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Democracy? In America? Where?: A Literature Review on Popular Education in America

““Enlightenment that only addresses the enlightened does not deserve to be called enlightenment” was the widespread conviction of many champions of the Enlightenment movement” (Horlacher, 2011).

American educators are ironically and hypocritically being indoctrinated into being obedient undemocratic sit-down and shut-up students themselves. With their spirits smashed, now completely fashioned into the soulless and heartless robotic automatons the system requires them to be, they can reign down the oppression onto the heads of the naïve, vulnerable, innocent and unsuspecting young American students. In order to “Teach Like a Champion, a popular textbook for current and soon-to-be teachers in American teacher training schools, Doug Lemov advocates 100% compliance (Lemov, 2010). Even Lemov himself sees his own 100% compliance as the “draconian” “power-hungry plan” of a “battle of wills” against the students for precisely what it is. Nothing else will be tolerated in a properly classroom managed American classroom but an “obedience-obsessed” classroom with a “grinding discipline” that's expected for all. Lemov barely qualifies these expectations by saying that the “culture of compliance” should be a “positive” one, and “most importantly, invisible” (Lemov, 2010). Not only does Lemov demand a sneaky and somehow “positive” 100% compliance, but Doug Lemov's micromanaging tyranny includes that all students to never have even their elbows on their desks, and Lemov will even get the teachers of America to complain if an educator's students only raise their hands up halfway (Lemov, 2010). For Doug Lemov, only 100% compliance is acceptable behavior. Not even Adolf Hitler got 100% compliance (August Landmesser). The worst atrocities in human history—war, slavery, and genocide—have come about because of blind obedience to authority (Zinn, 1997/2010). Doug Lemov isn't just advocating being tough and firm: he's talking about totalitarian fascism.

A totalitarian system is where all of the people's behavior is being governed in totality, including the student's thoughts. Lecture is a classroom management technique, where the educator governs the very thoughts of everybody in the classroom. When others are speaking, especially dictators, it's difficult to keep one's thoughts. Dictators hate the sound of other students' voices for this very reason, but rarely their own. Typically, in American classrooms, only the autocratic dictator has the microphone, and one has to resort to just blurting out their questions, or comments, if they want to be heard. Or by passing notes, which is also strictly forbidden. Or pretending to write down notes on the lecture, but really, jotting down how oppressed one is, and to dream up ways that school can be better. Adolf Hitler understood the importance of the spoken word in order to get compliance, as did Jim Jones. Fascism is where the behavior expected, if not complied with, will be met with force and violence, such as being removed from the class by overweight minimum wage security guards, or sometimes, even, the State's brutes. If your ideas need violence in order to enforce them, then your ideas are absolutely worthless. Most of the time, such measures aren't necessary, even though the institutions are in place, due to social authority, and the seeming penchant for humankind towards obedience. In American Schools, autocratic dictator monarchists run their classrooms as fascist totalitarian mini-fiefdoms, and democratic structures and processes are wholly absent.

“To substitute books for all is not to teach us to reason. It is to teach us to use the reason of others. It is to teach us to believe much and never to know anything.” (Rousseau, 1979).

From an unsourced anonymous and popular Facebook meme: Daughter: “Why do I have to go to school?” Mother: “So you can be molded into a state approved homogenous drone that cannot think outside of the prescribed consensus. You will learn to repeat information instead of how to think for yourself so that you don't become a threat to the status quo. When you graduate you will get a job, pay your taxes, in order to perpetuate the corporate system of indentured servitude.”

Horace Mann, the Father of American Schools, did not care for Classroom Management, nor Corporal Punishment. Horace Mann, in his 2nd Annual Report about American Common Schools, wrote:

“To make a small child sit both dumb and motionless, for three successive hours, with the exception of a brief recess and two short lessons, is an infraction of every law which the Creator has impressed upon both the body and the mind.” … “Its effects upon the body is to inflict severe pain, to impair health, to check the free circulations in the system (all which lead to dwarfishness), and to misdirect the actions of vital organs, which lead to deformity.” … “In regard to the intellect, it suppresses the activity of every faculty; ....the inevitable consequence is, both to diminish the number of things they will be competent to do, and to disable them doing this limited number so well as they might otherwise.” … “In regard to temper and morals, the results are still more deplorable. To command a child whose mind is furnished with no other occupation to sit for a long time silent in regard to speech, and dead in regard to motion, when every limb and organ aches for activity; to set a child down in the midst of others, .... And then to prohibit all recognition of or communication with his fellow is subjecting him to a temptation to disobedience.” (Mann, 1847).

