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Christer Fritzell A contribution to the

Dept of Pedagogy European Conference on Educational Research,

Växjö University University of Lisbon, Portugal, 11-14 September, 2002

Pedagogic practice and deliberative democracy

Introduction

During the course of modernisation it seems that a major problem facing educational systems in Western societies had to do with growing difficulties in transforming structures of pedagogic practice in accordance with social and cultural changes in society at large. The traditional value basis of schooling has been subjected to disintegration with regard to traditional world-views, further pronounced by multi-cultural influences, and teachers and pupils are now faced with a situation in which the basic tasks seem to be vastly redefined. An established focus on subject matter, which could previously be sustained by implicit cultural values and latent social sanctions, is apparently becoming very hard to maintain. And many pupils seem to be lost in late-modern conditions of highly flexible and increasingly individualised structures of teaching and learning.

During the second half of the last century the problems of educational democracy attracted an intensified significance in many European countries, as well as in the USA. Social and cultural change placed systems of schooling under pressure of growth and new demands as to the development of both fair and competitive comprehensive schools. If in modern society democracy is to be taken as the very epitome of the specific values that are supposed to do the job of holding people together as a society, such hopes were also to a substantial degree built into the basic ideals of education, as was succinctly formulated already by John Dewey in a well-known passage almost a hundred years ago:

The devotion of democracy to education is a familiar fact. The superficial explanation is that a government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless those who elect and who obey their governors are educated. Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created only by education. But there is a deeper explanation. A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience (Dewey, 1916/1997, p 87).

However, the operational meanings of fine words like these are not easily laid open. It rather seems that in many educational and pedagogical discussions of democratic ideals and aspirations, with their particular value bases as to ethics and moral virtues, the pitfall of what could be called "abstract normativism" is more of a rule than an exception. By this I mean that interest is directed to highly general and ideal notions of what needs to be done in educational settings, but without much attention paid to the harder issues of how this could actually be carried out. It is often very easy to criticise and pity the present condition, especially among the young, and mass media are more than helpful in providing the "facts" of moral decline and lack of discipline. Of course, everyone would like to see a more favourable situation, and good hopes are always appreciated. In such discourse, exchange of abstract condemnation and wishful speculation tend to exclude analysis, and the actual practice of teaching and learning in schools tends to slip far away….

If traditional values grounded in religious and ideological beliefs are loosing their capacity to provide spiritual meaning as well as practical co-ordination in day-to-day activities, the question arises as to functional alternatives, also as a basis of educational ambitions. Of course social integration is pursued in many ways, perhaps most comprehensively in modern society by means of two basic forms of steering; on the one hand political and bureaucratic and on the other hand economic and market-based. Legal and administrative rules and regulations as well as financial transactions tend to control ever larger sections of everyday life. So also in systems of education, and it seem that the last decades have seen these "steering-media", as they are called by Habermas (e g 1987), grow in importance in the structuring of schooling.

In such processes human action is framed in forms of rationality in which basic cultural values are not easily identified or acknowledged. The co-ordination of social activities may be accomplished and sustained largely by the proper adjustment of functional consequences, and topical interpretation in terms of cultural values may be of little significance as long as the results meet such functional requirements. It seems that in late-modern systems of schooling these forms of rationality often tend to dominate in conflicts of social roles as well as in the social construction of prevalent concepts of knowledge.

So in departing from abstract normativism, a more concrete pedagogic analysis will need an elaborate frame of reference with regard to the historical development of modern society, with its cultural differences. In such an analysis problems concerning secularisation and social differentiation, globalisation and multi-culturalism as well as a number of other aspects of pluralism would probably have to be closely attended to. It seems however a safe assumption that traditional perspectives related to homologous world-views can no longer be adhered to in the pursuit of a legitimate value-basis of comprehensive schooling in Western countries. At the same time as the extreme division of labour and fragmentation of functional relationships underpin highly generalised norms, the actual content of central values like individual freedom, responsibility, tolerance, solidarity and so on may seem to descend into obscurity.

If concepts like these are nevertheless needed in relation to education in general and basic schooling in particular, an obvious problem centers on tenable ways of turning them into some kind of tangible reality in the pedagogic practice of teachers and pupils. Likewise, this task seems to entail enormous complications when it comes to interpretations of their explicit formulation in policies and theories. While teachers and pupils no doubt often act out the values of democratic education, it seems that efforts to actually pinpoint and communicate the meaning of democracy in pedagogic practice constantly run into dead-locks of one sort or the other.

Yet if schooling is supposed to pursue not only knowledge and skills, but also cultural and moral values connected with the ideals of democracy, the practical implications in concrete contexts will have to be dealt with. This is also the task of a research and development project to be discussed in the paper. The aim here is to give an overview of the social philosophical and theoretical basis of the project with particular attention to the issue of turning abstract ideals into practical reality. In the following, concepts of democracy pertaining to general school curricula in relation to practical pedagogic ambitions are described and analysed in terms of moral development and citizenship.

