication. These concerns are not new – critics such as Ortega y Gasset,
Adorno and Horkheimer were voicing them from earlier in the twentieth century
– but Bobbio places a particular concern on the relationship between mass
culture and modern democracy:

The effect of the rise of mass culture, from which all major societies are
suffering, is a general conformism. The indoctrination characteristic of
mass societies tends to repress and suppress the individual’s sense of
personal responsibility which is the corner-stone of a democratic society
(Bobbio 2007: 72).

A case could be made that the rise in political populism in various countries over
the past decade or so has been due to developments in broadcast and social
media. The nature of the sound bite and tweet often lend themselves to opinions
that offer simple solutions to intractable problems and tend to reward a
pugnacious tone of voice over one that is more meditative. Interestingly, however,

the invention of digital technologies has led to a movement away from mass
distribution and circulation of media towards narrow casting and the creation of
niche audiences as the capacity for bespoke channels increases. People pick up
news feeds from algorithms sorted according to personal interest on tablets and
mobile phones. Bobbio’s fears of indoctrination from mass culture has morphed
into a concern that the body politic has become fragmented and national forums
for debate are increasingly difficult to establish. Mouffe, on an international level
at least, is sanguine about such developments:

I strongly believe that it is high time for left-wing intellectuals to adopt a
pluralist approach and to reject the type of universalism that postulates
the rational and moral superiority of Western modernity (Mouffe 2013:
loc. 90).

Such circumstances lead to what Mouffe has termed ‘a multipolar world’ (Mouffe
2013: 22), where no one source of power is dominant and where diversity of
attitude and belief are acknowledged and facilitated.

One of the challenges contemporary democratic socialism thus faces is the
maintenance of diversity without fragmentation in a bid to avoid the conformity
and indoctrination Bobbio and others have associated with mass culture. For all
three thinkers highlighted in this chapter, socialism must come to terms with
democracy in order to meet such a challenge. Bobbio has neatly encapsulated the
conundrum:

[W]e immediately come up against a basic contradiction, which is the real
stumbling block of democratic socialism (not to be confused with social
democracy): socialism is unattainable via democracy; however, socialism
which is attained non-democratically fails to find the route by which a
dictatorial regime can be converted into a democratic regime (Bobbio
2007: 44).

Is socialism thus antithetical to democracy? Is there something inherent in
socialism that makes its relationship with modern democracy problematic at
best? Honneth once again points to socialism’s roots as an ideology focusing
primarily on economic inequality as a major drawback in its relationship with
democracy:

[S]ocialism has been incapable of finding productive access to the idea of
political democracy. Although socialists occasionally considered plans to
establish economic democracy, workers councils and similar institutions of
collective self-organization, these all applied exclusively to the economic
sphere, because it was assumed that in the future there would no longer be

 any need for a process of ethical and political will-formation, i.e. for
democratic self-government (Honneth 2017: 76).

For many on the left historically, socialism has been seen as a stepping stone
towards communism, the transition between a bourgeois state and a genuinely
classless one. It is partly this that has distinguished socialism, in the eyes of
Bobbio and others, from social democracy where there is an acknowledgement of
a mixed economy comprising private and state-owned enterprises. Within such
terms, social democracy is viewed as working inside the established frameworks
of representative democracy to achieve power whilst socialism (when defined as
a transitional stage to communism) is ultimately aiming at the removal of
representative democracy as conceived in western, capitalist states. In the words
of Bobbio

Social democracy claims to represent an advance on liberal democracy in
that its declaration of rights embraces social rights as well as rights to
liberty; with respect to socialist democracy, on the other hand, it claims
only to be a first phase (Bobbio 2005: 78).

I appreciate that what I am saying here is, to some extent, a simplification as the
nuances between what are purportedly social democratic movements and
democratic socialist ones are almost infinite. However, the differences (although
often minute) have played an important part in how socialism is perceived in
relation to democracy (as Bobbio and Honneth have explained immediately
above).

I think it is politically impossible for socialism to avoid full and deep
engagement with democracy in all its political forms if it is to survive as a credible
ideology in the twenty-first century. The experiment in one–party regimes in the
old Soviet Union and elsewhere have, with some honourable exceptions,
ultimately failed because the discipline needed to maintain such regimes required
the curtailing of the people’s fundamental rights (particularly the freedom of
speech and the freedom of movement). Socialism, in this version, was unable to
come to terms with the main tenets of liberalism because liberalism exemplified
the elements of the bourgeois state (choice, individualism, competition) that these
regimes wanted to move away from. For some, socialism will now be forever
identified with bread queues and the secret police because of this. But
contemporary socialism has to come to terms with liberalism and the democratic
structures liberalism reflects to retain its validity and purpose in a high
technology, multipolar world where citizens often have a variety of identities –
Rawls’s articulation of modern democratic societies as comprising citizens with a
range of conceptions of the good is an influential example from the philosophical
literature (Rawls 2005). Mouffe makes a controversial call for the downplaying of

individualism in the endeavor to forge links between socialism, liberalism and
democracy:

By putting the particular individual with her interests, needs and rights at
the origin of society, the individualistic conception made possible, not only
the liberal state but also the modern idea of democracy, whose
fundamental principle is that the source of power is the independent
individual, with every individual counting equally … I agree with Bobbio
about the importance of individualism in the birth of [the] modern
conception of society, but it seems to me that the real question is to ask
whether today such an individualistic conception has not become an
obstacle to the extension of democratic ideal. Many of the problems Bobbio
finds in modern democracies could be attributed to the effects of
individualism (Mouffe 2005: 95).

So what would a democratic socialism that engages at a deep level with
liberalism and democracy actually look like? How do we prevent such a form of
democratic socialism from becoming simply a variant of liberalism itself?
Honneth offers a possible way forward:

[I]t is not enough for a renewed socialism to discover the potential for
freedom in personal relationships, the economy and democratic will-
formation. It must also have a rough idea about the relationship of
interdependence between these different spheres (Honneth 2017: 90).

Democratic socialism’s concern with the collective can be of potential advantage
here. Democratic socialism, as an ideology, is at odds with the notion of the
atomised individual and society as simply a set of mutually beneficial transactions
- as depicted in Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (Nozick 1974), for
example. There are links and responsibilities across communities that democratic
socialism is particularly effective at emphasising. It is also in relation to the
spheres stated by Honneth above that democratic socialists can take a positive
stance on the environment and climate change, the role of women and people of
colour in business and politics, the amount education should be allocated as part
of a national budget or the connection between politicians and their constituents
(to name only a few important contemporary issues). Democratic socialists need
to be able to see how inequality or disadvantage in one area can have
ramifications in others – how, for instance, the precariousness of employment
affects morale within the household and the children’s commitment towards
school. Or how a district’s disaffection with the political process can lead to a
reduction in government or corporate investment.

 Commentators such as Paul Mason are arguing that neoliberalism (in the form
of increasing technology) is itself morphing into something akin to
postcapitalism:

There is a growing body of evidence that information technology, far from
creating a new and stable form of capitalism, is dissolving it: corroding
market mechanisms, eroding property rights and destroying the old
relationship between wages, work and profit (Mason 2015: 230).

Such waves of economic tumult can and do leave communities bereft and
destitute. Phenomena like the recession of 2008 onwards also challenge people’s
confidence in banks, money markets and the inner workings of the international
stock exchange. Over-reliance on organisations that manage to skirt around the
niceties of democratic oversight, be it ministers of finance, legislative committees
or the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank, do not engender confidence
or a sense of legitimacy in this state of affairs. People feel powerless and neglected
– the seeds of Trump’s triumph in the US presidential election of 2016, the vote
for Brexit in the UK in the same year, and the success of populist leaders in
Hungary, Italy and Brazil are raised on such soil. This is why the emphasis on
strengthening the connections between socialism and democracy take on a
certain urgency – a revived faith in democracy in many aspects of life (and not
just the political or the economic) can potentially give people back a sense of
control and meaning that has been lost in the drive towards multi-national
companies and the globalisation of the labour force. In the words of Mouffe, the
‘extension of representative democracy to more and more areas of social life’
(Mouffe 2005: 94).

Mouffe talks of ‘associational socialism’, an adaptation of Hirst’s ‘associative
democracy’ introduced earlier in this book. To recap very briefly, for Hirst,
‘[a]ssociations … empower those for whom services are provided in diverse ways.
Voluntary association is an alternative to top-down bureaucracy in the competent
provision of services’ (Hirst 1996: 19). According to Mouffe’s definition:

Associational socialism can give us an insight into ways of overcoming the
obstacles to democracy constituted by the two main forms of autocratic
power, large corporations and centralized big governments, and show us
how to enhance the pluralism of modern societies. It indicates the
necessity of breaking with the universalistic and individualistic modes of
thought which have been dominant in the liberal tradition (Mouffe 2005:
99).

