Education for Democracy

With a title like "Education for Democracy" with those two big words in it, education and democracy the word I want to hold up to the light first is for. It could mean education for use by an existing, living, breathing democracy. It could also mean education/or bringing about a democracy because we surely don't have one now. That's the for I mean. Despite secret ballots and slogans like "majority rules," we don't have a democracy. Some of us think we do. Lots of us wish we did. We've got some of the rhetoric and even some of the governmental structures. But we're a long way from living in a democracy. A democracy is a system, as Pat Shannon (1993) says, in which people participate meaningfully in decisions that affect their lives. To quote John Cabral (personal communication, 1993), a progressive city planner in Chicago, it is a system where people consciously and rationally decide together how and what to produce and consume; or to quote Peter Johnston (1992), it is a system where there is genuine negotiation of societal goals and meanings. Each definition emphasizes participation. But it's participation among equals, negotiation among equals, not participation where a few are more equal than the rest. Each definition also emphasizes significant participation, not just having a vote on options already determined behind the scenes, but being a part of what is now done behind the scenes in essence, eliminating official "behind-the-scene-ness." In a democracy, there wouldn't be the kind of situation in the United States that Shannon (1993) described in an article called "Developing Democratic