Toward schools as sites of radical democratization: New possibilities for democratic education

Toward schools as sites of radical democratization: New possibilities for democratic education

Schools as they are currently constituted in many capitalist, liberal–democratic nations, including the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and Australia, are not particularly democratic places. Several decades of neoliberal and neoconservative education policymaking have sought to replace the public good of public education—including its collective commitment to improving social justice and equity outcomes for all young people—with the market logics of choice, competition, and individual gain (Connell, 2013), in which schools compete for market share and students are rendered as consumers (Giroux, 2016). However, it need not be so. Indeed, Woods (2011) argued that “the idea that private business, markets and the role of people as consumers constitute the preferred model for all kinds of services and human activity is past its sell-by date” (p. 3). Now is the time for schools to become sites of radical democratization instead of continuing to support the reproduction of existing social and economic inequalities.

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