In my prospectus, I am attempting to argue that standardization in education reform is a form of democracy. The democracy of modern education is a process of making knowledge legible and orderly for the purpose of competition (to put it simply), being better able to compete in colleges, careers, and the global economy. Of course, I see this form of democracy as being quite limited and problematic. It views education as static and does not see education as fluid or evolving or benefiting from any sort of experience; it resists understanding because understanding is less easily measured than knowledge. Democracy, according to Dewey in "The Challenge to Democracy in Education," sees democracy as dynamic and about understanding the movement and direction of social forces." Democratic education seeks to understand the social needs and the resources that may be used to satisfy them. The importance of education for Dewey is in understanding rather than knowledge. Education reform is an iteration of democracy as a political system involving institutions and discourses as consent by the governed, regulation, and social control. Again, we can see democracy has having its limits -- and in both iterations: Dewey's and education reform's/
Cintron, in his chapter "Democracy and Its Limitation," seems to be arguing that we should be suspicious. He says democracy is "ontologized" or "over a number of centuries democracy has acquired a certain primordial value, an automatic virtue, a kind of fundamental, nearly metaphysical rightness." Cintron goes on to suggest a few reasons why this has happened. First, democracy has from an early time defined itself against its negatives like monarchy and Communism. Post-Berlin Wall, democracy is global or transnational with no serious contender against which to measure it, and so Cintron suggest that without the negative the ideologies that helped to dismiss the others might dissipate and I think in education, we can see that it is. Second, democracy has been imagined with limitless resources with limitless rights and freedoms; if we consider property rights, we see that it has become a restricting agent. So we see while all have a right to their share of property and commodities, democracy as open-ended rights and freedoms will need an adjustment.
Topoi (commonplaces) and social energies. He argues that topoi, in order to move things (like ideas, knowledge, and understanding), must preexist the motion itself. "The body politic can be described as already organized around its topoi. Topoi do not emerge out of the blue...So the ability to get things moving collectively is dependent on the fact that topoi constitute the body politic in a visible and highly public sort of way." Understanding names the process by which the new enters a system of language that socializes new topoi with old.
When looking at the rhetorical nature of democracy, we notice scholars using such topoi as democracy, equality, and egalitiarianism (which I am avoiding to some degree in my dissertation) as unstated value systems to talk about the issues with institutions (as I do with schooling). In some senses, such as when I talk about "thick pedagogy," I talk about greater inclusivity of people and arguments; I think about my argument as having automatic virtue because I talk about democracy in this more complex (what I think as more complex and ethical) sense. Of course, inclusion and participation also need to be examined just as do exclusion and authoritarian pedagogy. Cintron says," Advocacy in the name of equality seems to ignore material limits that shrink the good intention to include. Political organizers know this especially well, and this is why they shoot for more benefits or higher wages than can be achieved because they know restrictions will eventually curb their aspirations." And I know this well, too. I do not expect education to create equality or to give students equal access to higher education and careers. Rather, I know restrictions will curb such aspirations. Schooling, education reform, is not going to bring about democracy in the sense of equality or freedom for all. There is no democracy in education. However, democratic methods in the classroom and democratic texts -- in the sense that they offer more complexity and ways of knowing and understanding. As Cintron's alderman sees democracy as a ritual to be manipulated by the power that he has collected so that he might have even more power to do what he thinks is right, my right way of teaching clearly stymies other right ways of teaching. It my way more democratic, perhaps and perhaps not, but it is at least acknowledging that teaching is always and already consequential and perhaps, then, never truly free. Democracy, therefore, has no automatic value.
