Everyday life, democracy and education in the age of populism

ABSTRACT

In our day and age, everyday life has become a receptacle of various spheres of human life and development. Its expansion and current role of the main reference point for the valuation of phenomena and processes can be seen in the media, various branches of the economy, politics, education, religion, science, art, new technologies, etc. Therefore, the question that we seek to answer in our article is the following: what is the role of democratic politics and educational practice in the context of the modern appreciation of everyday life as the most essential locus of human life?

KEYWORDS:

• Everyday life
• politics
• education
• democracy
• populism
• modernity

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. This relationship is, naturally, highlighted in Dewey’s seminal Democracy and Education, published in 1916. Still, it is in order to recall in the context of relations between education and everyday life his work from a decade before, The Child and the Curriculum.

2. This allegation has, of course, a longer tradition, and we can distinguish several levels in ‘detachment’ itself; see Włodarczyk (2022), 107–120.

3. Importantly, Thomas More’s Utopia of 1516, which in time became a major cultural text and at the same time a paradigmatic text for the entire vibrant literary genre, puts everydayness at the center of the narrative of an ideal social organization; see Sargent (2010), 4–5; Włodarczyk (2022), 152–160.

4. The idea of non-consensual democracy is developed in the book: Koczanowicz (2015).

Additional information

Funding

The article is the result of research project “The Aesthetics of Populism. Political struggle and the aesthetics experience in Poland after 1989” funded by the National Science Center (no. 2019/35/B/HS2/01187).