On corporal punishment, Horace Mann called it “an evil... none will deny”, and he pointed out that there's “some excellent teachers who manage schools without resorting to it”. Horace Mann even points about that bad teachers who are “destitute of skill and of the divine qualities of love, patience, sympathy” use non-violent methods of control “which, though they may bear a milder name, are, in reality, more severe.” Nick Peim believes that “discipline” is being instituted nowadays for “composing forces in order to obtain an efficient machine” in the hallways, the playground, and the classroom for the Empire (Peim, 2013).

Since knowledge of the uses, practices, and institutions of democracy are limited, it should come as no surprise to find out that knowledge of civics in general is lacking in Americans. A major survey conducted in 2011 found that 38% could name all 3 branches of the US government; only 13% knew that the Constitution was signed in 1787; and while only 15% of Americans could identify our Supreme Court Chief Justice, 27% of Americans knew that Randy Jackson was a judge on American idol (Reid, 2014; DeConcini and Kyl, 2014). The Governor of Utah pointed out that in an American classroom, the vast majority of the students could answer only about 15 of the 50 questions” from the US Citizenship test correctly (Herbert, 2014). In another study, in the Xavier Center for the Study of the American Dream, only 32% of Americans knew what the supreme law of the land was (i.e. the US Constitution), only 32% knew the number of US Senators in the Senate, and only 29% knew the length of a US Senator's term of office (DeConcini and Kyl, 2014). The abhorrent lack of knowledge on American civics accounts for the low voter registration and turnout rates across the nation, as many other perils of our society. Because of these lackluster findings, there's been a major Civics Education Initiative push in South Dakota, Utah, Arizona, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Missouri, and South Carolina (Reid, 2014).

E.D. Hirsch writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education that speaks about increasing literacy skills in American schools. Kentucky has a large illiterate adult population (2 out of 5), but for Hirsch, literacy doesn't just mean knowing how to read; it's knowing how to exist and function properly in a democracy. For Hirsch, to be democraticly literate, an American citizen would need to be able to refer to the right historical folks, to appeal to the common understanding of how our democratic society is supposed to work. A common public democratic language would assist us in establishing communication in civil democratic groupings, such as townhall meetings, or other similar assemblies. To illustrate his point, Hirsch quotes James Madison: “A popular Government,” said Madison, “without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy” (Hirsch, 2009). For Hirsch, it's important for Americans to have that common language, that common understanding, a common framework, to be able to have meaningful conversations about the future of our nation. As Hirsch understands our democracy, the cohesion of the nation would be brought about by the tempering of private and local interests to the common good, and that common good could only be obtained through common schools. Through common schools with a common core, only then, could we develop that “sense of community and solidarity within the nation”. Hirsch also references Noah Webster, “our most important and influential early schoolmaster”, who was the chief maker of both American dictionaries and schoolbooks. For Webster, having both a common public language plus a common school curriculum were needed to sustain a loyalty to the common good (Hirsch, 2009).

“The child is wicked only because he is weak. Make him strong; he will be good. He who could do everything would never do harm,” says Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Rousseau, 1979). Because folks do not understand their power in a democracy, combined with the lack of solidarity, and common understanding of how our democratic processes are supposed to work, we witness irrationality and dumb behavior. The dumb behavior comes from a lack of knowledge, and so therefore, a truly democratic education is called for in order to rectify this situation. Hirsch says the best way to enable our young soon-to-be citizens in our American democracy to be able to effectively participate in the public sphere is to teach them in elementary schools, and it's “a task that need not take up more than half of classroom time.” Hirsch concludes his article with: “If we want to bring all our students out of the linguistic shadows, we shall need to teach this enabling knowledge systematically, through a limited but common core curriculum in the early grades” (Hirsch, 2009).