Associational socialism has the benefit of locating the power and control over
services in the area of those who actually use and rely on such services. In this

sense, it works as a ‘middle way’ between the individual and the state and this has
attractions for those who are suspicious of too much importance being given to
either the state, large corporations or the individual. Associational socialism relies
on the levers of civil society, of local citizens willing to play an active part in the
maintenance and development of the services under their control. It is, therefore,
as vulnerable to the charge Oscar Wilde is attributed to have levelled at socialism
generally, ‘that it takes up too many evenings’ (Day 2000: 238). The time and
energy required to look after schools, hospitals, welfare services and businesses
(if run on a cooperative basis) cannot be dismissed although the sharing of
responsibilities across a given community would potentially ease the burden.
There has been a resurgence in interest recently in the nomination and election of
people to posts through the drawing of lots (harking back to the procedures
adopted in Ancient Athens) – one recent example of this was the creation of the
Irish Citizens’ Assembly through the random selection of one hundred citizens to
investigate possible amendments to the Irish Constitution. A combination of this
alongside the more conventional ballot might ensure the burden of public service
is fair and represents all sections of the community. What is important is that
people feel a sense of collective control over the issues that affect their lives. This
would mean a significant diversification and devolution of public services down
towards the local level rather than a reliance on the centralising organs of the
state. It would also mean that democratic socialists would need to let go of any
homogenising tendencies they might have in favour of facilitating what is best in a
specific context or situation at a given time. As Mouffe has stated above,
universalism (beyond, perhaps, a basic array of needs, requirements or rights)
will be compromised and that will be difficult for some to bear, but a ‘one size fits
all’ response runs counter to the dexterity democratic socialism needs to show if
it is to survive in the twenty-first century.

The following chapters focus specifically on issues within education and how
the democratic De theories discussed above can inform ways forward. As I noted
in Chapter 1, the challenges state education systems face are the increasing
reliance on international assessment rankings, the alignment of the curriculum to
national economic productivity, the creation (in some jurisdictions) of a market
for schools and colleges based around the ethos of consumer choice, and the
notion that students’ well being, progress and achievement is best measured
using quantitative data. I will discuss the curriculum, pedagogy and governance in
successive chapters to investigate these issues.



*

 This chapter has introduced the work of Bobbio, Honneth and Mouffe as
examples of important contemporary thinking on democratic socialism. For
democratic socialism is remain a relevant ideology in the twenty-first century,
these writers argue that it is vital for it to engage with liberal discourses around
democracy, rights and individual autonomy. It is also critical to acknowledge and
reflect upon the increasing diversity of modern societies (often through forms of
social media and other technologies). The concept of ‘associative democracy’ was
also introduced here as a possible model for participatory bodies and
organisations, particularly in the realm of public services.






References

Bobbio, N. (2005), Liberalism and Democracy, tr. Ryle, M. and Soper, K., London:
Verso.

Bobbio, N. (2007), Which Socialism? Tr. Griffin, R., Cambridge: Polity Press.

Day, B. (ed.) (2000), Oscar Wilde: A Life in Quotes, London: Metro Books.

Hirst, P. (1996), Associative Democracy: New Forms of Economic and Social
Governance, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Honneth, A. (2017), The Idea of Socialism: Towards a Renewal, tr. Joseph Ganahl,
Cambridge: Polity Press.

Mason, P. (2015), PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, London: Penguin.

Mouffe, C. (2005), The Return of the Political, London: Verso.

Mouffe, C. (2013), Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically, London: Verso.

Newman, M. (2005), Socialism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

Nozick, R. (1974), Anarchy, State and Utopia, Oxford: Blackwell.

Rawls, J. (2005), Political Liberalism (Expanded Edition), New York: Columbia
University Press.


Chapter 3:
Towards a Democratic Socialist Curriculum


In some respects, the curriculum is the most political of the processes within
state education. It determines what will be taught and to whom, the hours and
weeks devoted to particular themes or subjects, how the students will be assessed
to ensure the teaching has been effective and progress has been achieved, and the
transition from one class or form to the next, one phase of education to another. It
is the educational hub from which everything else in education emanates
outwards. And yet, in terms of the word’s definition and complexity, it can come
across as a relatively straightforward concept. A. V. Kelly (citing Kerr (1968))
describes the curriculum simply as ‘all the learning which is planned and guided
by the school, whether it is carried on in groups or individually, inside or outside
of school’ (Kelly 2009: 12). But, as Kelly himself acknowledges, this definition is
deceptive in its simplicity as it encompasses all the elements that I have just
mentioned above.

So the curriculum can be both a potential agent of emancipation and of social
control depending on the circumstances in which the teaching and learning take
place and how power manifests itself in determining who ultimately decides the
content and scope. In the words of Foucault:

[D]iscourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a
hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for
an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it
reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and
makes it possible to thwart it (Foucault 1979: 100-101).

The language or register in which the curriculum and knowledge is framed will
determine, according to Foucault, who will be able to access and apply it. In this
sense, it is potentially restrictive and privileges those who are already familiar
with such registers. However, Foucault can also see the potential for change or
challenge – students who are not originally familiar with the register or language
associated with a given curriculum can still acquire, through education, the
knowledge associated with it and use this power for alternative purposes.

I indicated in Chapter 1 that the neoliberal turn in state education that
occurred from the 1970s onwards (depending on the country and system in
question) led to a close connection being made between quantifiable education
progress and achievement on the one hand and economic productivity on the

other. It would be foolish to pretend that links were not made before this period
between state education and the health of a nation’s economy – what
distinguishes the neoliberal approach sought by many countries is the reliance on
measurable data to ascertain whether improvements in education are being made
and the potential effects these are having on Gross National Product or worker
efficiency (compared with competitors). The creation by the OECD and others of
international educational rankings according to specific tests (in the guise of PISA,
TIMSS, etc.) has reinforced these trends – the data is now arranged into neat
league tables where ministers and commentators can immediately chart the
performance of students in their country against dozens of others. Reporters
keenly relay to their readers the implications for government, schools, colleges
and business of a rise or fall in the rankings. Indeed, some jurisdictions (Finland,
South Korea, Singapore, for example) have been touted as educationally pre-
eminent on the basis of such rankings. It is important to state that these
international comparisons are not without any benefit – they do provide, at least,
the results of a sample of students in different countries on particular tasks. What
is more worrying is the reliance education ministries, journalists and chambers of
commerce attach to the findings. Alexander has written:

In many countries, including the UK, the potential of international student
achievement surveys such as TIMSS and PISA is being subverted by
political and media fixation on the resulting league tables. These prompt
not just well-founded efforts to learn from others’ success but also ill-
founded assertions about educational cause and effect, inappropriate
transplanting of the policies to which success is attributed, and even the
reconfiguring of entire national curricula to respond less to national
culture, values and needs than to the dubious claims of ‘international
benchmarking’ and ‘world class’ educational standards (Alexander 2012:
4).

Because international achievement surveys tend to focus on reading, mathematics
and science, those countries concerned with their place in the rankings (and
which country isn’t?) will often amend their curriculum in such a way as to
maximise the possibilities of rising in the next round of research. This invariably
means an increase in the study of native languages, mathematics and the ‘hard’
sciences at the expense of other subjects or activities that might be seen as being
important to children and young people as part of their education. The creative
arts, vocational subjects, the humanities (in general) and physical education are
typical victims as a result of this emphasis on ‘core’ subjects. No-one is saying
that students shouldn’t be adept in their mother tongue, the use of number and
knowledge of scientific theory and experimentation. The concern is that
increasingly, for many, this becomes an almost exclusive menu with everything
else relegated to the role of meagre side dishes.


In terms of philosophy of education, discussion of the curriculum has had a
long and detailed development. For R. S. Peters, education was a form of initiation
into a public world, a form of social inheritance. He says in Ethics and Education:

A child born with a consciousness not yet differentiated into beliefs,
purposes, and feelings … The objects of consciousness are first and
foremost objects in a public world that are marked out and differentiated
by a public language … Differentiation develops as the mastery of the basic
skills opens the gates to a vast inheritance by those versed in more specific
modes of thought and awareness such as science, history, mathematics,
religion and aesthetic awareness … for all who get on inside such a form of
thought … the contours of that public world are transformed. The process
of initiation into such modes of thought and awareness is the process of
education (Peters 1970: 49-51).

It is clear from this passage that Peters envisages a curriculum that goes well
beyond a focus on native language, mathematics and science. Education is
essentially an induction into the complexities of culture, giving children and
young people the language and background in order to engage in public discourse
and debate. It is therefore imperative that students are exposed to the creative
arts and humanities as part of this experience, to acquire the necessary
knowledge to appreciate where they have come from, what their predecessors
created and discovered, and how the world is evolving in their own lifetime. Paul
Hirst, a colleague of Peters, developed ideas regarding the aims of a curriculum
and what constituted conceptual and propositional knowledge within a
curriculum. According to Christopher Winch:

For Hirst, propositional knowledge is important, but so also are
conceptual structure and methods of investigation. Forms of knowledge
can be distinguished through variation across all three of these
dimensions. For Hirst, this approach yielded distinctive areas of:
Mathematics and Logic, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences and History,
Literature and the Fine Arts, Morals, Religion and Philosophy (Winch
2013: 133).

What distinguishes both of these theories of knowledge (and the curricula
associated with them) is the apparent absence of vocational subjects from the
area of discussion. Perhaps this is due to the focus on culture (for Peters) and
propositional and conceptual knowledge (for Hirst) in the passages above. It is a
significant absence, nevertheless. One key player for whom vocational education
was at the forefront of any worthwhile programme of study was John Dewey.
Dewey was concerned over the separation of theory and application as a means of

understanding how knowledge is conceptualised which he traced back,
ultimately, to Plato. With this separation evolved a hierarchy where the
‘intellectual’ took precedence over the ‘practical’, the ‘mental’ over the ‘physical’:

The contempt for the physical as compared with mathematical and logical
science, for the senses and sense observation; the feeling that knowledge is
high and worthy in the degree in which it deals with ideal symbols instead
of with the concrete; the scorn of particulars except as they are deductively
brought under a universal; the disregard for the body; the depreciation of
the arts and crafts as intellectual instrumentalities, all sought shelter and
found sanction under this estimate of the respective values of experience
and reason – or, what came to the same thing, of the practical and the
intellectual (Dewey 2007: 196).

