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January 31, 2015
The lesson of any authoritarian society is simple. Without a vital public to hold power accountable and protect individuals against its incursions, there can be neither a democratic polity nor a secure private life.
How can I connect with something larger than my own ego?
No educational task is more important than helping students reflect on realities larger than their own egos—and learn how to find meaning and purpose by connecting with realities that bring life, not death.
The single most important thing teachers can do is explicitly connect the “big story” of the subject with the “little story” of the student's life.
But if students are to be well served and are to serve democracy well, we need to invite them into a lived engagement with democracy's core concepts and values. There are at least two ways to do this: by engaging students in democratic processes within the classroom and the school and by involving them in the political dynamics of the larger community.
to instill community pride and leadership skills in young people and engage them in governance.
Service learning and related action-reflection programs not only help students grow as citizens but help communities grow as well.
Students may take a course on democratic values that is full of solid information. But if the teacher does little more than dictate that information and then demand that students memorize and parrot it on tests, they are not learning democratic values. Instead, they are learning to survive as subjects of an autocracy: keep your head down, your mouth shut, and repeat the party line whether or not you understand it or believe it.
democracy is not a spectator sport in which citizens can sit back and watch the pros at work.
Both of these drivers create an educational bias against the humanities. For most students, courses in philosophy, literature, music, and the arts do not translate directly into jobs.
As is true of any subject, how we teach the humanities is as important as that we teach them, and the humanities are no freer from the cult of expertise than the sciences are.