Surprisingly, or maybe not, peer-reviewed articles about Democracy in American Education, or Popular Education in America, are virtually absent. To find case studies and analysis of Democracy in Education, one has to look for international scholars, such as examples in Brazil (Loflin, 2008), Latin America, Mexico (Rockwell, 2011), Turkey (Kus and Cetin, 2014) and South Africa (Endresen, 2013). In many case studies of Popular Education, Paulo Freire is mentioned numerous times. Unfortunately, American scholars have seemed to have left the talk about Democracy in American Schools to John Dewey and Horace Mann, and just assumed that democratic virtues are being taught in American Schools without consideration of the truth: there is none. At all. It's a totalitarian dictatorship which uses the means of social power, and the threat of violence by security guards, or the police at large, in order to enforce their ways. The fascism of American classrooms is clear: do as the autocrat orders: no ifs, ands, or buts. Unfortunately, the teacher may claim to care, or even love, their students, but they aren't being sincere. Only 5% of lectures are retained, but that doesn't stop the dictators from stopping their oppression, or to initiate the sharing of power. One cannot expect slaves with a slave mentality being taught in slave settings to eventually become masters. The “lessons” are quickly forgotten, and no networking is gained. It's mostly a complete waste of time. Considering how there's absolutely no democracy in American education, when the “fathers” of American education were huge advocates for it, the lack of scholarship on this matter is shockingly appalling.

It doesn't make sense why we see the lack of democracy in American schools because of the forefathers of American Education—notably John Dewey and Horace Mann—advocated vehemently that democracy be taught in American schools, for numerous reasons. “Educational commentators, including liberal advocates and radical critics, have persistently aligned schooling with democracy (Apple 1993; Dewey 1997; Gutmann 1999; Neill 1995)” (Peim, 2013). In 1916, John Dewey wrote an entire book on the subject matter: Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. In Democracy and Education, Dewey praises the virtues of democracy in education, and synthesizes them into one cohesive idea. “Dewey discussed the importance of individual growth and its relation to a healthy democratic system” (Sanborn and Thyne, 2014).

The foremost scholar of education and democracy, John Dewey, made a long career of arguing for the necessity of creating schools that produced individuals who respected the rights and opinions of others. Dewey recognized that to be good citizens, individuals must be placed in situations where they can interact with others on a repeated basis. Through experience, students learn that actions have context and that views and opinions are part of a multitude. Other individuals have their opinions too, and compromise must be reached when the preferences of multiple actors are not aligned. Students also learn that disagreements and conflict can be resolved through debate, without the threat of violence and instability. As seen through this lens, democracy is defined by addressing the concerns of as many individuals as possible and by promoting equality (Sanborn and Thyne, 2014).

According to John Dewey, “Democracy is a way of personal life controlled not merely by faith in human nature in general but by faith in the capacity of human beings for intelligent judgment and action if proper conditions are furnished... I am willing to leave to upholders of totalitarian states of the right and the left the view that faith in the capacities of intelligence is utopian” (Sanborn and Thyne, 2014). “Covello’s Franklin High School largely followed the overall trajectory of progressive
education, which, generally speaking, began with the innovative ideas of Dewey, found greatest support in the 1930s, evolved into the life adjustment movement, limped along through the Cold War, and died a sudden death with the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983 (Johanek & Puckett, 2006).” (Loflin, 2008).

Horace Mann adamantly believed in a democratic society, and that schools should be democratic in method. Mann wanted “to define a set of values that were essential to citizenship in a democracy” (Eakin, 2000). Mann was against only “rote learning of names and riles”, but wanted the children to be "led to discover principles and relationships” (Eakin, 2000). Like E.D. Hirsch, Mann believed that democratic processes should be developed in childhood. “The great moral attribute of self-government can not be born and matured in a day; and if school children are not trained in it, we only prepare ourselves for disappointment, if we expect it from grown men” ... “The theory of our government is—not that all men, however unfit, shall be voters—but that every man, by the power of reason and the sense of duty, shall become fit to be a voter. Education must bring the practice as nearly as possible to the theory” (Eakin, 2000).

“It is strange that the schooling system which was created to ensure democracy is the most undemocratic institution in America” (Loflin, 2008).

Nietzsche said that “large states' public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad” (Nietzsche, 1915).

Alejandro Ferrer analyzes the term “Popular Education” as it's been used over the years, and nails down a solid definition of the word. The term “Popular education” originates from the reformers during the Enlightenment period. What was meant by “Popular Education” then was “a large group of the population composed of craftsmen, manual workers, peasants, farmers, beggars and vagabonds, thought of as living in ignorance and even immorality” (Ferrer, 2011). Later on, “Popular Education” got mixed up with “National Education”, such as Germany's Volksbildung. Because educational reforms can come from working-class elements, progressive upper classes, public officials, or churches, Ferrer says that the how of public education doesn't matter as much as who it serves. For Ferrer, the important part of the meaning of “Popular Education” is “the social origin and position of their publics which make the difference among diverse types of initiatives” (Ferrer, 2011). While America has universal education, since social inequality is being maintained, democratic processes aren't being implemented in the schools systems, which accounts for the lack of solidarity and dwindling and near vanquishment of labor unions, America doesn't have “Popular Education”. Instead, it has a National Educational System, which serves to maintain the status quo, to build nationalism, and to support the Empire.