I am not trying to set up Dewey in opposition to Peters and Hirst – after all, he
values many of the same things as them, particularly in the importance he
attaches to the arts, for instance. What must be noted, however, is Dewey’s
particular emphasis on the relationship between theory and practice in his theory
of knowledge and attitudes to education. His concern was that this separation at
the level of epistemology is then reflected in what and how children learn. From
the ‘intellectual’ and the ‘practical’, we then devise curricula that are termed
‘academic’ and ‘vocational’ for different classes of students as though these were
inherently different things. As a philosophical pragmatist, Dewey believed these
were false dichotomies:

[W]e have no right to call anything knowledge except where our activity
has actually produced certain physical changes in things, which agree with
and confirm the conception entertained (Dewey 2007: 247).

A balanced curriculum should be one where the mind, hand, body and eye
should be resorted to equally. Students steered into either an academic or a
vocational curriculum are deprived in similar measure – the only difference is
that the academic student will at least benefit from participating in a curriculum
that has a certain prestige and opportunities for advancement. One of Dewey’s
goals in Democracy and Education is to raise the reputation of vocational learning
to an extent that there is no longer any need to view it as separate from the
academic:

[A]n education which acknowledges the full intellectual and social
meaning of a vocation would include instruction in the historic
background of present conditions; training in science to give intelligence
and initiative in dealing with material and agencies of production; and the
study of economics, civics, and politics, to bring the future worker into

 touch with the problems of the day and the various methods proposed for
its improvement (Dewey 2007: 234).

In such circumstances, with such a curriculum, the partition between the
academic and the vocational is steadily dismantled – there is a sense of the
learning as a holistic process where students are able to investigate the dynamic
between thought and deed. There is also an interaction between and across
disciplines – study is not confined always to discrete subject areas. Dewey was
not against learning defined according to subjects as such – he could see the
benefit that comes from learning within a disciplinary framework (like Peters and
Hirst). What Dewey wanted to avoid was a situation where the emphasis on
subject learning came at the expense of exploring opportunities for cross-
curricula development. He believed ‘[t]he scheme of a curriculum must take
account of the adaptation of studies to the needs of the existing community life’
(Dewey 2007: 145). Just as the social world does not necessarily fit knowledge
into neat boxes then neither always should the education system which forms
part of it.

More recently, John White has advocated a curriculum similar to Dewey’s in its
relationship between subject areas and curriculum themes or topics. White has
stated:

The timetabled curriculum is not necessarily confined to school subjects.
We need to know the most appropriate vehicles for realising the aims and
should not assume that these will always be discrete subjects … Topic-
based or integrated courses; various practical activities; periods of free
private study; wider groupings such as ‘the arts’ rather than music, visual
arts and literature as separate subjects, are all in the ring … On the other
hand, subjects do reflect to some extent logical differences in the
organisation of knowledge and awareness; and they have behind them
years of experience in internal structuring and sequencing of learning. It
makes sense to draw on their strengths while avoiding their weaknesses
(White 2004: 28).

What we have, drawing on the work of Dewey and White particularly, is an idea of
the curriculum as broad based, incorporating a range of subjects and topics that
might be discrete or across curriculum areas, and value the application of
knowledge as much as abstraction and theory. In the next section, I will explore
how this overview of curriculum frameworks informs the discussion on what
might constitute a democratic socialist curriculum.


*




So what could a democratic socialist curriculum look like? Is it credible to even
raise the idea of such a thing? The concept, on first hearing, might sound
somewhat far-fetched. However, if, as I contended at the beginning of this chapter,
the arrangement of programmes of study in state education is itself a political act,
then why shouldn’t we apply a certain political ideology to the curriculum? Seen
in this light, the endeavor does not seem so strange.

I wrote in the previous chapter how recent thinkers on socialism (Bobbio,
Mouffe and Honneth) have identified the relationship between socialism and
democracy as a vital element in democratic socialist thinking for the twenty-first
century. Dewey therefore acts as the cornerstone, bringing together aspects of
politics and education under the overall concept of ‘democracy’. Indeed, Honneth
explicitly acknowledges Dewey’s contribution to the search for a way of life that
embodies creativity and flourishing within social bonds:

The starting point for Dewey’s far-reaching considerations consists in his
claim that ‘associational’ or ‘communal’ behavior [sic] constitutes a basic
feature of all things; therefore, as history unfolds, potentials are unleashed
and realized by the establishment of connections between hitherto
isolated ‘individual things’ (Honneth 2017: 60).

What comes across clearly here is a reiteration of associational life and
organisation – the idea that services and processes are best arranged when the
people involved and affected are responsible for the decisions taken. In the words
of Hirst, ‘associationism has a strong potential to attract radicals, who favour
alternative and democratic organization, as well as those who favour the principle
of consumer choice’ (Hirst 1996: 433). Associationism is akin to forms of
participatory budgeting that have been implemented across various countries
with varying degrees of success. One of the most notable internationally, in terms
of education, has been the administration in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul,
Brazil. Gandin and Apple (2002) have gone into detail on how the city
administration (then under the control of the Workers’ Party) created a network
of ‘citizen schools’ where control of the curriculum was a cumulative and ongoing
process between teachers, students, parents and local districts within the city to
establish a curriculum that best suited local needs through the forum of organised
debate and discussion. The benefits and drawbacks of such an experiment are
easy to identify – the process allows stakeholders to voice their proposals in a
potentially fair and meaningful way so they feel that the curriculum belongs to
them at a certain level. Nevertheless, the procedures involved could be seen as
cumbersome, time-consuming and bureaucratic, inhibiting the very people from

participating that the project seeks to involve. One of the challenges of a
democratic socialist curriculum is to incorporate the principle of stakeholder
voice without becoming mired in interminable committees that resolve little and
create frustration.

One possible solution to the tension between democratic participation in the
curriculum and administrative overkill is offered by the ‘Cambridge Primary
Review’, a team of researchers based at the University of Cambridge. As part of
their final report, Children, their World, their Education (Alexander 2010), the
review recommended a primary curriculum seventy per cent of which was
devised nationally and thirty per cent locally. This would have the advantage of
having parts of the curriculum that are consistent across localities (an important
consideration as populations become increasingly mobile) but giving space for
innovation and experiment where individual schools or districts can tailor the
learning to their specific contexts. On a small scale, this epitomises Mouffe’s
notion of a multipolar world:

Democracy in a multipolar world can take a variety of forms, according to
the different modes of inscription of the democratic ideal in a variety of
contexts (Mouffe 2014: 28).

Where Mouffe differs in her approach is that she identifies the multipolar world
as a site of conflict between oppositional forces who define and implement the
democratic ideal in different ways. This sense of opposition and conflict need not
be case where schools or local authorities in different areas are formulating a
variety of measures to enable them to meet the needs of stakeholders in relation
to the curriculum. The centres of power could, in my example, be complementary
or act in parallel.

My proposal shouldn’t be confused with examples of deregulation that have
happened in England, for instance, where schools have been allowed to opt out of
local authority control and create a direct connection between themselves and
central government. As part of this change, schools that choose to become
academies (or are created from scratch as free schools) are no longer required to
teach the English National Curriculum – they are only required, by law, to provide
a ‘balanced and broadly based curriculum’ (HM Government 2010). Superficially,
this appears to model what I have been saying above about devolving power
down to local stakeholders. However, the reality has often been very different –
the deregulation has allowed some corporate players to amass large ‘multi
academy trusts’ where the room for individual schools and teachers to innovate
and contextualise on the curriculum is limited. Some multi academy trusts run on
a strict profit basis and display in a significant way the traits of educational
neoliberalism I discussed in Chapter 1. A democratic socialist curriculum, by

contrast, must be subject to democratic control for it to be defined as such
(according to my interpretation). As Bobbio reiterates:

[A] political system is democratic where collective decisions, i.e. decisions
which affect the whole of a community (no matter how small or large), are
taken by all of its members [my emphasis] (Bobbio 2007: 90).

It is not enough that power over the curriculum has been distributed
downwards from central government – the question then arises: ‘Who has the
power been distributed to?’ I have said elsewhere:

The democratic curriculum has, at its core, the idea that learning is a
negotiation between those with a vested interest in such learning.
Stakeholders are likely to include government, educational administrators,
teachers, students, employers and the local community. There are practical
implications in terms of the ability, confidence and age of the students
involved, as well as the potential difficulty in consulting the various
stakeholders over individual programmes. However, the principle of
negotiation is key—no one agent or agency should own the curriculum to
the extent of determining aims and objectives without the agreement of
other stakeholders (Hopkins 2014b: 426).

To this extent, the democratic socialist curriculum and the liberal democratic
curriculum are synonymous – there should not be, where feasibly possible, a
sense of imposition or lack of ownership for those the curriculum directly affects.
I accept that there are issues regarding the level of agency we should grant to
children (especially very young children) but even here we need to tread carefully
when using phrases such as ‘these are the things children must learn’ – research
has shown that even young children can make informed comments and decisions
on their learning (see Brough 2012 and Flutter 2007). A democratic socialist
curriculum needs to have students’ voices (children included) at the epicentre of
any decision making.


