Democratic Socialism and Education: New Perspectives On Policy and Practice

SPRINGER BRIEFS IN EDUC ATION
Neil Hopkins
Democratic
Socialism and
Education: New
Perspectives on
Policy and Practice
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Neil Hopkins
Democratic Socialism
and Education: New
Perspectives on Policy
and Practice
123
Neil Hopkins
Faculty of Education and Sport
University of Bedfordshire
Bedford, UK
ISSN 2211-1921 ISSN 2211-193X (electronic)

SpringerBriefs in Education
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How can the bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing?
How can a child, when fears annoy,
But droop his tender wing
And forget his youthful spring?
O! father and mother, if buds are nipp’d

And blossoms blown away,
And if the tender plants are stripp’d
Of their joy in the springing day,
By sorrow and care’s dismay,
How shall the summer arise in joy,

Or the summer fruits appear?
Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy,
Or bless the mellowing year,
When the blasts of winter appear?
William Blake, from ‘The Schoolboy’,

Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794)
for Dara
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my Head of School, Juliet Fern, for research time in which to
complete the first draft of this book and colleagues at the University of
Bedfordshire’s Faculty of Education for their support and encouragement during
the writing of this project. Constructive criticism from reviewers during the peer
review process was invaluable regarding improvements made to the text. I also
would like to thank Astrid Noordermeer for her editorial support at Springer.
As always, this book couldn’t have been completed without the loving support
of family and friends.
Hertfordshire, UK Neil Hopkins

March 2019
ix
Introduction
This book’s main aim is to reintroduce ideas associated with democratic socialism
and their application to current trends in state education across jurisdictions. Over
the past several decades, there has been a trend towards neoliberal policy and
practice in relation to education. This has shown itself through the increasing
emphasis on competition between educational institutions on the issue of parental
and student choice, and the ranking of these institutions according to measurable
outcomes and achievements. Indeed, such rankings have now escalated to the
international level through the coordination of PISA, TIMSS and other international
education assessments. Alongside this, there has also been a particular focus on
education as a way of ensuring students are employable at graduation and that the
institutions themselves adhere to tight monetary efficiencies and responsibilities.
Paradoxically, neoliberalism has often led to increased government control, par-
ticularly in the area of the curriculum, to ensure the agenda of employability,
efficiency and measurability is carefully maintained.
A democratic socialist perspective seeks to challenge many of these ideas. In the
book, I will argue that viewing schools as competitors diminishes their role as hubs
of their given communities. The neoliberal trend often pushes to the periphery those
public goods that schools and colleges facilitate and epitomise. If we are hoping
that state education, in the manner of John Dewey, acts as a laboratory in which
students learn to collaborate and cooperate as emerging citizens in both the edu-
cational community and the wider community, then its consumerisation potentially
negates that hope. My view, as a democratic socialist, is that education is something
more than institutional competition and student employability and I will make the
case that citizenship and other social/public goods are at least as important in any
student’s compulsory education. To that end, the communities in which schools and
colleges live need to be given the agency to control and decide aspects of education
in their area—the education system needs to reflect and enhance the wider demo-
cratic culture.
I have used the work of Norberto Bobbio, Chantal Mouffe and Axel Honneth as
important thinkers in the democratic socialist tradition. Norberto Bobbio was an
academic at the University of Turin and was an important interpreter of Marx and
xi
xii Introduction
Gramsci in relation to contemporary ‘western’ democracies. His books include