Nick Peim says that Education in America serves mostly as a force for maintaining the status quo of “The Empire”, “given its intensely normative aspirations, its hierarchical structure, its ingrained governmental procedures, its restricted curriculum and its reproductive modus operandi” (Peim, 2013). Francis Fukuyama announced “the end of history” in 1989 after the fall of the Berlin wall, and declared that western liberal democracy had triumphed in the world (Fukuyama, 1989). For Fukuyama, history is a dialectical process, where humankind continues to improve their lot, but even nature through evolution doesn't prove this, considering cockroaches is one of the oldest species on Earth, and will continue to live, even after humankind wipes themselves out.

With the wave of popular uprising during the Arab Spring, and around the world, there was hope democracy would pour out of that revolutionary wellspring. But that hasn't happened. “Less than a majority of revolutions end in democracy”, but “democracies that tend to survive the test of time are those born in revolution” (Albertus and Menaldo, 2011). Sanborn and Thyne conducted a thorough analysis between authoritarian and democratic regimes in relation to their financing of education. While “education is typically underfunded in authoritarian regimes” (Feng, 1997), even authoritarian states, such as China and Singapore, continue to invest in education moreso than their democratic counterparts. These authoritarian regimes see the long term positive impact of education on economic development, and so therefore, a more educated workforce is a more productive workforce, and that gives the authoritarian leaders to generate more revenue for themselves, and their State (Sanborn and Thyne, 2014).

With Sanborn and Thyne's study, they found out that education is “an effective and more universally palatable tool to promote democratization” (Sanborn and Thyne, 2014). In their highly detailed analysis, they generated 5 Hypotheses regarding the relationship between democratization and education: 1) democracy taught in primary schools increases democracy; 2) higher education increases democratization; 3) gender equality increases democracy; 4) globalization increases democracy, and; 5) As wealth increases, the impact of higher education on democratization should decrease (Sanborn and Thyne, 2014).

Like Hirsch and Mann, Sanborn and Thyne also see the importance of primary education contributing towards democratization. “Primary education, with a focus on individualism and respect for others, such as Uganda’s “child for the child” policy, can instill and reinforce democratic values (Sanborn and Thyne, 2014). Sanborn and Thyne also see that “the number of years of school attended has a positive effect on the onset of democracy”, while also have the added benefit of preparing “future leaders and policy makers of the state by cultivating them into nuanced, analytical thinkers” (Sanborn and Thyne, 2014). While high performance in school matters, ultimately, how long the masses have attended school is the best predictor of democratization. The “relative deprivation” of a country, combined with educational opportunities, slam together to create a hotbed of political unrest and dissent. “Higher education imparts the knowledge, skills, and political familiarity that help in navigating the political world. Faced with a state allowing few roles for the educated to pursue their post-graduate goals, the highly educated are apt to take to the streets to force the government to make meaningful reforms, as they did in Argentina (1955), Hungary (1956), Japan (1960), China (1989), and elsewhere.” … before the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, “more than 43 percent of the unemployed in Egypt had university degrees.” (Sanborn and Thyne, 2014). The unemployed highly educated have the capacity “to understand the failures of their government, recognize other potential avenues of governance, and evaluate how best to achieve meaningful change” (Sanborn and Thyne, 2014).

The best case that Sanborn and Thyne point out for the combination of high educated and poverty promoting democracy is in the case of Tunisia. The Tunisian government provided for education for it's citizens, but higher quality jobs never materialized. The Tunisian economy relied primarily on labor-intensive activities, such as factory or farm work, and it's economic growth was based on the increase of exports, and “not from an internal expansion of the economy”. The unemployment rate spiked during the 2008-2009 world financial crisis, which hit the young and highly educated Tunisians. “Individuals who had completed university studies had the highest unemployment rate (19.0 percent) of any educational category, and this figure worsened to over 30 percent by the end of 2011.” Tunisians also had to deal with a corrupt government enshrined with the spoils system, where bribery and graft served as a basis for economic advancement. Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire, because of his inability to pay for these increase of fees, and that's when the boiling point of Tunisia exploded (Sanborn and Thyne, 2014).