*



Alongside the communal or associational aspects of Dewey cited by Honneth
earlier on in this chapter, there was also talk of ‘potentials [being] unleashed and
realized’ (Honneth 2017: 60). What goes into a curriculum is as important as who
makes the decision itself. I have already referred in this chapter to the tendency in
many countries to select students according to ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’ criteria

and steer them into what is seen as the appropriate curriculum for them. The
assumption is that students will excel in either one area or the other but a state
curriculum cannot accommodate both aspects for all students. This situation does
not necessarily have to be the case, however. In Central Europe and Scandinavia
(for example), there is a strong educational culture that incorporates the
academic and the vocational into an integrated curriculum (as a means of
articulating my notion of equality of treatment outlined in the). Georg
Kerschensteiner is a key historical figure in the development of such a curriculum.
Kerschensteiner was the Munich director of schools in the late nineteenth
century. According to Winch and Hyland:

Kerschensteiner’s [method] in Munich was to increase the practical
element in school education in the Volksschule or elementary school … and
to develop a mandatory element of college education for apprentices …
Thus developed the Berufsschule or vocational college, which worked in
concert with the workplace to develop an integrated vocational education
for apprentices between the ages of 14 and 20 (Winch and Hyland 2007:
34).

Kerschensteiner was influential in the highly-respected German apprenticeship
model that has attracted over the decades students who aspire to a well-regarded
industrial training instead of (or alongside) entry into the world of higher
education. The links between Dewey’s and Kerschensteiner’s theories of
education are tangible, particularly in the emphasis they place on fusing academic
and vocational aspects of learning into a given curriculum and, interestingly, the
democratic implications for students undertaking such learning:
‘[Kerschensteiner] considered vocational education – which he wanted to be
recognised as an essential component of education - to be an important requisite
for citizenship’ (Gonon 2009: 15). Both thinkers were viewing education from a
holistic and social point of view – learning needed to coordinate the mind and
senses through what Dewey called ‘occupations’. Dewey defined this term as:

[A] continuous activity having a purpose. Education through occupations
consequently combines within itself more of the factors conducive to
learning than any other method. It calls instincts and habits into play; it is a
foe of passive receptivity (Dewey 2007: 228).

The learning involved is collaborative – as well as integrating different aspects of
a person’s awareness and intelligence, it requires students to work together in
order to achieve the purpose (I will expand on these ideas in Chapter 4 when I
discuss pedagogy). In this sense, it is similar to social constructivist views of
education based on the work of Lev Vygotsky and others. What differentiates
Dewey and Kerschensteiner from some in social constructivist theory is the

deliberate emphasis they place on collaborative learning, citizenship and
democracy.

A contemporary democratic socialist curriculum, therefore, needs to be
integrative as well as democratic in its composition. It challenges the notion that
students can be divided into broad categories such as ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’
because this presents a two-dimensional view of what knowledge is and how it
relates to the world. An unintegrated curriculum does not provide students with
the necessary opportunities to investigate the relationships between theoretical
and practical knowledge in the way Dewey advocated. Students are encouraged to
over-specialise in a certain area of the curriculum at the expense of other
potential learning. Over-specialisation was a genuine concern for Dewey – there is
a ‘tendency for every distinctive vocation to become too dominant, too exclusive
and absorbing in its specialized aspect. This means emphasis upon skill or
technical method at the expense of meaning’ (Dewey 2007: 227). Dewey was
speaking here of craft-based learning but the same could be said of concentration
on certain academic subjects to the detriment of other elements of the curriculum.
Over-specialisation is a form of restriction and prevents students from
experiencing the full range of educational opportunities. It can also reinforce
social reproduction in terms of the expectations placed upon students regarding
their goals and future roles (particularly for women, students of colour, and
working-class students).

It is outside the scope of this book to give a detailed account of what a specific
curriculum should look like for a given age group or phase of education. What this
book is endeavoring to say is that democratic socialism places a premium on the
collective wealth and benefits that need to be shared throughout communities. A
democratic socialist curriculum, if it is to have meaning, needs to enable all
students to access the variety of intellectual, technological, athletic, practical and
artistic opportunities that are potentially on offer (again, in order to facilitate
equality of treatment). Students have their own interests and aptitudes and this
will reflect what they ultimately go on to pursue in detail. But specialisation needs
to occur towards the end point of the educational journey and not before.
Exposure to different subjects, technologies and crafts also enables children and
young people to appreciate those areas in which they do not excel but in which
others do. We learn to appreciate our diversity within such a collectivity. This is
similar to Mouffe when she writes:

[The] aim should be to create a bond among … different components, while
nevertheless respecting their differences … in creating a form of
commonality that leaves room for heterogeneity (Mouffe 2013: 49).

What I am arguing for, in effect, is a return to the common curriculum, a place
where students encounter a sharing of experiences, where they learn to work
together and respect their different ideas, skills and interests. It would be a
flexible curriculum because it would be open to the various stakeholders to
suggest changes or innovations. I also suspect it would be a combination of
subject- and topic-based learning depending what was being investigated or
discussed.


*


The success of a curriculum should not be predicated on the results of a few
subjects but requires a much more rounded view – this is why Dewey and
Kerschensteiner were keen to underline the role education plays in a democratic
society. Citizenship is, to some extent, the centre of a socialist, democratic
curriculum – if success in a curriculum has to be measured, Dewey and
Kerschensteiner would, undoubtedly, have put the ability to play a productive
part in a democratic society at the heart of it. Citizenship has come to play an
important role in the curriculum in many countries in Western Europe
(especially) over the past two decades. This has been due to a number of factors,
the most prominent of which are the perceived drop in political participation
amongst young people in so-called ‘mature’ democracies and the terrorist threat
associated with religious and political extremism in contemporary politics.
Citizenship education has been seen as a means of re-establishing national
identity and encourage young people to feel a sense of belonging within their
national communities. Bobbio has identified a possible source for some of the
disaffection with democracy amongst both the young and old:

The sovereignty of the individual citizen is limited by the fact that the
major decisions which affect economic development either are made
without consulting representative bodies, or if they are consulted it is only
after decisions have already been made in the corridors of power (Bobbio
2007: 83).

It is with such reflections that governments fear students will veer towards the
radical left and right. Citizenship in the curriculum has lead to a variety of
practices, from a strictly ‘book-based’ approach where students are expected to
absorb the events and facts surrounding their national political history, to a more
participatory interpretation that involves students engaging with local or national
projects that have some political significance. One of the criticisms raised about
some citizenship programmes is that they conform to the prevailing culture of

measurement in education. Gert Biesta and Robert Lawy have spoken of ‘[t]he
idea of citizenship as outcome’ (Biesta and Lawy 2006: 72) and go on to say:

[citizenship as outcome] reveals a strong instrumentalist orientation in the
idea of citizenship education. The focus is mainly on the effective means to
bring about ‘good citizenship’ rather than on the question of what ‘good
citizenship’ actually is or might be (Biesta and Lawy 2006: 72).

There is often a lack of debate over what constitutes ‘good citizenship’. It is seen
as a given, something upon which any ‘reasonable’ person would agree. In
England, there has been a clear case of this in the formulation of what have been
called ‘Fundamental British Values’. These were formulated by the government
after a scare concerning supposed religious radicalisation in a group of schools in
Birmingham in 2014. State school teachers are now expected to adhere to
‘Fundamental British Values’ as part of the Teachers’ Standards (DfE 2011). As I
have said elsewhere:

On the surface, FBV could be seen as relatively benign – a statement of
values that most ‘reasonable’ people would conform and adhere to as a
means of working and living together within a multicultural society.
However, the labelling of these values as ‘British’ has caused considerable
debate … There is little that is inherently ‘British’ regarding the values
themselves and it is often taken as read what the concepts mean (Hopkins
2018: 434).

In contrast, Dewey had a much more expansive view of citizenship and
democratic education:

A society which makes provision for participation in its good of all its
members on equal terms and which secures flexible readjustment of its
institutions through interaction of the different forms of associated life is
… democratic. Such a society must have a type of education which gives
individuals a personal interest in social relationships and control, and the
habits of mind which secure social change without introducing disorder [my
emphasis] (Dewey 2007: 76).

A democratic socialist curriculum should see citizenship as integral to all learning
if the aim is to encourage students to develop the attitudes and skills that are
necessary to participating in a democratic society. How citizenship is
accommodated within the curriculum will depend upon the age of the students
and the environment in which the learning takes place. As I have advocated, using
Dewey as a forerunner, the notion of citizenship needs to be as expansive as
appropriate, encompassing the local, national and international in its direction

and scope. Students should be encouraged to see themselves as citizens beyond
the confines of local and national borders. Honneth makes links between Dewey’s
notion of expanding communication and early socialist theories,

the presumption of a strong resemblance between, on the one hand,
Dewey’s claim that all of human history is marked by the gradual
expansion of communication and social interaction, and, on the other hand,
the notion that early socialists believed that they could apply to the
economic sphere (Honneth 2017: 63).

Globalisation is not just an economic phenomenon – social media and other
technological innovations have made communication across borders easier than
in the past. Dewey’s ideas on the gradual expansion of social interaction appear to
be playing out through the increased use of digital technology and widely-
accessible platforms. The notion of citizenship that limits itself to purely local or
national domains is ignoring these developments in human communication. A
democratic socialist curriculum needs to acknowledge these developments – they
are, to some extent, the social and cultural parallels to early Marxist thought on
the economic interests of the working class transcending national borders. As
mentioned in Chapter 2, identities are becoming increasingly fluid as issues of
gender, ethnicity, environmentalism, human rights, sexual orientation and
lifestyle generally play a greater role in how people envisage themselves and how
they are perceived by others. Technology is the vehicle through which people are
making international connections based on such identities. This is not to
downplay the the vital local, regional and national identities people have within
their cultural DNA but citizenship education that has a solely national aspect, for
example, will inevitably restrict the more expansive, international elements of
people’s sense of belonging.

