Joel Westheimer -

If students from a totalitarian nation were secretly transported to an American classroom to continue their lessons with new teachers and a new curriculum, would they be able to tell the difference?  I do not ask this question facetiously.  It seems plausible, for example, that a good lesson in multiplication, chemistry, or a foreign language might seem equally at home in many parts of the world.  So what would be different about teaching and learning in your local schools than in the schools of a country governed by a one-ruling-party dictatorship?  Do students in the United States learn how to participate as democratic citizens in decisions that affect all our lives?

Most of us would like to believe that they do. While a school in North Korea, China, or Iran might be teaching students blind allegiance to their nation’s leaders and deference to the social and political policies those leaders enact, we would expect that schools in the United States would teach students the skills and dispositions needed to evaluate for themselves the benefits and drawbacks of particular policies and government practices.

We would not be surprised to learn, for example, that North Korean children are taught to abide by an “official history” handed down by President Kim Jong-il and his single-party authoritarian regime. A school curriculum that teaches one unified, unquestioned version of “truth” is one of the hallmarks of totalitarian societies. Democratic citizens, on the other hand, are committed to the people, principles, and values that underlie democracy – such as political participation, free speech, civil liberties, and social equality. Schools might develop these commitments through lessons in the skills of analysis and exploration, free political expression, and independent thought. And U.S. schools often support democratic dispositions in just such ways.

But teaching and learning do not always conform to democratic goals and ideals. Tensions abound, and in recent years some of the very foundations of democratic engagement such as opportunities for independent thinking and critical analysis have become less and less common. If being a good democratic citizen requires thinking critically about important social assumptions, then that foundation of citizenship is at odds with recent trends in education policy.

I run a research collaborative called Democratic Dialogue (www.Democratic-Dialogue.com). The teachers, students, and university researchers associated with Democratic Dialogue are all interested in the role schooling plays in strengthening democratic societies. We conduct studies to investigate the many different ways schools are fulfilling (or not fulfilling) their historic democratic mission to foster an educated citizenry, capable of informed engagement in civic and political life. These studies indicate a clear and troubling trend: much of current education reform is limiting the ways teachers can develop the kinds of attitudes, skills, knowledge, and habits necessary for a democratic society to flourish. Indeed, the goals of K-12 education have been shifting steadily away from preparing active and engaged public citizens and towards more narrow goals of career preparation and individual economic gain.

Pressures from parents, school boards, and a broad cultural shift in educational priorities have resulted in schools across the country being seen primarily as conduits for individual success, and, increasingly, lessons aimed at exploring democratic responsibilities have been crowded out.

In many school districts, ever narrower curriculum frameworks emphasize preparing students for standardized assessments in math and literacy at the same time that they shortchange the social studies, history, and citizenship education. Moreover, there is a “democratic divide” in which higher achieving students, generally from wealthier neighborhoods, are receiving a disproportionate share of the kinds of citizenship education that sharpen students’ thinking about issues of public debate and concern. Curricular approaches that spoonfeed students to succeed on narrow academic tests teach students that broader critical thinking is optional.