Sanborn and Thyne identify improving access to education for females is integral in promoting democracy.

Educating females alongside males indeed produces more empowered females, as well as males who are able to see females beyond their traditional gender roles... With both the awareness of inequalities embedded in the status quo and the tools to address these inequalities, females may take a leading role in agitating for political change in the country. For example, mothers’ groups in Argentina, Chile, and El Salvador arose in the 1970–80s to address human rights violations perpetrated by military regimes. At their most basic level, schools produce students with analytical and critical minds who are able to recognize and take action to address gender inequities. Teachers can act as the agents of change in classrooms, providing opportunities for students to contest traditional gender roles in society. Likewise, school leaders are able to promote gender equality by ensuring that gender is a focus of enrollment and retention in decision making (Sanborn and Thyne, 2014).

Globalization helps with democracy because “interconnectedness increases, news about democratic systems and movements may find its way into a state through these avenues and destabilize the regime” (Sanborn and Thyne, 2014).

The 5th hypothesis of Sanborn and Thyne says that democratization will not happen in highly wealthy societies, even with a large base of highly educated folks, because “protesting for meaningful political change takes considerable time and effort... the highly educated in wealthy societies to be more likely to accept authoritarianism, because they are likely to expend their time and resources on economic advancement. In poor states with few opportunities for economic advancement, however, we expect the highly educated to use their abilities to agitate for political change” (Sanborn and Thyne, 2014). This may be the reason why democratization hasn't happened in American schools.

Nick Peim's article, while a bit rambling with Derrida's postmodern jibberish, trips over many truths. While it's assumed that American education and democracy go hand in hand, “any correspondence between schooling and democracy is highly tenuous” (Peim, 2013).

There is nothing inherent in the school, nor in schools, nor in schooling, that is democratic. What’s more, there is much inherent in the school-as-we-know-it that is anti-democratic … rather, it is built into the genetic constitution of the institution... The school divides the body of pupils into age-stratified classes, designating time periods for activities and affirming norms for performance and competence... The future is thus rendered predictable, programmed and constrained... the school, operates unarguably, ... according to several forms of symbolic violence: including age-stratification, norm-related judgments, the production of negative identities, especially in terms of race and class, the intensive and absolutist management of time and more (Peim, 2013).

Flying in the face of Horace Mann, Nick Peim shows how “education actually produces and sustains inequality”. Peim references Bowles and Gintis, who published their famous Schooling in Capitalist America (1976), which was a book that “explicitly presented the scandalous thesis that education had not been a mechanism for social equality in the USA, rather that it had operated to sustain inequality” … “Not only were inequalities resistant to reform, they appeared to be ineradicable precisely because they were written into the institution’s DNA” … “The myth of schooling as capable of delivering social justice or contributing to it in terms of the redistribution of cultural capital and in the long run by implication economic capital. Broadly speaking, the inequalities remain since they are structurally embedded in the most minute operations of the institution, its state function, its organization of knowledge and its pedagogical operations” (Peim, 2013). Horace Mann believed in education in order to elevate. Horace Mann's vision for America's common schools was to help elevate the lower classes, and to foster a more even playing field for the masses. For Mann, the educated masses would be able to bring themselves up out of poverty, and therefore, with more knowledge, we could compete on more equal footing with the educated and financial well to do upper classes (Eakin, 2000). Pestalozzi believed that the poor children, the majority, was in greater need of education than rich children, and that's why he believed that popular education should be the business of the State (Horlacher, 2011). Pestalozzi, as well as Horace Mann, wanted to equalize the status of the poor and rich, but Nick Peim shows that in America, this isn't happening.

“A teacher who does not study and work well does not deserve to be called a revolutionary”. (Rockwell).

“Is the fear justified that enlightenment will destroy social order and lead inevitably to social unrest or even revolution?” (Horlacher, 2011).

“Finally, I would stress the importance of thinking in terms of the various logics of schooling (often found to be in conflict with overt aims) that in fact articulate the programmes and actions undertaken in the name of such terms as popular education. These logics cross through the bounded entities we call schools, to connect what occurs in society at large with what happens within the classroom. Among these logics, we might recover one that is often disregarded: the significant learning that humans always and everywhere engage in. Of course, such learning also takes place in classrooms, but at times through peer relations as much as through teacher mediation. Often, it occurs elsewhere, and belies the claim that the spread of literacy is always a direct consequence of schooling. More fundamentally, this logic challenges the presumption that popular education is a necessary prerequisite to the exercise of citizenship. Beyond the confines of literacy classes and campaigns appear multiple alternative paths towards the constitution of both local and national polities as holders of a sovereignty that is still continually denied by the State” (Rockwell, 2011).

