| Democracy and Society | |
What is democracy - is it something worth preserving and, if so, how should we do it? Most Americans tend to take the democratic nature of our society for granted, but they shouldn't. This is especially true because so few of them actively participate in our democratic institutions, few can readily articulate why democratic institutions are important, and not many understand how and why democratic values should be passed along to young people.
Fortunately, two recent books can help alleviate such problems. One, The Last, Best Hope: a Democracy Reader, edited by Stephen John Goodlad, explains what democracy is and why it is important. But even better, the various contributors also take the time to explain what sorts of threats exist in our society which might server to undermine our democratic institutions. One of the most obvious is general apathy - democracies cannot rely upon passive acceptance. Instead, they rely upon active involvement - not simply by voting, but by being active in the community and as a general member of society. A related problem lies in the changing nature of social interactions, moving away from being valued in their own right because so much of out interactions with others have been reduced to economic utility.
Democracy also cannot survive unless future generations actually want it to - and this, of course, requires that we pass along democratic values to our children. That is the topic of a companion volume to the above book, Developing Democratic Character in the Young, edited by Roger Soder, John I. Goodlad and Timothy J. McMannon. One of the principle themes is the fact that so many people today see our schools simply as a means to education - or even worse, to create job skills for competing later on in the market. But schools have a much more important function, often lost in today's rhetoric: creating the future's democratic citizenry.
The public is not simply a random assembly of individuals who happen to live in the same geographic area. In a democracy the demos must be a collection of people who actually value the public institutions which created the foundation of society. These values cannot be acquired through osmosis, however. We must make a deliberate attempt to foster them in our youth, preferable in the democratic institution where they spend the most time: schools. But today we fail to do this, and Soder's books explains how, why, and what we might try to do about it.
Read the reviews:
Developing Democratic Character in the Young
The Last, Best Hope: a Democracy Reader
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