Against Dumbocracy and Education

In this time of ascendant US fascism, as we sigh our way through the 250-year anniversary of the country’s bourgeois revolution, democracy and education makes me uneasy. To me, democracy is when everyone affected by a policy has a meaningful share in the deliberation and administration of it. But when I hear “democracy and education in America” now, in our current moment, it sounds an awful lot like Trout Fishing in America: quaint, absurd, cheesy, but also scammy, like someone’s peeing on my leg and telling me it’s raining.

I’m not the majority. There’s a common sense about the relationship between democracy and public education in the United States, specifically how education advances democracy in the nation, and it goes something like this: We need education for an informed electorate, so our schools are essential for democracy. If the schools are bad, democracy is threatened, and to the extent that we have strong public schools then we have strong democracy. In short, more school equals more democracy, and better school equals better democracy—broadly speaking.

There are varieties of this notion, some of which center citizenship or friendship or trust or ethics. American philosopher and psychologist John Dewey even thought that democracy and education were conceptually equivalent as the constant give and take of shared interests. Education, through that process of communication and deliberation, was for him democracy itself. Since Horace Mann, known as the Father of American Education, declared schools were the balance wheel of the social machinery in the mid-19th century, partisans of this vision say that we’ve seen nothing but progress, including in the democratic quality of the country.

The positive correlation between education and democracy isn’t not there in recent data. Even though political scientists have seriously debated recently whether a college degree yields more voter turnout, there’s good reason to believe that perhaps it does, as going to college increases turnout by about 10 percent. The numbers are similar for the more global nexus between educational attainment and democracy: the more education, the more participation in government. Less empirically, some think that school boards themselves increase democracy, with their nonpartisan elections, hyperlocal participatory structure, and low spending on campaigns. Despite this evidence, I still cringe when I think about democracy and education in America. What if these notions that education has advanced democracy in America, to play on the fish theme, are bass ackwards?

 American Education Is Bass Ackwards

From the start, we must understand our history to grasp how education was removed from direct democracy, when in 1650 religious extremist settlers while stealing land from the Indigenous, couldn’t figure out how to make decisions about education through town hall protocols and established a committee of other people to do it. This less democratic educational structure was maintained. These were the same people that burned women for being witches. Their separate structure of the school district survived, despite Benjamin Franklin’s guileful plagiarizing of Iroquois democracy for the country’s constitution.

Funding for education in the United States and its history is bass ackwards, too. The Supreme Court declared in 1973, since the word education isn’t in the US constitution, the federal government is absolved of responsibility for public education. This is despite the fact that every state has an education clause in their constitutions. In 1974, in Detroit, the Supreme Court decided that there’s no legal obligation to deal with funding disparities across school district lines. As recently as 2018, Detroit residents sued the federal government for not providing adequate literacy in public schools to satisfy constitutional requirements for voting given the underfunding of the city’s schools. While the Court ruled in favor of the residents, the incident begs the question: Is this a true democracy?

Meanwhile, since the 1880s, funding for schools has been metaphysically tied to racist property markets, levied at the local level without any redistribution, with states attempting to compensate for the disparities through sales taxes that hit working class communities harder than the wealthy. Even worse, public schools have had to sell themselves as commodities on Wall Street for infrastructure money, ceding what little democratic power elected school boards have to anonymous bondholders who must be paid back with high rates of interest before money is spent on the actual provision of education. The property taxes, increased-but-ineffective state spending, combined with the bondage of bonding causes districts to worry more about their credit ratings and local property values than educating for democracy or anything else—all of this forcing communities to filter their views of public education through the veil of their real estate’s price, ensuring that places with high property values only serve high property value people, everyone else de damned. That’s just straight-up undemocratic.

What Could Education and Democracy Actually Be?