Liberalism and Democracy (2006) and Which Socialism? (2007). Bobbio’s work is
influential in the debate between liberalism and democratic socialism, and it is this
part of his work I will draw upon particularly. Chantal Mouffe has taught at a
number of universities (including the University of Essex and the University of
Westminster) and, like Bobbio, has worked on the interface between democratic
socialism and liberalism. Mouffe can be distinguished from Bobbio in her critique
of philosophical liberalism (in the work of John Rawls and others) and her advo-
cacy of radical democracy. Mouffe is an important voice for ‘agonism’, the belief
that democracies are inherently in tension between competing groups and that,
historically, political progress and emancipation has been as a result of conflict
rather than consensus. Mouffe has also explored how democratic socialism and
liberalism interact with current strains within feminist political theory. I will be
using The Return of the Political (2005) and Agonistics: Thinking the World
Politically (2013). Axel Honneth is currently a Professor at the University of
Frankfurt and Columbia University. In his book, The Idea of Socialism (2017),
Honneth has challenged the over-emphasis socialism has placed, as a tradition, on
economic relations and the ownership of the means of production. Because of this,
in Honneth’s view, concepts such as individual rights and democratic systems of
governance have played a minor role in the struggle for economic emancipation.
Democratic socialism in the twenty-first century needs to grapple with a politics that
is more identity-based and centred around rights. Honneth’s discussion of Dewey is
especially pertinent in the relationship between democratic socialism and education.
I will be using the work of these three thinkers in a dialogue with other
philosophers and educationalists to explore how contemporary democratic social-
ism can inform the current educational landscape. Each of the writers I have chosen
to focus on has vital things to say, whether it’s regarding the political infrastructure,
the relationships between people or our aims and goals as communities. As will be
shown, there are varying levels of agreement and disagreement between them on
the nature of democratic socialism and its place in contemporary societies. My
intention in the chapters that follow is to extend this conversation to the specific
area of state education.
*
In Chap. 1, I will set the scene with regard to education and educational systems.
One of the main questions under discussion will be how far educational systems
have followed a ‘neoliberal’ or marketised path in their endeavour to meet indi-
vidual student needs, foster a sense of community, improve standards and maintain
a competitive ‘edge’ vis-à-vis their perceived competitors. Are these educational
aims and ideals mutually compatible or incompatible? In what sense is a state
education there to meet the needs of individual students and in what sense is it a
vehicle for perceived national priorities? I will use this chapter to explore the
current educational landscape before moving onto an exploration of the political
and philosophical theories I will adopt to critique education systems.
Introduction xiii
In Chap. 2, the thinkers I have chosen to highlight (Mouffe, Bobbio and

Honneth) will be related and compared with some important themes in philo-
sophical and political liberalism. Liberalism, in its philosophical guise at least, has
been the dominant strand in the Anglo-Saxon world and, increasingly, in European
circles as well. Bobbio, Mouffe and Honneth acknowledge that we are living in a
period where democratic socialism needs to engage and confront philosophical and
political liberalism on a range of fronts including education. The work of John
Rawls,1 particularly in Political Liberalism (Rawls 2005), is of importance when
investigating how societies establish agreement when citizens have different (and
sometimes conflicting) systems of belief; what constitutes ‘political society’ in
states that differentiate between public and private worlds; and the tensions between
equality and liberty in our efforts towards justice or fairness. How democratic
socialist thinking addresses these issues without straying into authoritarianism or
old-style centralisation will be of interest here.
Chapter 3 takes the curriculum as its focus. The curriculum, it could be argued,
has become increasingly politicised over recent decades as governments have
decided to take significant control over what goes into school and college curricula.
I will argue that a democratic socialist view of the curriculum needs to challenge a
predominantly economic aim or focus on programmes of learning. If democratic
socialism is as concerned with the social as the individual, then a contemporary take
on Dewey’s philosophy of education begins to emerge—a curriculum that is not
exclusively academic nor vocational, one that views the pursuit of knowledge as a
collective endeavour, a curriculum that supports the notion that we should learn as
much about participation in society as the study of specific subjects.
What are the implications for pedagogy from adopting a democratic socialist
approach? This will be the focus of Chap. 4. The idea of dialogue and dialogical
education, as indicated by Paulo Freire (1996), is one that has considerable scope
for any pedagogy claiming to be socialist oriented. The use of dialogue as a form of
teaching and learning goes back at least to the practice of Socrates as immortalised
in the works of Plato. Effective dialogue, including the use of a range of question
types within it, works on two levels: it helps to establish our foundations of
knowledge (or whether, indeed, we have any firm foundation on which to erect
knowledge) and embodies the notion that we come to knowledge through ongoing
interaction with other people. This chapter will draw especially on Honneth’s
discussion of Dewey, particularly Dewey’s emphasis on the nature of communi-
cation and human relationships and how these are critical to the process of learning.
In Chap. 5, I will move on to the question of how democratic socialist theory can
inform the organisational and power structures within contemporary schools and
colleges or whether the creation of alternative structures is a more effective option.
From a democratic socialist point-of-view, this offers fundamental challenges and
potential opportunities. The challenges revolve around concerns that teachers and
1
Interestingly, William A. Edmundson has recently identified Rawls as a ‘reticent socialist’—see
Edmundson, W. A. (2017), John Rawls, Reticent Socialist, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
xiv Introduction
students are increasingly under pressure due to high-stakes testing which has a focus
on economic competitiveness and the demands of the job market. The opportunities
this situation presents are offered by all three of the democratic socialist thinkers
under focus in this book. Each of them presents a potential way forward by envis-
aging societies that are not solely predicated on economic norms or efficiencies.
Such ideas enable us to ask what the aims of education are and how students,
teachers and other stakeholders should play an important role in their devising. This
has implications for democratic education and whether educational institutions
should be democratic (in terms of negotiation, consultation and discussion).
The Conclusion provides a short summary of the main points addressed in the
book.
Note on the Use of ‘Equality’
I will be using the term ‘equality’ as shorthand for ‘equality of treatment’. One
interpretation of equality of treatment, as defined by Winch and Gingell, is that
all children follow the same [curriculum] and are taught together, irrespective of ability and
motivation. Equality of treatment is often associated with comprehensive education and
mixed-ability teaching, as well as the absence of segregation on any grounds, including sex,
race and disability (Winch and Gingell 2008: 76).
I will endeavour to show how such equality of treatment will have implications for
the curriculum (in Chap. 3) and pedagogy (Chap. 4).
References
Bobbio, N. (2006). Liberalism and democracy. London: Verso.

