Education and democratization. An introduction

ABSTRACT

Democracy as a regime and as a way of life requires strong ethical-political sensibilities and enabling social preconditions to the creation of which education may be especially conductove. The related normative tasks that we expect from education to carry out are daunting as such. However, they become even more difficult to fulfil in the contemporary contexts of exacerbated adversities. Democracy and democratic education have fallen into various crisis and are facing multiple challenges; this worry is shared by many educational theorists. Thus, today, there is an urgent call to rethink the relationship between education and democratization. This special issues reponds to that call with educational-philosophical papers that explore yet undertheorized dimensions of the connection of civic education and democratic development.

KEYWORDS:

• Crisis
• democracy
• inequalities
• injustice
• rethinking

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The importance of deliberative process and equality of all for democracy is acknowledged also in Plutarch’s text. The sages referred to the symposium itself in terms that chime with the notion of a democratic space, as enacting a kind of democratic deliberation, and praised its benefits and value for living and thinking together. One of the symposium participants even emphasizes that ‘the “opportunity to speak” (λόγος)’ during the symposium should not be ‘measured “according to wealth” (πλουτίνδην) or “according to birth/merit” (ἀριστίνδην).’ ‘Rather, “like in a democracy,” “everyone should get equal opportunities” to drink and to partake in discussion’ (Becker 2019, 37).

2. Democratic practices and forms of life were not exclusively evident in the history of thought of the western world (for more, see, for instance, Ronald Glassman (2019).

3. For more on the politics of such ‘critical times’ and ‘times of … ’ tropes and of what phenomena they single out as conspicuous challenges, see Papastephanou (2023b).

4. To Aristotle, koinonia [κοινωνία] represents the ontological model by which he understands human relationship. In his Politics, he uses the term to designate a community of any size, from a single family to a polis (city or city-state).