I’m historically irked by the common-sense national understanding of democracy and education. Philosophically irked, too. What I mean is that democracy was conceived by the Iroquois and Aristotle and whoever else as a way of getting to something like justice, nourishing social relations, and making sure everyone has what they need and want. Democracy’s not an end in itself, and you can’t eat it or use it pay rent. It’s a means to that end. Whether it’s neoliberals who’ve recently lost power or fascists who are now in power in the United States, if you have what you think is a democracy and it’s not helping people survive and thrive then it’s time to wonder if your democracy is democracy at all.

Another philosophical thing that irks me is that education doesn’t make society more democratic, beyond the thin premise of voter turnout, on which research is tepid anyway. If you have a democratic society, then education helps keep that going, yes. But let’s be real for a moment. Education is carework that maintains the continuity of social relations and bodies in a society, however those are arranged. If adults make a society undemocratic, there’s no amount of educating younger people that’s going to solve that. Adults have to learn outside of school to make society more democratic.

But of course, our social relations and bodies are potentially and sometimes actually democratic, and so is America generally.

There’s a promise of democracy this country makes that oppressed groups have used to fight and even win to gain better worlds. It’s that potential for democracy through education that gets us sort of excited. What could democracy and education in our nation actually be? What’s a good horizon? I’d want an education that advances a democracy you can eat. An education for democracy that’s not dumbocracy. For such a model, we can look to the Basque country of Spain during its bout of fascism from 1939 to 1975 for a template, and then go in search of precedents here and now.

I lived in such a house in Brooklyn with a bunch of Stanford grads. Their lives were materially democratic in ways I hadn’t been able to imagine…

Don Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta was a Basque Catholic priest with a socialist bent living under Franco’s fascist regime. In the 1950s, Arizmendiarrieta served a poor community and wanted participation, democracy, but he wanted his people to have what they needed and wanted. So, he founded a new school whose goal was to educate democratic relations of ownership. The first graduating class of the priest’s new school went on to start a worker-owned stove company. That little business grew into the Mondragon Cooperatives, a mass industrial scale of worker and consumer owned businesses, one of the world’s largest to date. Mondragon is more democratic than what we have in America, and the priest’s school advanced that democracy fundamentally. I think we can do that too. In fact, there’s a long tradition of thinking about education for democratic control of our lives, from Robert Owen in the 17th century to Tom Woodin’s recent work on cooperative learning.

But this education for democracy happens in the United States too. I worked at HB Woodlawn High School in Virginia, an alternative school that involved the students in the yearly budgeting process, holding assemblies with even the youngest kids to teach them how to address questions around where the community’s money comes from and goes. Later, when I was a professor at Cleveland State University, I worked on a project to start a school program at the primary and secondary level that followed Arizmendiarrieta’s model. We wanted to teach students to control the means of production, to own them, to have a meaningful share in the deliberation and administration of the policies that materially affect them. This is a polytechnic education for a democracy they could eat. The Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland are one of the largest worker-owned businesses in the country. If we could teach democratic ownership, I thought, we could build out the cooperative model. This would be a truly democratic public education, a public education advancing democracy that isn’t bass ackwards. There are small islands of such experiments, more at the university level than K-12.

At Stanford University, there’s a long tradition of cooperative student dorms where Sigourney Weaver famously lived. The students share the maintenance and administration of their housing, cooking and cleaning and organizing events, collectively sharing costs and space. When they graduate, they then go on to live cooperatively because they know how to do it and prefer sharing the work of life together in this way, living democratically. I know because I lived in such a house in Brooklyn with a bunch of Stanford grads. Their lives were materially democratic in ways I hadn’t been able to imagine, and it was their education that taught them how to do it. (Other cooperative universities with a spectrum of democratic practices include Warren Wilson College, Evergreen College, and the University of the Redlands. These are the seeds of a democracy and education in the United States that I can get behind. At this time of radical uncertainty, maybe we need a radical turn in our thinking in how we can fight for education that really advances democracy, not some dumb shell of it.