Democratic Education

Toward a New Common School Movement suggests that educational privatization and austerity are not simply bad policies but represent a broader redistribution of control over social life-that is, the enclosure of the global commons. This condition requires far more than a liberal defense of public schooling. It requires recovering elements of the radical progressive educational tradition while generating a new language of the common suitable to the unique challenges of the global era. Toward a New Common School Movement traces the history of struggles over public schooling in the United States and provides a set of ethical principles for enacting the commons in educational policy, finance, labor, curriculum, and pedagogy. Ultimately, it argues for global educational struggles in common for a just and sustainable future beyond the crises of neoliberalism and predatory capitalism.

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This paper titled, “Building Forts and Drawing on Walls: Fostering Student-Initiated Creativity in the Elementary Classroom” presents a fourth-grade classroom teacher’s reflective investigation into the self-initiated creative potential of his students through the development of a child-centered classroom. The story unfolds over the course of a school year as groups of students were allowed to freely create drawings, paintings, sculpture, and environments in the classroom and on the grounds of the school campus. For example, in the classroom the students developed intricate maze-like designs on the walls using Sharpie markers. Outside, the students began by constructing a humble lean-to that by year’s end turned into a series of complex fort structures. Through this experience, the author has come to realize that the creative potential of children far surpasses the limitations established by educational traditions, conventions, and expectations.""

Principles of freedom, independence and differentiation are shaping a new education landscape that includes new schools like free, charter and academy schools. Paradoxically, the reforms are justified on the basis of a rights and equalities discourse, yet they lead to greater competition through increased involvement of private interests. Critics of privatised schooling highlight its effects upon social inequalities. Looking to schooling in the fee-paying private sector reveals that there are a few schools whose strong ideological drivers resist competitive social relations. The ideas of Durkheim and Dewey on developing individuality in relation to a social good suggest it is theoretically possible that some of the new state-funded schools will also operate from their own social values to further social equity and make contributions to a more just society. This paper explores such a possibility by comparing newly established free schools in England with existing cases of democratic schooling to theorise how in a deregulated market a school might act upon the social field of schooling to promote social responsibility and minimise commitments to economic drivers, showing also the challenges a school might face in so doing.