Education and democracy: “Educational democracy” or “democratic education”?

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Xavier Massó

The question could also be framed in terms of which education system is better suited to a democracy. This is no idle question. What is at stake is whether we give priority above all to the fully democratic functioning of the educational institution or, on the contrary, to the education system’s task of forming future free citizens suited to democracy.

This is not a new debate. It goes back to the criticisms of the republican school of the Enlightenment tradition voiced by anti-authoritarian Romanticism rooted in Rousseau. The former corresponds to the idea of “democratic education”—or education for democracy—as represented by the Enlightenment model of Condorcet; the latter corresponds to “educational democracy”, the model of Rousseau and the later pedagogical schools that grew up in his wake—with the Savoyard vicar thrown in free with the purchase.

In a text that, in our view, is of crucial importance for education [1], Hannah Arendt reminded us that “the problem of education in the modern world lies in the fact that by its very nature it cannot forgo either authority or tradition, and yet must proceed in a world that is neither structured by authority nor held together by tradition”.

For Arendt, the school belongs neither to the private sphere nor to the political (public) sphere, but occupies the pre-political, or pre-public, realm, since it precedes them both logically and chronologically. It is concerned with the formative process that precedes entry into adult society, for which it must prepare the individual. This gives it a particularly distinctive character, based on the fact that “what may be generally valid in education is not necessarily so outside it, that is, in the world of adults”.

And this does indeed seem to be the case, both with regard to authority and to the appeal to tradition. Whereas in the public sphere citizens stand on an equal footing before the law, this is not so in education; there is an asymmetrical relationship between its participants: one, an adult, teaches; the other, a child or adolescent, learns. The adult world, for its part, can be more consistently oriented towards the immediacy of the present and, in any case, take tradition for granted. In education, however, this cannot be so because, as Arendt reminds us in the same essay, “since the world is old, always older than they themselves, learning inevitably turns toward the past”.

There is also an aspect worth highlighting, given the deliberate neglect it has suffered at the hands of official pedagogies in recent decades. For Hannah Arendt, “the function of the school is to teach children what the world is like and not to instruct them in the art of living”. How to live in the world is something that each person must ultimately decide according to their own judgement, which should have been shaped in part by the education they received during their school years. The reason for this qualification is obvious and has two aspects. On the one hand, we are reminded that the aim of school is the transmission of knowledge, not indoctrination, and that this must be so because the individual is an end in themselves and never a means. Moving from teaching what the world is like to telling people how to live in it does not seem particularly compatible with this Enlightenment idea of Kantian origin.

Arendt also opposes the view of childhood and adolescence as autonomous stages that have meaning in themselves, just as she opposes their subjection to the logic of adult society. Since they are not autonomous stages, they cannot and should not be shaped according to their own “natural” or “spontaneous” dynamics, nor within a framework in which the teacher is merely a companion whose role is to adapt to the world of children and adolescents, doing no more than fostering and channelling the development of their impulses. Since the “world” of learners is not autonomous and meaningful in itself, but is given to them by the adult world into which they will eventually enter, the concepts of authority and reference to tradition are inseparable from education. Through the teacher, they serve as a link between the adult world and the new generations who will one day become adults themselves. In other words, allowing everyone to study is democratic, but the teaching of mathematics is not. Education is not a natural or spontaneous process, but an artificial one and therefore necessarily guided.

We have also been able to observe, however, that the principle of authority in education was already beginning to be questioned in the 1950s. Given the formal requirements of education, the question that arises is how we can reconcile them with the requirements of a democratic society. In other words, and at the risk of provoking the Holy Office, the question is whether maintaining the principle of authority in education means sacrificing democratic values, as some argue, or whether, on the contrary, as others maintain, the opposite is true and maintaining it is precisely a necessary condition for securing the future of democracy.

At this point, to be honest, the notion of “democratic education” does not seem to raise many conceptual or moral problems, because the claim that education (in a democracy) need not itself be “democratic” is compatible with the very structure of the teacher/learner dyad, that is, with the model of the Academy that has governed the Western world since the time of Plato, in which the teacher’s authority is legitimised by mastery of the subject being taught. This model has survived more than two millennia of democracies, dictatorships and populisms of every kind. Historically, it has been challenged in demagogic contexts in which those in power have sought to appropriate it and transfer it to their sycophants. Nazism, for example, is one of the most emblematic cases, and one that has been suspiciously little studied.

And perhaps the teacher/learner dyad is not as democratic as the strictest purists might wish, but then neither is the relationship between doctor and patient, without anyone seeing this as a threat to the foundations of democracy. Moreover, if we consider truths that must be taught at school—for example, whether or not there was a Big Bang, whether air has weight and whether hot air weighs more or less than cold air, or whether the Earth orbits the Sun or vice versa—it seems that none of these questions can be decided by a vote at an assembly. Nor can a vote decide whether astrology is a science or a pseudoscience. Democracy simply has nothing to say about such matters, except to denounce impostures.

The notion of educational democracy, by contrast, does seem to raise serious problems, both theoretical and practical. From the outset, it requires the educational process itself, as well as the structure and institution responsible for carrying it out—namely, the school—to function in a fully democratic manner. The problems, however, differ considerably from one case to another.

In essence, what the idea of “educational democracy” proposes, from what we might call a libertarian perspective, is the elimination of the principle of authority in school, treating as equals those who are not equal—that is, projecting adult society onto the world of children and young people. Instead of learning the rules of the game so that one day they can take part in it with an understanding of what is involved, the game itself becomes the learning. This is as nonsensical as claiming that movement is proved by walking: walking does not prove movement, but at most (merely) demonstrates it, which is not at all the same thing.

In its most up-to-date and elaborate version, which is by no means inspired by libertarianism, the principle of authority is abolished by transferring it to an entity external to the educational process, to an instrument or means that comes to be treated as an end. The principle of authority is not eliminated; rather, the figure that represented it is removed or its functions are changed. In other words, the teacher becomes a coach or spiritual adviser who simply provides guidance or, in a still more futuristic development, is replaced by AI, a possibility already at an advanced experimental stage. To AI, it seems, something more than the modest principle of authority we have been discussing has been transferred unconditionally: the principle of all authority. But that is a subject for another day.

In the meantime, let us marvel at how, with just four quotations from a short essay written three-quarters of a century ago, Hannah Arendt is more than enough to strip, at a stroke, virtually the whole of twentieth- and twenty-first-century pedagogist literature of its foundational categories. And, in passing, to do the same to all its postmodern epigones, even before they had appeared on the scene. For now, too, let us stay with Hannah Arendt.

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[1] Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Education” (1953), later published in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (1961).

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