Citizenship in the democratic socialist curriculum should probably look to the
form of cosmopolitanism advocated by Kwame Anthony Appiah. Appiah states:

So there are two strands that intertwine in the notion of cosmopolitanism.
One is the idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch
beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kin, or even
the more formal ties of a shared citizenship. The other is that we take
seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives,
which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them
significance (Appiah 2007: 14).

This account is attractive as it describes our ties and duties to others using both a
wide angle and a narrow angle lens, viewing our relationships to people in
general and in particular. It will also potentially create tensions which the

curriculum (and those involved with it) need to be able to facilitate – the debate
over Brexit, for instance, has demonstrated the divisions that are created in the
debate over the general and the particular, the national and the international.
What a democratic socialist curriculum cannot do, in my view, is restrict such
discussion to a discrete, standalone subject entitled ‘citizenship’, ‘civics’ or the
like. If democracy, in Dewey’s conception of the term, is more a way of life than a
means of selecting political representatives, then citizenship should be explored
throughout the curriculum whether this is arranged according to subject or
theme. This is likely to enable citizenship to come across as more relevant and
important to students than when it is dealt with separately (and often as a subject
outside of the inner ‘core’ of subjects).


*

This chapter has taken, as its focus, the notion of a socialist, democratic
curriculum. I have argued that a democratic socialist curriculum for the twenty-
first century should be open to discussion from a variety of stakeholders (local
and national) in terms of what should go into a programme of study. The chapter
has also advocated a more integrated approach to the curriculum, based on the
thinking of Dewey and Kerschensteiner, to encompass both ‘academic’ and
‘vocational’ elements for all students. The notion of a common curriculum
available to everyone is in order for students to develop their understanding of
the links between theoretical and the practical in collaborative ways. Finally, I
argue that citizenship is a central aspect of a democratic socialist curriculum if the
aim is to encourage students to participate in a democratic society. Citizenship
needs to be incorporated across the curriculum and reflect the dynamic nature of
twenty-first century identities facilitated by the onset of digital technologies. The
next chapter will look at how pedagogy can be informed by current democratic
socialist thinking.







References

Alexander, R. (ed.) (2010), Children, their World, their Education: Final Report and
Recommendations of the Cambridge Primary Review, Abingdon: Routledge.

Alexander, R. (2012), Moral Panic, Miracle Cures and Educational Policy: what can
we really learn from international comparison?, Scottish Educational Review 44
(1): 4-21.

Appiah, K. A. (2007), Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in A World of Strangers, London:
Penguin.

Biesta, G. and Lawy, R. (2006), From teaching citizenship to learning democracy:
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Education, 36 (1): 63-79.

Bobbio, N. (2007), Which Socialism? Tr. Griffin, R., Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Student-Centred Curriculum Integration in Primary Schools, The Curriculum
Journal, 23 (2): 345–369.

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ttachment_data/file/665520/Teachers__Standards.pdf (Accessed 14 January
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Hirst, P. (1996), Associative Democracy: New Forms of Economic and Social
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Education 3-13, 46 (4): 433-440.

Kelly, A. V. (2009), The Curriculum: Theory and Practice (Sixth Edition), London:
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Mouffe, C. (2013), Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically, London: Verso.

Peters, R. S. (1970), Ethics and Education, London: Allen & Unwin.

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of Education, 47 (1): 128-146.

Winch, C. and Hyland, T. (2007), A guide to vocational education and training,
London: Continuum.


Chapter 4:
In Search of a Democratic Socialist Pedagogy


Just as it might sound counter-intuitive to discuss the idea of a democratic
socialist curriculum (as in the last chapter), so the same questions could be raised
about introducing the concept of a democratic socialist pedagogy. Pedagogy, after
all, is usually thought of as the science of teaching or transmitting knowledge.
Scientific investigation is often framed within the conventions of positivism (in
terms of research methodologies). According to Michael Crotty,

from this … viewpoint, scientists are required to keep the distinction
between objective, empirically verifiable knowledge and subjective,
unverifiable knowledge very much in mind. It emerges as the distinction
between fact and value and founds the goal of value-neutral science
(Crotty 1998: loc. 550 – 554).

Within such a paradigm, the political is subjective and therefore to be treated
with suspicion by those who aspire to be value-neutral. Granted, there are
certainly aspects of teaching and learning that lend themselves readily to such
investigations – the Behaviourist school of educational theory, although
comprehensively challenged on many of its central tenets, has still been able to
show the benefits of orthodox scientific study within the classroom. However, as
with any human endeavor, orthodox science can only tell part of the story.
Although the current educational climate is one that places considerable weight
on what is measurable, empirical and evidence-based, I contend that teaching is
as much an artform or creative pursuit as it is an object of scientific research.
There is a side to teaching that lends itself to narrative, the description and
analysis of the behaviour, thought and dialogue that occurs within a learning
environment during a certain passage of time. Teaching also involves the creation
of resources and artefacts that are then introduced into the classroom to
stimulate understanding and inspiration.

If we determine pedagogy, therefore, as a combination of science and art then,
perhaps, the notion of a democratic socialist pedagogy becomes more difficult to
dismiss. This more inclusive view of pedagogy is reinforced by Alexander’s own
definition – Alexander (2001) is himself an important thinker on pedagogy across
different national contexts: ‘pedagogy … is the act of teaching together with the
ideas, values and beliefs by which that act is informed, sustained and justified’
(Alexander 2008: 4). If values and beliefs are integral to our concept of pedagogy,
then political views are likely to be a factor in how teachers teach. What needs to

be addressed if this is the case are concerns over indoctrination – how can we
prevent political views spilling over into situations where students are vulnerable
to one-sided opinions or even brainwashing? When I speak of pedagogy in this
chapter, I will not be discussing specific political content. It is right and
appropriate from an ethical standpoint that teachers present a broad and
balanced view on any given subject (particularly if the issue involves sensitive
political, religious or moral overtones). My focus in this chapter is to explore how
and where current democratic socialist theory can inform the way we teach. Is
there something in the writings of those democratic socialist thinkers I have
chosen to concentrate upon that can clarify or challenge how we interact with one
another in learning situations? How is knowledge constructed and who has the
responsibility for this construction?

One of the texts that has been extremely influential in terms of pedagogy as a
form of empowerment has been Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire
takes a radical stance on teaching methods and the hierarchies these often entail.
Friere criticises what he calls the ‘banking’ model of pedagogy where ‘the
educator’s role is to regulate the way the world “enters into’ the students’ (Freire
1996: 57). In its place, Freire offers the concept of ‘problem-posing’ education:

[P]roblem-posing education … breaks with the vertical patterns
characteristic of banking education … Through dialogue, the teacher-of-
the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term
emerges: teacher-student with student-teachers. The teacher is not merely
the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself [sic] taught in dialogue with
the students, who in turn while being taught also teach (Freire 1996: 61).

It must be acknowledged that Freire’s concepts concerning pedagogy were
formulated primarily during his time as an adult educator with rural, illiterate
students. However, his advocacy of dialogue and the flattening of educational
hierarchies as part of the teaching and learning process has pertinence across all
phases of education. If, as I argued in Chapter 3, it is important that children and
young people have a say into what goes into their own curriculum, then a
pedagogy that emphasises dialogue and the sharing of ideas and knowledge
across the classroom is more likely to facilitate such discussion. Honneth, again
referring to Dewey, put this into a broader context:

Dewey argues that the more potentials we unleash and realize, the more
freely the individual elements will be able to interact with one another.
This moves Dewey to conclude that within the reality of human
communities, possibilities can only be completely realized if all members
are able to participate as freely as possible in the kind of meaningful

 communication that is typical of such communities (Honneth 2017: 60-
61).

I am arguing that classrooms are such communities. This doesn’t mean that the
teacher is absolved of all responsibility, as is often depicted in nightmare
scenarios of ‘progressive’ education run wild with children as masters and
teachers as servants. Dewey states that the teacher ‘can arrange conditions that
are conducive to community activity’ (Dewey 1950: 64) as part of her or his
professional duties. What such a situation encourages is an atmosphere in which
students are treated as partners rather than as receptacles in the educational
process. I mentioned in Chapter 1 of educational cultures that strive for targets
and results in an effort to demonstrate ‘measurable progress’ – such cultures are
in danger of reverting to the ‘banking’ mode of education described by Freire in
their bid to maximise outcomes.


*


So what does dialogue actually mean in relation to pedagogy? How is talk used
in ways that are participatory and meaningful? And, importantly, where does this
connect with recent democratic socialist thinking? Robin Alexander has been a
significant advocate of dialogical teaching in the classroom – for him, such
teaching has five recurring principles:

1. collective: teachers and children address learning tasks together,
whether as a group or as a class;
2. reciprocal: teachers and children listen to each other, share ideas and
consider alternative viewpoints;
3. supportive: children articulate their ideas freely, without fear of
embarrassment over ‘wrong’ answers; and they help each other to
reach common understandings;
4. cumulative: teachers and children build on their own and each others’
ideas and chain them into coherent lines of thinking and enquiry;
5. purposeful: teachers plan and steer classroom talk with specific
educational goals in view
(Alexander 2008: 112-113).