Bobbio, N. (2007). Which socialism? Cambridge: Polity Press.
Edmundson, W. A. (2017). John Rawls, reticent socialist. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Freire, P. (1996 [1970]). Pedagogy of the oppressed. London: Penguin.
Honneth, A. (2017). The idea of socialism. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Mouffe, C. (2005). The return of the political. London: Verso.
Mouffe, C. (2013). Agonistics: Thinking the world politically. London: Verso.
Rawls, J. (2005). Political liberalism (Expanded ed.). New York: Columbia University Press.
Winch, C., & Gingell, J. (2008). Philosophy of education: The key concepts (2nd ed.). London:
Routledge.
Contents
1 Contemporary Education and Education Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2 Contemporary Democratic Socialism in a Complex Political
World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
3 Towards a Democratic Socialist Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
4 In Search of a Democratic Socialist Pedagogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
5 Democratic Socialism and Governance in Education . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
xv
Chapter 1
Contemporary Education and Education
Systems
Abstract In this chapter, the prevailing trends in state education systems will be
discussed. It will be argued that the neoliberal turn in education has emphasised
choice (for parents and students) that encourages a consumerist view of state educa-
tion. Competition between educational institutions (within given jurisdictions) and
between national education systems through the advent of international educational
rankings potentially runs counter to the notion of schools and colleges as centres
of local communities. Democratic socialist ideas offer an alternative paradigm in
which to envisage state education that challenges these prevailing neoliberal ideas
by emphasising the communal and democratic aspects of education systems.
Keywords Neoliberal · Consumerist · State · Education · Democratic
The trend in many education systems over the past several decades has been towards
increasing emphasis on measurement, performance and cost efficiency. Stephen Ball
has described this process as “renewed capitalism” … The teacher and student are
made into “enterprises” … in relation to which the state is regulator and market-
maker’ (Ball 2013: 108). The link between education and the economy is a long-
standing one. The drive towards state education systems in ‘advanced’ industrial
nations during the nineteenth century was, in part, due to the concern of maintaining
economic superiority or parity with competitors. What makes the current situation
different is the depth of focus on quantitative data in order to compare and critique
education systems against very specific targets, scores and measures. The introduc-
tion of international testing in the form of PISA, TIMSS and others has reinforced
and exacerbated the movement towards using numerical data as the primary means of
establishing standards and quality in a given educational jurisdiction. There is noth-
ing inherently bad regarding the use of this type of data in relation to education—what
is of concern is its overuse and the tendency to submerge important educational aims
and objectives in the wake of meeting ‘key performance indicators’. This is often
conceptualised as ‘performativity’, defined by Anna Kilderry as:
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 1