The Democracy Perception Scale showed that the democratic perceptions of primary school students of Turkey differ according to their sex, what grade they are in, the education and income status of their parents, and where they live.The perception of democracy scores for students in Turkey was high compared to the scores of students from the 28 other countries (Kus and Cetin, 2014). Female students in Turkey perceived democracy more correctly than male students did. Female students adopt democratic behavior more readily, and they also had higher perceptions of democracy (Amadeo, Torney-Purta, Lehmann, Husfeldt, & Nikolova, 2002; Atasoy, 1997; Aycan & Calık, 2003; Başaran, 2006; Buyukkaragoz, 1989; Cuhadar, 2006; Gurbuz, 2006; Doğanay, 2008; Doğanay & Sarı, 2009; Genc & Kalafat, 2008; Gomleksiz & Kan, 2008; Kaldırım, 2003; Karatekin et al., 2010; Sağlam, 2000; Torney-Purta, Lehmann, Oswald, & Schulz, 2001; Ural, 2010; Yoğurtcu, 2010) (Kus and Cetin, 2014). Perceptions of democracy for primary school students differ according to their parents’ income status. Children of parents with higher incomes had higher perceptions of democracy (Kus and Cetin, 2014).

Paulo Friere believed that education was for liberation In group settings, absent a crisis, liberty is democracy. Schools are front and center of most of the communities they are in, and children can become leaders right now.

“The philosophy in the classroom of this generation is the philosophy of government in the next.” ~Abraham Lincoln (Loflin, 2008).

Democracy in the Classroom

Those who seek to be leaders in America will need a strong robust educational background. John Taylor Gatto writes in The Underground History of American Education about how the American education system was initially constructed on the strict 3-tiered social stratification of the Prussian-Industrial Education system Horace Mann adopted in America. According to Gatto, only the top ½% of the students were educated properly, with an open mind, for them to be introduced to the greatest of ideas, and to question them all. For the bottom 99.5%, they received lesser educations. For the top ½% of the population, the best of the elites, attended the Academy School, “where, as future policy makers, they learned to think strategically, contextually, in wholes; they learned complex processes, and useful knowledge, studied history, wrote copiously, argued often, read deeply, and mastered tasks of command” (Gatto, 2003). If we seek to truly educate our students to be effective citizens, we must educate them as the ½% is educated. Parents, teachers, and students should be discussing national and international political issues.

There's no democracy in American schools, homes, or workplaces. The only time we see any democratic process in America is on a day that's not held sacred with a National Holiday: Election Day. And since the turnout rates are so low, the majority aren't even showing up for those. There is no democracy in America. Since democratic processes won't just magically appear with our ill-informed and unpracticed and unseasoned young citizens, we need to start teaching democratic virtues in Elementary School, and we as Educators can do it by setting a good example. Kindergarten, Primary, Grade, High, Secondary, and Teacher-training schools should all been ran democraticly.

There's many democratic elements that are lost in American democracy. From the continuum of having a pure direct democracy, where everybody votes on all of the issues, with unanimous consensus, to a pure dictatorship. America from top to bottom resembles a dictatorship. By learning democratic elements, we'll instill in our young love and respect for each other, understanding our oneness, while embracing our differences as a beautiful colorful rainbow, and human rights should be understood in Elementary school. They can learn how to cooperate with each other, how to treat each other better, and how to build culture. America's so-called democracy consists of having an election once every other year, more or less, where the masses get a 12-hour window to choose who they want to rule over them. That's the absolute bare minimum of democracy. And if the Electoral College ever voted against the popular, they'd be legal in doing so. The very presence of the Electoral College shows how the US Constitution was constructed by anti-democratic aristocratic plutocrats. For John Dewey, “a democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. The extension in space of the number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men from perceiving the full import of their activity” (Dewey, 1916).

More democratic elements include students deciding upon their seating charts, their own curriculum, the classroom agenda, their own behavior, their own ideas, understanding the peaceful resolution of disputes, being taught morals and values, understanding their sacred sovereign autonomous independence, dismantling illegitimate authority, building critical thinking skills, accepting different cultures, organizing unions, finding peaceful solutions to their problems, practicing socialization skills and building a broad-based foundation of the language of democracy that's necessary for democratic communities.