Habermas (and Nussbaum in Poetic Justice) describe the public sphere as a social space that "ought to mitigate violence and human suffering by increasing the amount of inclusive, rational, and empathetic communication." Of course, I want the public to be good and just, and I argue that literature can at least cultivate some understanding of how complex those ideas are and that education has some responsibility in encourage this sort of understanding. Is this demand thought of as innately virtuous or answering a higher purpose of humanity? Innately? I am not sure. I do, however, see the work of a teacher of children as ethically implicated. The inclusion of stories traditionally excluded in middle school curriculum or curriculum more generally seems good for democracy but how such stories are included also has ethical implications, so it is not innately virtuous. Thus, Cintron argues that an ontological attribution of virtue to democracy is open to inquiry, "a rhetoric whose substance and meaning are opaque until the motives behind its deployment are understood. Democracy and itse attendant terms (transparency, rule of law, rights, equality, and so on) are quintessential topoi that exhibit sufficient malleability to mobilize the most disparate collective desires and actions, and as a result have competing meanings."
What we have with school reform is more in line with what Cintron calls a oligarchic-democracy: "we may ask (demand) that the mechanism and adjudication be 'fair' or 'democratic,' but fairness not only difficult to determine ,but, in the final instance, only a certain amount of 'fairness' can be permitted...only up to the point that it jeopardizes the stability of the social system...which will respond with its [the system's] even more rightful claim to 'fairness.'" Rights to resources will inevitably be regulated (and is already) and exhaust democracy with laws, democratically passed, that will respond to the constriction of resources especially if we cannot find new technologies to replace the wastefulness of current technologies.And this brings me back to education. The sort of education that restricts, constricts and wants to quantify knowledge will not be the sort of education that can create new technologies to preserve democracy, or the ideologically virtuous imaginary of democracy. Perhaps Cintron would argue that the purpose of education reform (exclusion and inclusion of certain knowledges) is for the continuity of power; "just laws...also participate in the consolidation of specific power blocs and the dismantling of others in the infinite game of inclusion/exclusion." And does this not have ethical implications? Shouldn't education be about uncovering the texts that contribute to this phenomenon? Shouldn't education be about presenting the "material conditions, or root conditions, that allow- or disallow -- people to think and act according to 'democratic virtues'"?
As Agamben notes democracy is a set of conceptual ideas that cannot be easily materialized in a real state with real needs facing the push and pull of internal and external forces (again we come to Dewey's call to education to study social forces). I like this idea of seeing democracy as a "thought system that may have tried to institutionalize but has yet to arrive." Cintron says that from a certain perspective democracy simply has darker conditions as part of the potential of any democratic power. if theory attempts to control practice by giving it meaning and practice abides by theory and follows its rules, the breaking point is the moment when practice must overthrow what gives it meaning to save the theory itself. "But this breaking point simply tells us what has been in place all along, namely, that theory is constantly under assault because it disables and hinders the power of human desire and real needs" (110). But a calling out of this hypocrisy some argue are legitimate strategies by which the virtues of democracy can be widened and improved, and perhaps the classroom is the place to do this. I think the English classroom is the very place to call out the shortcomings of democracy in our history (Kant, Rawls, and Habemas).
How then might we improve the public sphere? Democracy is too abstract to be institutionalized. Whatever one complains about related to democracy is inherent to the the system. Democracy provides an interpretive lens that can rationalize and legitimize actions and words that we, and Cintron, finds reprehensible (e.g. standardization and privatization of testing). Democracy generates the very conditions that trouble education; public school, accountability, no child left behind. All of these might be about equal rights in education, but in an effort to measure learning, it excludes certain knowledges and thus people.
Cintron admits that he cannot imagine a program that could "in any pragmatic way improve public deliberation" and that most "calls to improve the public sphere reflect the specific motives of some group that feels shut out of the deliberative process" and that most calls for improvement "idealize the concept of the public good by suggesting that there is some determination or improvement that will somehow escape the paradoxical conditions of exclusion/inclusion."
Democratic rhetorics overproduce expectations that generate unrealistic claims of equality, freedom and rights that are difficult for any social order to realize and manage.
Cintron likes oligarchic-democracy as the actual existing democracy and as the other democracy as energeia --as an energeia, it is not meant to be realized, which provides democracy with propulsive force. When does this energeia instigate perversity -- like Serbia? What happens in this era we are entering when the materials are exhausting -- the exhaustion of democracy?
In his co-written chapter "Minutemen and the Subject of Democracy" (with David Bleeden and Caroline Gottschalk-Druschke), discusses American liberal democratic subjectivity.