N. Hopkins, Democratic Socialism and Education: New Perspectives
on Policy and Practice, SpringerBriefs in Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18937-2_1
2 1 Contemporary Education and Education Systems
visible where performance related practices, such as teaching and learning, are expected and
regulated through measurable criteria … Furthermore, performance criteria can function in
such a way that … teachers are coerced into an accountability discourse, one that is focused
on outcomes, achievements and performance, and where teachers have to ‘prove’ the quality
of their teaching practice. (Kilderry 2015: 634–635)
Alongside this trend towards ‘performativity’ (for institutions as a whole as well

as individual teachers and students), there has also been a parallel development
viewing education through the lens of business and economics. As I stated above,
this is nothing new but the emphasis accorded to it today is distinctive. After the
financial turbulence caused by the OPEC oil crisis in the 1970s, governments in
various countries began to question the levels of finance devoted to the public sector
and whether this was being allocated and spent as efficiently as in the private sector.
The onset of ‘monetarism’, a philosophy of government expenditure and fiscal policy
based on the work of the Chicago School of economics and notably embodied in the
Thatcher and Reagan administrations in the UK and USA, created an environment
where ministries of education (and other key public services) increasingly had to
justify the budget granted to them on the basis of tightly-controlled efficiencies. With
the advent of such an economic philosophy, the market was seen as the final arbiter of
price, value and service. Education and other public facilities were expected to adopt
the discipline of the market to a greater or lesser extent. The language of ‘parental
choice’, the student as ‘consumer’, ‘voucher systems’, institutions operating in a
‘competitive’ environment—this is the vocabulary increasingly used by education
ministries when describing policy.
The collective label that has been attached to this set of circumstances is ‘neolib-
eralism’. However, like many other political terms, neoliberalism, through excessive
use, is in danger of becoming something of a ‘catch-all’ term. In the relationship
between government services and citizens, Hayek, in The Constitution of Liberty,
offers a typically robust account of what neoliberalism is most concerned with:
though the government may at any moment be best qualified to take the lead in [certain]
fields, this provides no justification for assuming it will always be so and therefore for giving
it exclusive responsibility. In most instances … it is by no means necessary that government
engage in such activities; the services in question can generally be provided, and more
effectively provided, by the government’s assuming some or all of the financial responsibility
but leaving the conduct of affairs to independent and in some measure competitive agencies.
(Hayek 2006: 196)
The language of neoliberalism associates education and other public services with
concepts such as ‘efficiency’, ‘performance’ and ‘competition’ that have been
adapted from the private sector. It is important, however, not to view these ideas
as inherently bad as some commentators and thinkers (especially on the left of poli-
tics) have done. A case can be made, for example, for efficiencies in education and
other public services where there is perceived corruption or the widespread waste of
resources. Where this becomes problematic is when the focus on efficiency, com-
petition, performance or other allied concepts begins to take precedence over other
important values and beliefs that we hold dear in relation to education. It is hard
1 Contemporary Education and Education Systems 3
to measure quantitatively the increased confidence or assertiveness a student might