Education Doesn't Always Lead to Democratization

Not everybody agrees that more education will lead to democratization. If an educational system only educates the top ½% of their population, that only widens the gap between the have-nots and the have-mores. “The widespread provision of education can also create a surplus of highly-educated workers, driving down wages and employment rates. This is particularly dangerous if the “excess capacity” exists for a long duration, without prospects for remedy. Taken together, this debate in the literature suggests that the effects of education might have little impact on democratization, work
against democratization, or be conditional upon a host of factors (Sanborn and Thyne, 2014).

Nick Peim suggests a “monstrous proposal” of just dismantling the entire education system and starting over on “the grounds for social, ethical and cultural redemption” (Peim, 2013). Nick Peim wants to think “beyond education”. I believe Peim's monstrous proposal is worth considering, because imagine an America without centralized public schools. Parents would have to be parents again. Americans would understand that the only way we'll be free is through our own actions. We can actually start to value education, and appreciate intelligence, and educate each other. We'd get educated on the streets, in our homes, in our neighbor's homes, with loved ones, in our union halls, civic groups, in our workplaces, and hopefully, create democratic institutions that will last till the end of time. America bombs other nations in the name of democracy without have a true democracy here. Public education may have to be destroyed so we Americans can see ourselves as individuals, and as people, again.

From Headstart to K-12 to College to Graduate School, there's absolutely zero democracy. Freedom in groups can only be expressed using democratic functions, forms, and practices. This is quite unfortunate, because without freedom, one's humanity is stifled, and one's soul cannot breathe. If we aren't learning democracy in our schools, then when and where are Americans learning democracy? Democracy? In America? Where? Where's the democracy? For my entire American educational career of 21 years, all that this author has witnessed—in homes, workplaces, and classrooms—are autocratic totalitiarian mini-regimes. Francis Fukayamu decried the “The End of History” because it seemed as if the world had embraced liberal democracy as it's final endform of government, and so now, for Fukayamu, there would be no more great battles, or wars, or Revolutions to happen anymore. The fall of the Berlin Wall for Fukayamu was the “end of history” because liberal democracy was victorious. But that's not true. For one, capitalism and democracy are opposites. Second, America needs liberal democracy instituted in our own country first before anybody can declare that liberal democracy won the great cosmic battle of ideas. In American educational institutions, on all levels, we are provided with an appointed dictator, who we may or may not know, who we are expected to follow blindly. Howard Zinn said that the three worst atrocities in human history—war, genocide, and slavery—have all happened because of blind obedience to absolute and arbitrary authority (Zinn, 1997/2010). How are Americans supposed to be able to understand how democratic structures properly operate when they've only been trained under strict tyrannical monoarchical fascist totalitarian dictatorships?

Some folks argue that since we have elections, that is what makes America a democracy, but just recently, in the Senate race for Kentucky between Alison Grimes and Mitch McConnell, we see how that's not true. By taking those who voted in (Kentucky's November 4, 2014 Senate Election Results) by (Kentucky's Total Registered Voters) we see that only 46% of Kentucky's registered voters voted. 46% isn't the majority of Kentuckians. Compare this rate with Denmark, who has an 89% turnout rate, or with Australia, who makes it a crime punishable up to a $1,000 fine, if you do not vote. And this Senate campaign was a high profile race! Plus, all local Kentucky seats—Judge-Executives, Sheriffs, County Attorneys, City Councils, Mayors, Magistrates, Soil and Water Conservation District Supervisors, Coroners, Property Valuation Administrators, and on and on—were also up for election. Many of Kentucky's local governments were completely and forever altered. This 46% turnout rate doesn't include everybody, because those who aren't registered to vote (100s of 1,000s of people), or those who are disenfranchised because they are ex-felons (180,000) (Ryan, 2014), weren't counted in this number. So the 46% turnout rate is really lower than that. Democracy is rule by the people—the “demos”—but in Kentucky, the demos stayed home. So, while there's no democracy anywhere in Kentucky workplaces, schools, or homes, even in the one cherished institution of democracy, the one day where we get to vote our power away, to those who will lord over we the people with the power of the State, who has a monopoly on violence, on Election Day in America, there isn't even democracy. And the national elections in this Republic—a representative democracy—are just a tiny flash of democracy. We need a robust and active civil society, as well as citizens who are well-versed in dialogue, discussion, and in the sharing of power. If America is going to be a beacon of freedom to the world, the exceptional city on the hill, then talking about politics with educated civic minded folks should be commonplace watercooler talk. Kentucky specific, as well as America at large, has a major crisis of democracy, and it always has, because there's no democracy in any of our schools.