On the meaning of educational democracy

Perhaps the basic meanings of democracy are hard to pinpoint because they are so important to all of us. Educational democracy is no exception. Educational democracy is certainly a complex and multi-facetted concept, and democracy can even be considered the most important aspect of education, particularly at the level of basic schooling. And democracy may well be seen as the very epitome of schooling in modern society insofar as it is supposed to characterise schooling in all its aspects. This ideal notwithstanding, the concept of educational democracy is contested, and there seems to be a plethora of interpretations competing for influence in educational theory and practice.

Quite a lot of research has been carried out on questions of democracy related to the establishment and development of more comprehensive systems of national schooling. Well-known contributions in this area are connected to names like Plowden, Jencks and Coleman, and they have doubtless been very influential in terms of state policies in many countries. Here, democracy was looked upon as a matter of the availability and distribution of education to the population at large. How is schooling to be made available to all? What are the best ways of differentiation and selection in terms of both efficiency and welfare? Questions like these were raised in research and debate on the importance of education in the creations of greater equality and democracy.[1]

Education was approached as a social "system" in relation to other systems, primarily work and the labour market. Schooling was typically seen as a major stepping-stone on the road from family life to professional life. Democracy in this context was often considered a matter of how these systems were functionally connected in view of opportunities and difficulties for various social groups. Thus a major issue turned on how educational systems could compensate for inequalities in pre-requisites or differentiate fairly with regard to outcome and effects.

Another point of departure has been to approach the issues of educational democracy in terms of individual freedom and liberal ideals concerning the possibilities for single individuals to choose according to their own interests and needs. The qualities of schools concerning flexibility and individualisation as to both form and content were observed, and a democratic value was attached to the degrees of freedom of choice when it comes to decisions on what subjects to study in what ways, and so on.

I would venture to say that in very broad terms the problems of educational democracy have been approached largely from these two points of departure; on the one hand analyses of systems of schooling in terms of equal opportunity, differentiation and in general the relationships between schooling, family and work, and on the other hand, matters of individual freedom as to the catering for individual needs and the possibilities for individual choice.

It also seems that these major approaches to the problems of educational democracy fall back on two basic ways of apprehending democracy in society at large. I am thinking here about the two general models of democracy that can be called the representative and the participative. Thus, and again in very general terms, it could be argued that studies on equal opportunity, distribution etc within schooling rely on notions of representative democracy in which the task of polity is to maintain such educational systems in which the will of the people is properly, i e democratically, expressed. The form and content of education will then have to be adjusted to needs and requirements from this point of view. On the other hand, notions of participatory democracy are easily detected in many studies that focus on individual freedom of choice and the possibilities to pursue individual interests in education.

Important as these kinds of studies on educational democracy obviously have been and are in policymaking on many central matters of educational interest, they share a critical shortcoming in the specific context of practical pedagogy. Thus while they may provide essential information on sociological and psychological aspects of democratic education, they may have little to say about pedagogic democracy in the practical activities of teachers and pupils. In effect they tend to evade questions like: What is in fact pedagogical democracy within particular systems of education and after individuals have made their choices?

These kinds of questions seem more to the point within a third major conception of democracy, which has been widely discussed during the last few decades, and I am referring here to deliberative democracy. Some have even argued that there has been a "deliberative turn" in theories of democracy (e g Dryzek, 2000). In deliberative democracy focus is placed in possibilities of solving problems and making decisions by means of rational discussion and exchange of well-grounded opinions. By sharing arguments in communication, democratic intercourse is seen as a practical means of reaching agreement on matters of common concern.[2]

It is not very difficult to justify the effort to translate the political terms of democratic deliberation into educational ones. For instance, Amy Gutman in a well-known analysis in this field points to several important issues concerning democratic education on the basis of a widely accepted liberal perspective:

Deliberative decision making and accountability presuppose a citizenry whose education prepares them to deliberate, and to evaluate the results of the deliberations of their representatives. A primary aim of publicly mandated schooling is therefore to cultivate the skills and virtues of deliberation (Gutman 1999, p xiii).

While few educationalists are likely to oppose to this aim of developing democracy in and by deliberative processes of schooling, teaching and learning, the question of how this could actually be done in practical terms is hardly settled by this positive attitude. And although deliberative democracy certainly may seem especially interesting in the context of education and schooling since is points our attention to the basic question of the very meaning of democracy in the actual, practical, day-to-day activities, feasible pedagogical models may still seem far from obvious. In many respects, the actual reality of schooling tends to appear distant from even weak forms of deliberative intercourse. Perhaps some educationalists in contemplating the possibilities of deliberation in that context would rather agree with Schauer (1999, p 17) in that "the resistance of other members of the community to even our strongest arguments is a continuing and puzzling frustration".