Conference Program

While there has been debate about the nature of democratic education and its effectiveness, there has been less discussion of the social and economic conditions which enable such an education. Given the ascent of the New Right in many countries this has become a vital question. Democratic education refers to an education for democratic citizenship and a system of education which is democratic. Dewey noted that ‘education is the midwife to democracy’, yet the current state of polarized societies vitiates this view. This suggests that we need to consider the conditions under which a democratic education is possible. The failure of Liberal democracies, hollowed out by Neo Liberal policies, has created an epistemic deficit that has enabled what Arendt called the ‘big lies’ associated with totalitarian regimes. To establish the failure of an education for democratic citizenship under Liberal democracies, evidence is drawn from the historical example of Germany during the democratic period of the Weimar Republic and subsequent Nazi dominance and from contemporary research on the Global Citizenship programme in the International Baccalaureate, where many students view it as a way of elevating their CVs as Neo-Liberal subjects (Hayden et al, 2020). In education, the consequence of this democratic failure has been what Balarin and Rodriguez (2024) have called ‘shallow pedagogies’. This suggests that a democratic education will only be effective in a society based on participatory democracy in which citizens engage in the informal education of decision-making according to our best theories and evidence. That said, without considering the economic conditions that have given rise to the New Right, such a proposal would be Idealist. This suggests that both participatory democracy and democratic education need to be seen as part of a broader progressive programme which addresses the fundamental contradictions within capitalism.