gain in a supportive classroom environment, for instance.
However, the impact of educational policies and practices associated with neolib-
eralism have had, in my view, a largely negative effect on the education of children,
young people and adults. There is a tendency, once measures have been created, to
bias the direction on any given course or programme in order to fulfill those mea-
sures. Sometimes, the measures can have a beneficial effect, especially when there is
a perceived inequality or failing with regards to the educational entitlement of spe-
cific students within certain contexts. But the danger is when the need for measures,
especially of a quantitative sort, begin to override other ways of determining what is
important in education and how we establish what an effective or valuable education
actually means.
In English education, for example, we have a current situation where the cen-
tralising and decentralising factors are in tension—the influence and power of the
local authorities over their schools have steadily decreased while control has moved
upwards (to central government in the form of the Department for Education) and
downwards to the individual schools (or networks of schools). Schools that opt out
of local authority control are no longer required to follow the National Curriculum
although they are still under the regime of the national inspectorate and national
awarding bodies which create their own centralising tendencies. This system (it
might be more appropriate to call it a set of systems) has created interesting con-
sequences. Senior leaders in schools, especially head teachers, have had to take on
much more of the financial and budgetary responsibilities than would have been
the case in the past. The circumstances are not dissimilar to those in the National
Health Service in recent decades where there is a more direct funding relationship
between the government and individual health ‘trusts’. Ball describes these trends
in the public sector as ‘[t]he move from the welfare state to the neo-liberal state
[which] involves a redistribution of responsibilities and the emergence of new forms
of government—self-government’ (Ball 2013: 130).
On one level, the partial devolution of power (in terms of finance and curriculum)
to individual schools has an intuitively ‘correct’ feel for those who believe authority
in education should be grounded at the grassroots level. Something similar is being
sounded by Paul Hirst in his explanation of ‘associationalism’:
Associationalism challenges both the centralization of the state and its claim to ‘sovereignty’.
It proposes that authority be as far as possible divided into distinct domains, whether territorial
or functional, and that authority should be as localized and small-scale as possible [my
emphasis]. (Hirst 1996: 64)
Clearly, there are elements of the current state education system in England that
accord with associationism. Power has been delegated so that some of the decision
making can now be made at ‘source’ and this is something that should be welcomed.
What is of concern, nevertheless, is the potential lack of public accountability within
the current structures. The local education authorities created through the 1944 Edu-
cation Act were not always exemplars of local democracy—many teachers and par-
ents can relate tales of the bureaucracy, inefficiency and even, at times, bare-faced
corruption that sometimes occurred in the corridors of county and city halls. That
being said, the one thing that local authorities had was a clear link back to their local
electorate—if people in a given community were unhappy with the education being
provided in their area, they could vote out those councillors they deemed responsible
and vote others in their place. One of the main concerns with the existing state of
affairs is that this link to the local authority has now been broken for those schools
who have decided to opt for a direct funding connection with Westminster. Yes,
these schools do have a board of governors that include staff, parent and other local
representatives who can provide a voice for those affected by the school’s policy
on pupil intake, the direction of the curriculum or provision for special educational
needs (to name but a few examples). The problem arises when academies (the term
used for schools who have left local authority control) are taken over by agencies
who own schools over a wide geographical area and where the schools themselves
become branches of a network or a brand. It is in these circumstances where edu-
cation comes closest to the corporate world—these ‘academy chains’ are often run
by people using terms such as chief executive, financial or operating officer. Local
accountability is compromised because the power is now no longer located at source
(i.e. the local school) but at the head office of the academy chain. In the worst exam-
ples, these school networks are run as companies, sometimes even with a built-in
demand for profit (I will be discussing ways of addressing this potential problem in
Chap. 5).
Schools and other educational institutions are being required or encouraged to
mirror corporate behaviour in other ways as well. Increasingly in the past few decades,
government and policy-makers have viewed parents and students as customers in an
attempt to create an internal market where institutions compete for student numbers.
In Britain, it was the Thatcher administration in the early 1980s that first attempted
to radically change the perspective in which schools, parents and pupils would be
viewed:
The idea was beguilingly simple. Parents would get a voucher with which to ‘buy’ education
at the school of their choice. Schools, forced to compete, would become more responsive.
Good schools would expand, bad ones would improve or close. Parents – not teachers, the
educational establishment or local or national politicians – would thus determine the nature
of schools and would more than likely reopen the door to selection. Education would become
consumer- not producer-run and local authority control of it would be broken. It was the first
attempt at a thoroughly Thatcherite change to the welfare state: the introduction of markets
within a state system. (Timmins 2017: 451)
As stated above with regards to school funding, giving parents or carers a significant
say in the education of their children has a sense of fairness and appropriateness to
it. After all, parents and carers are vital stakeholders, particularly for children in the
compulsory stages of education. What is much less agreeable, from a democratic
socialist point of view, is the idea of parents becoming consumers in an educational
marketplace. There are intrinsic problems with comparing schools (or hospitals or
welfare offices) to businesses in trade and retail because what exactly are schools
supposed to be selling? Is there a definable educational product or service that the
consumer receives within a clearly-established transaction? Does the consumer role
gradually shift from the parent to the student as the latter moves through the phases of
education? Each of these questions provokes significant queries or challenges from