What this summary of dialogical teaching and learning has is a emphasis on the
common and collective without sacrificing individual students’ attitudes and
ideas. This is the pedagogical counterpart to my thoughts on the curriculum in
Chapter 3 – students, in collaboration with each other and the teacher, are able to
explore, through supported speech, the issues, experiments or problems they are

working on in an atmosphere of ‘two heads are better than one’. The learning is
inherently social. Freire has said that ‘[o]nly dialogue, which requires critical
thinking, is also capable of generating critical thinking’ (Freire 1996: 73). By
adopting such a process, in Alexander’s words,

we see young children discussing with increasing sophistication and
sensitivity the dynamics and mechanisms of interaction: the use of eye
contact, listening taking turns, handling the dominant individual and
supporting the reticent one, engaging with what others say rather than
merely voicing their own opinions (Alexander 2006: 115).

What we have here, in effect, is a pedagogical model for what democratic
education (in the Deweyan mode) ought to look like. The students in this passage
are developing the skills and attitudes one associates with citizenship in a
democratic society. But what connections can be made to democratic socialist
thought – is there any sense in which dialogical learning finds an echo in the work
of contemporary democratic socialist thinkers? If we take dialogical learning to be
an instance of direct democracy (where individuals articulate their thoughts and
opinions directly in a public forum rather than mediated through a
representative) then Bobbio’s writings do yield potential links: ‘the concept of
direct democracy is the central idea, I would almost say the sole central idea,
behind the socialist theory of the state’ (Bobbio 2007: 79). I accept that there is a
jump between classroom activity and theories of the state but the notion that
direct democracy is a socialist idea and that the classroom can be an instance of
direct democracy in action (when suitably arranged and facilitated) is an
important one. It reinforces the idea that learning, like decision making, should be
a social and collective enterprise although the teacher will often need to retain
ultimate responsibility in the classroom (depending upon the age of the students
and context in which the learning takes place). That said, we must also be careful
to not make a ‘fetish’ out of direct democracy (Bobbio 2007: 78-82) and see it as a
panacea for all of society’s ills or a cure for every poor decision-making process –
by placing too much store in such a system (within the classroom and elsewhere),
we are likely to be deceived by its apparent virtues.

Honneth also thinks collaborative learning actually leads to more effective
answers and better decision making.

The more those who are affected by a problem are involved in the search
for solutions to that problem, the more such socialhistorical [sic]
experiments will lead to better and more stable solutions (Honneth 2017:
61).

The exchange of different viewpoints that comes with dialogical forms of
pedagogy enables students to peer into a problem and look at it from the various
sides before establishing a fact or coming to a conclusion. The solution is more
stable because it has been built by many hands, is the product not of a hierarchy
where the information is fed to students in an ‘input-output’ manner but where
they have had some ownership of the process and the endeavours that have gone
into it.

Dialogical learning is a good example of student voice. I will be discussing
student voice in relation to educational governance in the next chapter but some
commentators have gone so far as to use dialogue to encourage students to work
with teachers on pedagogical practice. Jean Flutter (2007), for instance, makes a
strong case for the use of ‘pupil voice’ as a means of developing teachers’ own
practice by eliciting ongoing feedback from students that will, in time, develop
into a dialogue on what is effective teaching and learning. This is, in a small way, a
manifestation of Freire’s concepts of the teacher-student and student-teacher.
Flutter acknowledges that such negotiations need to be gradual and dealt with
sensitively (to ensure teacher professionalism is not undermined and that all
students in a given class, and not just the most articulate, are heard).What it does
show is that the appraisal of pedagogy is not necessarily a procedure left to the
teacher and her/his colleagues but can involve the students as well. Dialogue,
when trust has been engendered, can often bridge the apparent divide between
the roles of teacher and student.


*


I have made much in my advocacy of the benefits of dialogical learning and the
use of discussion in the preceding section. But talk is always prone to trigger
conflict in the classroom as elsewhere. Conflict is usually seen as a thing to avoid
because of the emotions and actions it produces. Mouffe, on the other hand, takes
a different stance towards it:

Conflict in liberal democracies cannot and should not be eradicated, since
the specificity of pluralist democracy is precisely the recognition and the
legitimation of conflict (Mouffe 2013: 7).

The reasoning is clear. According to Mouffe, contemporary liberal democratic
societies are, by their nature, plural – there is no agreement on what constitutes a
good life. People will adhere to what John Rawls has called ‘reasonable though
incompatible religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines’ (Rawls 2005: xviii).
For Mouffe, conflict is necessary because it is only through conflict that gains are

made by disenfranchised and disempowered groups in society. Conflict also
demonstrates the fact that, in modern, plural democracies, there are often
opposing belief systems that cannot be drawn together into some sort of
consensus in a given aspect of life – it is a manifestation of deep-rooted diversity.

How can we deal with conflict in the classroom if, as Mouffe states, it is
something that is fundamental to contemporary democratic societies and should
not be eradicated? One possible answer is by using Alexander’s depiction of what
he calls ‘primordial values’ in relation to pedagogy. Alexander describes these
values as:

• Individualism puts self above others and personal rights before
collective responsibilities. It emphasises unconstrained freedom of
action and thought.
• Community centres on human interdependence, caring for others,
sharing and collaborating.
• Collectivism also emphasises human interdependence, but only in so
far as it serves the larger needs of society, or the state … as a whole.
[emphasis in the original] (Alexander 2008: 100-101).

I noted in Chapter 2 the trends in current democratic socialist thinking towards
an engagement with some of the central tenets of liberalism (especially the
importance of individual rights and the need to respect individual identities).
Looking at Alexander’s list above, a democratic socialist pedagogy would need to
probably incorporate all three elements in some shape or form. I would, however,
expect an emphasis on the first two at the expense of the latter one. This is
because students need to be able to have freedom of thought and action (this is
central to dialogical learning) although this cannot be unconstrained because
education, as I have said previously, tends towards the ‘community’ element in
Alexander’s set of values. Conflict often comes at the interface between the
individual and the community – people often assume or acquire their sense of
rights and freedoms through their association with the communities they identify
with. With contentious issues, the rights associated with speech (in the school,
college or elsewhere) often come into conflict with the rights of others in the
classroom community not to be abused, victimised, etc. A democratic socialist
pedagogy, when using dialogical learning particularly, needs to strike a balance
between individual rights and the rights of different communities when using
discussion as a form of learning.

Socratic questioning is one possible way of addressing this balance – it
challenges the source of the conflict in ways that are not aggressive or
inflammatory and encourages the students to ‘think through’ their views and
opinions and arrive at an answer, through discussion with others, that has been

through a sort of refining filter. Socratic questioning will not eradicate conflict (or
its less volatile variant, profound disagreement) – Mouffe and Rawls have shown
that this is an inevitable consequence of the diversity that epitomises modern
democracies. However, the probing and seeking for clarification that comes with
such questioning enables students (and the teacher) the space and permission to
think. In such an environment, the individual is respected but is also seen as part
of something greater – the collective endeavour towards a firmer understanding
of the world in which we live and the role we have to play within it. This doesn’t
minimise conflict but prevents it from destroying the very aim it is trying to seek.
Dewey put the process neatly:

The school has the function … of coordinating within the disposition of
each individual the diverse influences of the various social environments
he enters … The development within the young of the attitudes and
dispositions necessary to the continuous and progressive life of a society …
takes place through the intermediary of the environment (Dewey 2007:
21).

A democratic socialist pedagogy, using the tools of dialogical learning and socratic
questioning, offers the prospect of valuing both the individual student and the
communities in which she/he is a participant. It is on this balance between
respect for the individual and the demands of a diverse society where
contemporary democratic socialism attempts to find its footing.


*


This chapter has looked at the idea of a democratic socialist pedagogy. I have
argued that applying a political ideology to the concept of pedagogy is not
counter-intuitive if we see the term as a combination of both art and science.
Beliefs and values do play an important part in both the teacher’s and students’
notions of what constitutes effective teaching and learning. Dialogical learning
epitomises the idea that we come to acquire knowledge and understanding
through our interaction with others. In this sense, facilitated discussion enables
us to get to the heart of the matter – it is a communal enterprise. I advocate the
use of socratic questioning as a means of probing views and opinions and
addressing concerns over conflict when debating controversial issues. Socratic
questioning allies itself with dialogical learning in acknowledging the individual
student within a process that is inherently social.

References

Alexander, R. (2001), Culture and Pedagogy, Oxford: Blackwell.

Alexander, R. (2008), Essays on Pedagogy, Abingdon: Routledge.

Bobbio, N. (2007), Which Socialism? Tr. Griffin, R., Cambridge: Polity Press.

Crotty, M. (1998), The Foundations of Social Research, London: Sage.

Dewey, J. (2007 [1916]), Democracy and Education, Teddington: Echo Library.

Dewey, J. (1950 [1938]), Experience and Education, New York: Macmillan.

Flutter, J. (2007) Teacher Development and Pupil Voice, The Curriculum Journal,
18 (3): 343–354.

Freire, P. (1996 [1970]), The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, London: Penguin.

Honneth, A. (2017), The Idea of Socialism: Towards a Renewal, tr. Joseph Ganahl,
Cambridge: Polity Press.

Mouffe, C. (2013), Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically, London: Verso.

Rawls, J. (2005), Political Liberalism (Expanded Edition), New York: Columbia
University Press.