Peer-reviewed Articles

Endresen, Kristin. (2013). Popular education in three organizations in Cape Town, South Africa. Studies in the Education of Adults. Vol. 45, No. 1.

Feng, Yi. (1997). Democracy, Political Stability and Economic Growth. British Journal of Political Science. 27:391–418.

Ferrer, Alejandro Tiana. (2011). The concept of popular education revisited—or what do we talk about when we speak of popular education. Paedagogica Historica. Vol. 47. Nos. 1-2. 15-31.

Fukuyama, Francis. (1989). The End of History? The National Interest.

Hirsch, Jr., E.D. (2009). How Schools Fail Democracy. The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Horlacher, Rebekka. (2011). Schooling as a means of popular education: Pestalozzi's method as a popular education experiment. Paedagogica Historica. Vol. 47, Nos. 1-2, 65-75.

Kus, Zafer and Cetin, Turhan. (2014). Perceptions of Democracy of Primary School Students. Educational Sciences. Theory and Practice.

Peim, Nick. (2013). Education, Schooling, Derrida's Marx and Democracy: Some Fundamental Questions. Studies in Philosophy and Education. pg. 171-187.

Rockwell, Elsie. (2011). Popular education and the logics of schooling. Centro de Investigacion y Estudios Avanzados, Instituto Politecnico Nacional. Mexico City, Mexico.

Sanborn, Howard and Thyne, Clayton L. (2014). Learning Democracy: Education and the Fall of Authoritarian Regimes. British Journal of Political Science. 44.4: 773-797.

Other Resources

Albertus, Mike and Menaldo, Victor. March 2, 2011. “For enduring democracies, revolutions are the best bet”. USA Today.

August Landmesser. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Landmesser

Coombs, P. H. and Ahmed, M. (1974). Attacking Rural Poverty. How non-formal education can help, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

DeConcini, Dennis and Kyl, Jon. (2014, September 18). Arizona bombs civics, but we can change that. Azcentral. Retrieved from http://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/2014/09/17/civics-education-initiative/15742067/

Dewey, John. (1916). Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education by Dewey. Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/852/852-h/852-h.htm

Eakin, Sybil. “Giants of American Education: Horace Mann”. Technos Quarterly. Vol. 9. No. 2. Summer 2000 http://www.newfoundations.com/GALLERY/Mann.html.

Gatto, John Taylor. (2003). The Underground History of American Education: A Schoolteacher’s Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling. Oxford Village Press.

Herbert, Gary. “Gary R. Herbert: Citizenship education critical to long-term strength of nation.” Desert News. September 17, 2014. http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865611101/Citizenship-education-critical-to-long-term-strength-of-nation.html

Hirson, H. (1979). Bantu Education: 1954-1976. Year of Fire and Ash. London: Zed Press.

Ryan, Jacob. (2014, November 4) For Kentucky Felons, Getting to the Polls on Election Day Isn't an Option. WFPL. http://wfpl.org/post/kentucky-felons-getting-polls-election-day-isnt-option.

Kentucky's November 4, 2014 Senate Election Results. (2014). Retrieved from http://www.politico.com/2014-election/results/map/senate/kentucky/#.VF8sSPnF87U

Kentucky's Total Registered Voters. (2014). Retrieved from http://elect.ky.gov/SiteCollectionDocuments/Election%20Statistics/statcnty.txt

Lemov, Doug. Teach Like a Champion. Jossey-Bass. 2010. San Francisco.

Loflin, John Harris. (2008). A History of Democratic Education in American Public Schools. Democratic Education Consortium. Sao Paulo, Brazil. Retrieved from http://learningalternatives.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/a-history-of-democratic-education-in-american-public-schools.pdf

Mann, Horace. (1947). Annual Report of the Board of Education by the Massachusetts Board of Education. Retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?id=Xi8XAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA1-PA26&lpg=RA1-PA26&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false

Nietzsche. (1915). Human, All Too Human. CH Kerr and Company.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. (1979). Emile, or On Education. Basic Books. USA.

Zinn, Howard. (1997/2009). The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy. New York: Seven Stories Press. Pg. 420

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