those who find a neoliberal interpretation of education troubling.
An area that has proven to be especially fertile when criticising the neoliberal turn
in education is on the grounds of education as a public rather than a private good.
Gerald Grace has neatly encapsulated how a shift in paradigm from the private to the
public can radically change the perspective in which education is viewed:
To substitute the individual as consumer of education for the individual as citizen in the
education service changes fundamentally the nature of the education process itself. Cus-
tomers are concerned to maximize private good and individual return in their transactions.
The concept of citizen implies a set of wider social and political responsibilities. (Grace
1994: 129)
If education is seen as a public good, the processes in which knowledge and ideas
are introduced and developed are more collaborative than purely transactional. What
do I mean by this? When we see education as a product, with a provider/seller and a
consumer, there is a danger of regarding the transaction as essentially linear in nature.
The parent or student has a voucher or cheque that is ‘cashed in’ for a service in the
same way they might buy a holiday. The dynamic is one where one gives and another
receives—that is the ultimate logic of education or any other public service when
the laws of the marketplace are introduced or prioritised. In contrast, if education
is thought of as a public rather than a private good, the process of acquiring and
furthering knowledge is something shared as a good we have in common as opposed
to an acquisition bought through financial transaction. Education is less a form of
currency than a collective endeavour (these points will be extended further in my
discussion of pedagogy in Chap. 4).
Grace, in the extract quoted above, alluded to the agent or stakeholder in education
as a citizen rather than a consumer when viewing education in the public realm. If
education is, indeed, a collective endeavour then the image of the citizen is apt—we
can imagine working together to build, maintain and challenge the basis of knowledge
and key ideas in similar ways to how we, as citizens, support and change society.
Such notions have a long heritage—John Dewey was writing over a century ago
of ‘the school as social center [sic] … the school as a thoroughly socialized affair
in contact at all points with the flow of community life’ (Dewey 1902: 73, 75).
The school or college is both a community in itself and, as Dewey states, part of
the wider community. Indeed, democratic socialists and other democrats (including
Dewey) have frequently viewed schools as the places in which students are inducted
into democratic culture and practices—students learn to act as citizens whilst in
education in the belief that this prepares them for the role when they graduate into
their respective societies. I will discuss this in more detail later on when I discuss
ideas around democratic education in Chaps. 3–5.
The way schools are governed in a neoliberal paradigm has implications for what is
taught in the classroom. It would be wrong to state that the move towards measurable
outcomes and targets or closer connections between schools and central government
is the only driver for the content in a particular curriculum or programme of study
(there are other factors which have a significant role to play in determining what
should be studied and when). However, the connection between schools and gov-
ernment is possibly the most instructive when it comes to analysing the curriculum.
When I am speaking of a neoliberal paradigm in this regard, I am specifically referring
to a view of education that sees it inextricably linked to students’ future employment
prospects. The rhetoric used in many educational jurisdictions on ‘skills’, ‘trans-
ferable skills’ and ‘employability skills’ is a symptom of this stance. I have said
elsewhere:
The skills learnt are seen as a means to an end – to make the students more employable,
more productive, less likely to seek or need benefits. These factors are not necessarily bad
things in themselves but there is a poverty of vision nevertheless. Skill [becomes] an ability
or competence performed in isolation without a true awareness or engagement with the
community in which these very skills are requested and valued. (Hopkins 2014: 65).
There is something functional or instrumental in this approach. As I stated earlier in

this chapter, it conveys education as a transaction—students are encouraged to acquire
skills that are then applied in their future employment. There is nothing inherently
wrong with this being part of a student’s education—students are themselves hoping
and expecting to gain a set of skills to enable them to find satisfying and well-
compensated work. The problem occurs when this becomes the sole or primary
focus of education and pushes aside other equally valuable aspects of a person’s
development.
In many countries, this tendency has led to state education concentrating on sub-
jects that are perceived to be the ‘basics’ necessary to ensure students are able to
compete in the labour market. With this in mind, the educational focus has been
towards competency in the native language (and sometimes a second language),
mathematics and science. Indeed, the OECD’s PISA rankings are based upon com-
parative tests in these three disciplines. While it cannot be denied that these subjects
are important in any student’s education, the emphasis upon them has led to other
subjects being marginalised from the curriculum (and some barely covered at all).
Concerns have been raised about the squeeze being applied to the arts, humanities,
sport and vocational disciplines and how this is limiting the opportunities children
and young people have for pursuing their versions of the good life. The narrowing
of the curriculum to ‘core’ subjects has even raised concerns amongst some employ-
ers. In an economic situation where business is increasingly dynamic and global,
companies are searching for recruits who can exhibit initiative, cultural sensitivity,
creativity and entrepreneurship. These skills are sometimes labelled as ‘soft skills’
to distinguish them from those abilities or aptitudes that are more amenable to ‘hard’
data. The neoliberal focus on educational targets and measurements can often make
it very difficult to accommodate such skills within the native language, mathematics
and science, and can also mean subjects that emphasise them are marginalised and
pushed to the periphery. On a wider front, the European Union has devised a set of key
competencies that it sees as vital in an age where people are working for longer and
are likely to change their occupation several times throughout their careers. These
competencies are:
1. Communication in the mother tongue;
2. Communication in foreign languages;
3. Mathematical competence and basic competences in science and technology;
4. Digital competence;
5. Learning to learn;
6. Social and civic competences;
7. Sense of initiative and entrepreneurship; and
8. Cultural awareness and expression.
According to the European Union, the key competencies ‘are those which all indi-
viduals need for personal fulfillment and development, active citizenship, social
inclusion and employment.’ (European Union 2006: 13). It is clear that students in
the twenty-first century cannot live on a diet of the ‘core’ subjects alone.
One area that has seen interesting developments over the past two decades is
citizenship education. Countries in Western and Central Europe, North America,
and Australasia have all devised or refined programmes of study due to concerns
with low voter turnout and the rise of political and religious extremism. However, as
Gert Biesta and Robert Lawy indicate below, this turn towards citizenship education
has also tended to veer in the direction of neoliberalism:
[One] problem with the idea of citizenship education is that it is largely aimed at individual
… people … This [therefore] individualises the problem of … people’s citizenship – and
in doing so follows the neo-liberal line of thinking [emphasis in the original]. (Biesta and
Lawy 2006: 71)
As well as the issue with individualism, citizenship education in some educational