Chapter 5:
Democratic Socialism and Governance in Education


In Chapter 1, I outlined a climate in education that tended towards the
neoliberal with regards to emphasising efficiency (in relation to measurable
outcomes), customer choice (for parents, carers or the student), international
comparison and competition (in the form of PISA, TIMSS and the like), and the
role of the private sector in the running of schools and colleges. I stated in Chapter
1 that the neoliberal turn in education has led to a movement away from the
social or civic aspects of state education towards a situation where education is
increasingly seen as a private transaction between the consumer on one side
(student, parent, carer, etc.) and the provider on the other. Parallel to this is a
curriculum that places a premium on a ‘core’ set of subjects to bolster national
performance in international educational rankings as well as industrial growth
and productivity. In some jurisdictions currently, there is sometimes little sense
of the wider aspects of education beyond the instrumental. Ruth Heilbronn,
Christine Doddington and Rupert Higham offer an alternative:

Taking humanistic aims for education means not starting from the idea of
skills and preparation for employment, although these are important, but
from a question about what should count as an educated young person
today. This question requires thinking about which human qualities we
wish to nurture and develop and how education may foster them
(Heilbronn et al. 2018: 3).

How can democratic socialism inform the way we arrange organisation and
decision making in educational institutions to enable a move away from over-
reliance on the neoliberal aspects of education and a greater appreciation of what
Heilbronn et al. are advocating? This chapter will explore this theme. There will
be a certain degree of overlap with Chapters 3 and 4 as issues of curriculum,
pedagogy and governance are intertwined to a greater or lesser degree.

I made a point in the previous chapter, using Bobbio, that schools and colleges
can often be seen as forms of democracy in miniature or, as Heilbronn et al.
describe them, ‘small democracies’ (Heilbronn et al. 2018: 6). As we have already
seen, Bobbio makes close connections between democracy and socialist theory
and practice. He states:

The history of the development of democracy in a certain country is made
to coincide with the various stages in the spread of political rights. I get the

 impression that it is not widely enough acknowledged that now when
there is talk of extending democracy something else is intended, namely
spreading participation in collective decision making to areas outside of
the strictly political sphere (Bobbio 2007: 113-114).

I have made reference already in this book to the idea of stakeholders in
education – those with a vested interest having a say in how an organisation is
controlled and managed. To widen the application of democracy, in the form of
stakeholder control in education, is, indeed, to spread participation in collective
decision making to areas outside of the political sphere or outside of what Rawls
has called the ‘basic structure’ (Rawls 2005: 257-285). I am making the same
argument here as I did in Chapter 3 regarding the curriculum – I am unconvinced
of the supposed political neutrality in relation to education systems. The creation,
maintenance and modification of state education are themselves political acts.

So a democratic socialist stance on governance in education takes democracy
as its starting point. As with the curriculum, this means devolving power as far as
possible down to the grassroots in order that local stakeholder voices (students,
teachers, parents, interested community members) can have the agency and
authority to express and initiate proposals. This is similar to ideas put forward by
Hirst in his description of associative democracy:

Big government has grown at the expense of individual rights and
freedoms. The attempted uniformity of state policy and forms of social
provision has meant the imposition of common rules and standard
services on the increasingly diverse and pluralistic objectives of members
of modern societies … Associations, by contrast, empower those for whom
services are provided in diverse ways. Voluntary association is an
alternative to top-down bureaucracy in the competent provision of
services (Hirst 1996: 18-19).

We are returning here again to Mouffe’s concept of the ‘multipolar’, the fact that
contemporary societies are not uniform or standard in their beliefs or approaches
to life. Schools and colleges operate in local contexts and are deeply embedded
within their local communities. Each locality will have its own aims and focus and
the educational institutions within the area will need to reflect these. A
democratic socialist approach to governance should strive to increase local power
and accountability. In Honneth’s words, ‘socialism must remain rooted in
geographical spaces with enough cultural and legal commonalities to enable
public space to come about at all’ (Honneth 2018: 102). The challenge is to enable
this to occur without the education system becoming so diffuse that it ceases to be
a system at all. One possible answer is through subsidiarity, a term that plays a

key part, for instance, in the law of the European Union. According to the
European Union:

Subsidiarity aims to ensure that decisions are taken as closely as possible
to the citizen and that constant checks are made to verify that action at
[the central] level is justified in light of the possibilities available at … [the]
regional or local level (EUR-Lex 2019).

It is beyond the scope of this book to investigate the minutiae on how subsidiarity
could affect how schools and colleges are governed in specific countries or
regions. It is introduced here more as a principle to influence where power should
reside to ensure control is located at the lowest level possible without sacrificing
the workings of a given education system overall. I am arguing that democratic
socialists, if they believe in public services having a democratic structure with
priority given to the local level, should subscribe to some form of subsidiarity
when thinking about governance in schools and colleges.


*


I have spoken about the need for stakeholder control in the running of
educational institutions but how might that look in practice? Granted, many
countries already implement processes that accommodate stakeholders voices
within the governing bodies of specific schools and colleges. These might include
representatives from the student body, members of staff, parents, figures from
local businesses and the community at large, and elected officials from the
relevant local authority. They are often formulated through a mixture of election
and appointment (depending on the constituency the members are representing)
but tend to have the same length of tenure. What stakeholder accountability
enables is the assurance that ‘points-of-view are raised and listened to from
different perspectives’ (Hopkins 2014b: 421) within any educational community.
I have already alluded to Gandin and Apple’s depiction of community control in
the Citizens Schools in Porto Alegre, Brazil and this is a good example of
stakeholder agency in action. Porto Alegre established a series of fora from street
to city level. In order to establish the aims and actions of the Citizen School ‘a
democratic, deliberative and participatory forum was created – the Constituent
Congress of Education’ (Gandin and Apple 2002: 264) According to the authors:

Through a long process of mobilization of the school communities … a
Congress was constructed whose objective was to constitute the
organizing principles that would guide the policy for schools in Porto
Alegre (Gandin and Apple 2002: 264).


The benefits of involving the different stakeholders from the city in terms of
school administration are made clear by Gandin and Apple:

By paying attention to the more substantive forms of collective
participation and, just as importantly, by devoting resources to encourage
such participation, Porto Alegre has demonstrated that it is possible to
have a ‘thicker’ democracy, even in times of … economic crisis … [T]hick
democracy offers realistic alternatives to the eviscerated versions of thin
democracy found under neo-liberalism ... The Citizen School is organically
linked to and considered part of the larger process of transforming the
whole city (Gandin and Apple 2002: 260-263).

Such a way of involving the community in the running of schools and colleges is
potentially attractive from a democratic socialist perspective – it ensures that
voices from all corners of education are given the space to articulate their views
and opinions on what should happen within their local educational institutions. It
also embeds democratic practice into school and college governance as a means
of strengthening the links with the local community. Where difficulties could
occur is in the potential for relentless procedure, bureaucracy and committee
forming (similar to what I highlighted in the earlier discussion over a
democratically-accountable curriculum). Citizens do not necessarily have the time
and energy to devote to long meetings over school regulation or debate over
staffing costs. One possible solution might be a form of ‘citizen service’ where
people are given an allocation of hours paid leave per year to participate in
community projects – this might prevent the tendency for people with flexible
employment or ‘time rich’ circumstances potentially dominating such ventures.
Mouffe can see the benefits of this form of ‘associational socialism’ (borrowing
ideas from the work of Hirst):

Particularly compelling is the argument that associational socialism,
because of its emphasis on the plurality and autonomy of enterprises and
collective bodies as decision-making agencies, is a means of enhancing the
tradition of Western pluralism and liberalism (Mouffe 2005: 98).

What we find here (as elsewhere in the book) are possible links between
contemporary democratic socialism and liberalism, the emphasis on local
autonomy in the decision-making process to meet the needs of specific
communities. It is beyond the scope of this book to explore how such decisions
are made, the composition of governing bodies (although elections should be a
key aspect of selection) or how these relate back to national structures and
agendas. What I have endeavored to do in this section is give an idea of what
school and college governance could look like through the lens of associational

socialism. It is hoped I have shown that it is possible to equate socialism with a
belief in stakeholder power within local environments.


*


Perhaps the knottiest issue with regards to governance in education is the role
students should play in the running of schools and colleges. There has been much
discussion on how far student voices (particularly if very young) can influence
what occurs within state education. I hope to have demonstrated in the chapters
on the curriculum and pedagogy that it is possible and, indeed, necessary that
even very young children should have a say in what they learn and how it is
taught. But to what lengths can this be taken? The point was made earlier that
citizenship, as well as being an integral aspect of the curriculum, should also be
the guiding factor in terms of how educational institutions are governed. I have
said in a previous book:

Issues that are raised within the classroom [and] workshop … can be
carried across to … wider … forums as part of a culture of creating
informed choices and full participation in key … concerns (Hopkins 2014a:
155).

Citizenship becomes part of a ‘whole organisational approach’ in terms of
discussing the workings of a school or college rather than as potentially isolated
within the confines of a curriculum area or subject. Debate raised within the
classroom can translate across to other aspects of working together within an
institution. In this sense, the students are able to become stakeholder participants
within a wider conception of citizenship education. Schools and colleges are often
already very effective in facilitating this more expansive view of citizenship
education through the guise of student councils, parliaments and, where
appropriate, student governors. These fora give students the opportunity to
engage in formal debate, stand for election, vote for specific candidates and
represent others on school-wide bodies. Through such practices, students are
being socialised into what democratic decision making entails – the respect for
other people’s opinions, the need to allow turn taking, the search for compromise
to ensure an agreement is reached (akin to the dialogical learning discussed in
Chapter 4). Where the system works well, students are a full and equal
constituency and make a valued contribution to the educational administration.
Where it works less well are in circumstances where student voice is a token
gesture – the students are listened to but do not have the agency to propose or
implement changes (or the changes that are allowed to occur are cosmetic or
minimal). This is the challenge for schools with very young children where there

is a pronounced power differential between the students and adults. It is in cases
such as this where different means of eliciting children’s view and opinions are,
perhaps, necessary (using less formal procedures to prevent children feeling
inhibited from expressing their views).

The development of children’s rights, particularly with the drawing up and
signing by national governments of the United Nations Convention on the Rights
of the Child in 1989 (Unicef 2019a), has become an increasingly important
consideration in relation to governance in education. Audrey Osler and Hugh
Starkey have spoken of ‘[t]he interdependence of democracy, human rights and
education’ (Osler and Starkey 2005: 35). The landscape of children’s rights (as
well as the creation of national laws to implement and bolster the UNCRC) has
formalised children as key stakeholders in their education. In England, for
instance, a Children’s Commissioner has been given statutory powers to advocate
on behalf of children in relation to their rights. At a more grassroots level, Unicef
has developed a category of ‘Rights Respecting Schools’ (Unicef 2019b) where
children, as part of the wider curriculum and decision-making process, learn
about their rights and the rights of others. The children in RRS are actively
encouraged to voice their opinions in relation to their school and play an active
part in how decision are made. At its best, Right Respecting Schools epitomise the
notion of citizenship education as incorporating all aspects of school life. Honneth
warns contemporary democratic socialists of the trap early socialists fell into with
respect to the issue of rights:

it was impossible to incorporate basic liberal rights into socialist thinking,
because the latter did not accord any independent role to democratic
politics (Honneth 2017: 82)

To ignore liberal rights, and the associations they have with individual autonomy
and democratic practice, would be a mistake from an educational perspective. I
have already alluded to the importance of these in terms of the curriculum and
forms of pedagogy.

Some philosophers such as Onora O’Neill have questioned the concept of rights
when applied to children as being inadequate bearing in mind the duties
significant adults have towards them. O’Neill states:

Those who do only what the children they interact with have a (universal
or special) right to will do less than they ought. They will fulfill their
perfect but not their imperfect obligations. In particular parents or
teachers who meet only their perfect obligations would fail as parents and
teachers (O’Neill 1988: 449).

Granted, the language of rights does not fully cover the duties and responsibilities
significant adults such as parents and teachers have towards children within their
care. However, to replace, for the children themselves, the concept of rights with
obligations instead is to possibly take away those decision-making entitlements
that I have been advocating throughout this book. To say that children have rights
to be heard with respect to their education has strong political, legal and moral
force.


*


This chapter has concerned itself with the theme of governance in schools and
colleges. I have taken the view that a democratic socialist perspective on
education needs to embrace the democratic governance of education through
local stakeholder accountability. This is to ensure that local voices from across the
educational community (including the students themselves) are heard when
decisions are made on how schools and colleges are run. Also, stakeholder control
of education is more likely to create education systems that are diverse in scope
and responsive to those groups they affect. Democratic governance of schools and
colleges also expands the concept of citizenship education to include whole
organisations.







References

Bobbio, N. (2007), Which Socialism? Tr. Griffin, R., Cambridge: Polity Press.

EUR-Lex (2019), Glossaries of summaries: Subsidiarity [online]. Available at:
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/summary/glossary/subsidiarity.html (Accessed 17
January 2019).

Gandin, L.A. and Apple, M. (2002), Chellenging neo-liberalism, building
democracy: creating the Citizen School in Porto Alegre, Brazil, Journal of
Educational Policy, 17 (2): 259-279.

Heilbronn, R., Doddington, C. and Higham, R. (2018), Editor: The Book, the
Conference and Fighting Back, in Heilbronn, R., Doddington, C. and Higham, R.

(eds.), Dewey and Education in the 21st Century: Fighting Back, Bingley: Emerald
Publishing.

Hirst, P. (1996), Associative Democracy: New Forms of Economic and Social
Governance, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Honneth, A. (2017), The Idea of Socialism: Towards a Renewal, tr. Joseph Ganahl,
Cambridge: Polity Press.

Hopkins, N. (2014a), Citizenship and Democracy in Further and Adult Education,
Dordrecht: Springer.

Hopkins, N. (2014b), The Democratic Curriculum: Concept and Practice, Journal of
Philosophy of Education, 48 (3): 416-427.

O’Neill, O. (1988), Children’s Rights and Children’s Lives, Ethics, 98 (3): 445-463.

Osler, A. and Starkey, H. (2005), Changing Citizenship: Democracy and Inclusion in
Education, Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Mouffe, C. (2005), The Return of the Political, London: Verso.

Rawls, J. (2005), Political Liberalism (Expanded Edition), New York: Columbia
University Press.

Unicef (2019a), United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child [online].
Available at: http://www.unicef.org.uk/wp-
content/uploads/2010/05/UNCRC_united_nations_convention_on_the_rights_of_t
he_child.pdf (Accessed 18 January 2019).

Unicef (2019b), Rights Respecting School Award [online]. Available at:
https://www.unicef.org.uk/rights-respecting-schools/ (Accessed 18 January
2019)


Conclusion


This is a small book and my aim was to introduce and explore a group of issues
concerning contemporary democratic socialism and its potential influence on
twenty-first century state education systems. Inevitably, in a book of this scale
with a focus on a theoretically vast subject, there are themes or aspects which I
haven’t addressed within these covers. My hope is that the previous chapters
have done some justice, at least, to those themes that I have chosen to discuss.

As I said in Chapter 1, many educational systems over the past few decades
have adopted a neoliberal approach to the aims and function of state education.
Since the recession of 2008, however, that outlook has looked increasingly
precarious in relation to public services generally. In the words of Paul Mason:

[T]hrough austerity programmes, [the governments of major economies]
transferred the pain away from people who’d invested money stupidly,
punishing instead welfare recipients, public sector workers, pensioners
and, above all, future generations. In the worst-hit countries, the pension
system has been destroyed, the retirement age is being hiked so that those
currently leaving university will retire at seventy, and education is being
privatized so that graduates will face a lifetime of high debt (Mason 2015:
34-35).

Such a set of circumstances is not sustainable over the medium to long term. The
question is whether there is an alternative. I believe the work of Bobbio, Honneth
and Mouffe offer such an alternative through their reinterpretation of democratic
socialism for the twenty-first century. What each of these authors articulate,
albeit with different perspectives and aims, is the idea that socialism needs to
engage with the diversity that democracy and liberalism provide and facilitate in
order to remain a valid and relevant ideology for contemporary times. All three
authors also explore the widening effects of globalisation and how this influences
our notions of the collective in terms of the local, national and international. For
democratic socialism to survive and thrive it needs to provide explanations that
go beyond the purely economic and embrace the cultural dimensions of people’s
identity and sense of purpose.

My intention in this book has been to explore how contemporary versions of
democratic socialism can relate and inform state education systems. As well as
Bobbio, Honneth and Mouffe, I have also made frequent reference to Dewey and
Hirst – Dewey because of his major contribution to philosophy of education

generally and ideas on democracy and education specifically; Hirst, due to his
important ideas on associative democracy and how this connects with democratic
socialist forms of participation, particularly at the local community level. I have
decided to address the curriculum, pedagogy and governance in turn and weigh
the possibilities of democratic socialist interpretations of each. I have argued that
the curriculum, for it to have democratic socialist elements, needs to be genuinely
inclusive, incorporating academic and vocational aspects in a common curriculum
that is an entitlement for all (as articulated by Fielding 2007) within the bounds
of equality of treatment. Construction of such a curriculum should model
democratic culture by including, where practical and feasible, the stakeholders
who have a vested collective interest in what is learnt and when. If the curriculum
aspires to be democratic in its formulation, then citizenship ideally plays an
integral part throughout. Students, as key stakeholders, learn the attitudes and
skills necessary for Dewey’s ‘mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated
experience’ (Dewey 2007: 68).

I have envisaged a democratic socialist pedagogy to support the notion of
learning as a joint endeavor towards the acquisition of knowledge and
understanding. State education is primarily a collective enterprise – it takes place
in classrooms where speech is the primary medium. With this in mind, dialogical
learning offers excellent opportunities for students and teachers to use the
medium of speech to work together through debate, investigation and research.
This form of pedagogy values the special attributes and responsibilities of the
teacher but, when done well, begins to diminish the hierarchies within the
classroom. Over time, dialogical learning can, potentially, develop the roles of
‘teacher-student’ and ‘student-teacher’ as outlined by Freire.

Finally, I have made a case for a more democratic form of governance
regarding how state schools and colleges are run. The idea of stakeholders also
plays a key part here. Educational institutions ought to reflect the communities in
which they serve. A democratic socialist outlook, in my view, should embrace the
idea of subsidiarity – where possible, power should be devolved to the lowest
level manageable. This will allow schools and colleges to reflect the diversity of
their communities in ways similar to that described by Hirst in his depiction of
associative public services. There is, however, a potential tension between
diversity and equality for democratic socialists to discuss when services are
devolved and deregulated to local bodies – I have offered subsidiarity as a means
of addressing these concerns.

This book is intended to continue and enhance the debate democratic
socialism has had with education for at least the last one hundred and fifty years.
In that time, the educational landscape has, paradoxically, changed radically in
some respects and, in others, remained remarkably the same. It is my belief that

democratic socialism still has something to say to those concerned with
contemporary education and the issues that it faces going forward.





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Mason, P. (2015), PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, London: Penguin.

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