jurisdictions has also raised controversy around the idea of nationhood in multi-
cultural societies where people might have very different attitudes to loyalty and
belonging. One of challenges for democratic socialists in education is to articulate
the importance of collective identity without compromising a student or teacher’s
sense of individuality or to drift into forms of cultural or political chauvinism. I will
be discussing this in more detail in Chap. 2.
This chapter has taken, as its main theme, the nature of current state education
systems. The trend towards neoliberal practices in education has often led to circum-
stances where quantitative data and measurements take priority over other aspects
of education. This has been exacerbated by the increased importance attached to
international assessment rankings as a means of establishing the ‘effectiveness’ of
national education systems. In some jurisdictions schools and colleges are being run
on business lines, thus reinforcing the neoliberal agenda in education.
References
Ball, S. J. (2013). Foucault, power, and education. Abingdon: Routledge.

Biesta, G., & Lawy, R. (2006). From teaching citizenship to learning democracy: Overcoming
individualism in research, policy and practice. Cambridge Journal of Education, 36(1), 63–79.
Dewey, J. (1902). The school as social center. The Elementary School Teacher, 3(2), 73–86.
European Union. (2006). Recommendation of the European Parliament and of the Council on
key competencies for lifelong learning (2006/962/EC). Official Journal of the European Union
[English version], L394(49), 30 December 2006. Available at: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-
content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:L:2006:394:FULL&from=EN. Accessed November 2, 2018.
Grace, G. (1994). Education is a public good: On the need to resist the dominantion of economic
science. In D. Bridges & T. H. McLaughlin (Eds.), Education and the market place. London:
Falmer Press.
Hayek, F. A. (2006 [1960]). The constitution of liberty. Abingdon: Routledge.
Hirst, P. (1996). Associative democracy: New forms of economic and social governance. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Hopkins, N. (2014). Citizenship and democracy in further and adult education. Dordrecht: Springer.
Kilderry, A. (2015). The intensification of performativity in early childhood education. Journal Of
Curriculum Studies, 47(5), 633–652.
Timmins, N. (2017). The five giants: A biography of the welfare state. London: William Collins.
Chapter 2
Contemporary Democratic Socialism
in a Complex Political World
Abstract This chapter discusses the work of Noberto Bobbio, Chantal Mouffe and
Axel Honneth (the ideas associated with them will run throughout succeeding chap-
ters). These thinkers epitomise contemporary democratic socialist thinking by chal-
lenging ideas within the socialist tradition that have tended to emphasise control of the
economic means of production over cultural and other aspects of power. Each of these
writers takes a particular stance on democratic socialism’s relationship with liberal-
ism and the demands made by individual rights and identity politics in the twenty-first
century. The impact of technology and social media on democratic socialist thinking
with be discussed as will its relationship to other important political theories (such
as Hirst’s version of associationist democracy).
Keywords Democratic · Socialist · Liberalism · Contemporary · Community
It is not my intention in this chapter to recapitulate a history of socialism in educa-

tion or elsewhere. My focus is rather on the contemporary political situation and how
democratic socialism informs and affects this. Honneth has acknowledged the chal-
lenges contemporary democratic socialism faces, tracing these back to the post-1945
environment:
After World War II, when in the capitalist countries of the West the situation of the working
class rapidly began to change and white-collar workers began to dominate the labor [sic]
market, giving rise to the term ‘post-industrial society’ … there was no longer any certainty
about the class affiliation of socialism. (Honneth 2017: 40)
The class basis upon which the early socialists formed their conceptions and
organisations has changed radically with the evolution of technology, globalisa-
tion and profound social developments (e.g. the increased participation of women
in education, employment and social affairs). There is not now the same sense of
homogeneity, either culturally or demographically, that was often associated with
democratic socialist-informed workers’ parties or movements in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries (such as the British Labour Party and Germany’s
Sozialdemokatische Partei Deutschlands). New times have required new ideas (or,
at least, the profound adaptation of original ones). Again, in the words of Honneth:

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18937-2_2
10 2 Contemporary Democratic Socialism in a Complex Political World
As soon as social conditions were radically changed by technological advance, structural

transformation, and political reforms in the 1960s and 1970s, first-generation socialist ideas
were bound to become less attractive given that their socio-theoretical content remained
anchored in the early nineteenth century. (Honneth 2017: 48)
It was not so much that the old Marxist notions of base and superstructure were
redundant—these concepts still had a purpose as means of investigating and cri-
tiquing the relations between economic ownership and the wider society in which
these relations operated. However, we have seen remarkable changes over the past
20 or 30 years in the way companies now conduct business and trade. Even if a
democratic socialist government wanted to nationalise major industries and services
within a particular jurisdiction, because these entities are often owned by corpora-
tions that exist outside of the territory and have supply lines that are global in scale,
the practicalities of bringing production within the ambit of the national govern-
ment would probably defy economic and political logic—the costs would be just too
great. The term ‘globalisation’ has become something of a cliché but it is hard to
deny the impact digital technology, mobile supply chains, access to ‘cheap’ labour
forces and efficient international transportation has had on how we trade. Workers
and customers no longer necessarily engage with companies or employers that speak
the same language or share the same culture. This offers considerable challenges as
well as potential opportunities for democratic socialists. According to Mouffe
Sovereignty has taken a new form … This new global form of sovereignty, which [Hardt
and Negri] call ‘Empire’, has replaced the Imperial Age that was based on the attempt by
nation-states to extend their sovereignty beyond their borders. In contrast to what happened
in the stage of imperialism, the current Empire has no territorial centre of power and no
fixed boundaries; it is a decentred and deterritorialized apparatus of rule that progressively
incorporates the entire global realm with open, expanding borders. (Mouffe 2013: 66)
Even ownership of a country’s natural resources are often now in the hands of
multi-national companies (especially those countries that embraced the economics
of Thatcher, Reagan and others in the 1980s). However, various left-wing thinkers
(including Marx) have envisaged progressive forces working across national and lin-
guistic lines in order to further the interests of workers and other classes oppressed
by the capitalist system and the ‘divide and rule’ arrangement of bourgeois nation
states. The question for democratic socialist thinkers and activists is whether such
coalitions are possible in a postmodern world. Mouffe appears to think it is possi-
ble but not by using the same language or concepts as Marxists and socialists from
previous eras. Mouffe, discussing the idea of a ‘Multitude’ taken from the work of
Paolo Virno, states:
The democracy of the Multitude expresses itself in a ensemble of acting minorities that never
aspire to transform themselves into a majority and develop a power that refuses to become
government. (Mouffe 2013: 69)
These thoughts are connected to Mouffe’s contention that ‘[t]he world is a pluri-
verse, not a universe’ (Mouffe 2013: 64). The situation that contemporary democratic
socialists find themselves in reflects the fluid and dynamic nature of communication
and human relations generally. People do not identify themselves within basic class
2 Contemporary Democratic Socialism in a Complex Political World 11
distinctions that might have been the case fifty or one hundred years ago. This is
not to say that societies were simpler or that life was somehow more straightforward
in earlier periods—Mouffe is acknowledging that existing movements cannot be
homogenised, incorporated into monolithic groups that are unable to tolerate diversity
and difference. A similar point is being made by Michael Newman when he states:
21st-century socialists will need to accept that particular identities (including those of nation-
ality, ethnicity, and religion) have enduring importance to people, who often possess multiple
identities. (Newman 2005: 149)
Indeed, it is personal identity that is the pivot from which many people in modern
societies establish their affiliations (although it needs qualifying to the extent that
different societies or cultures will place a different premium on individual self-
expression). Personal relations form an important part of this tendency and it is
here, in particular, where early socialism ran into major difficulties. The language
of base and superstructure reduces everything, ultimately, to where people are in the
matrix of economic production—personal relations are themselves integrated within
this matrix. Honneth has spoken of how such a vision had a stifling effect on early
socialism’s ability to work with the emerging women’s movement:
The only thing that the early socialists could offer in terms of solidarity with the emerging
women’s movement was formulated in economic categories, and correspondingly amounted
to emancipating women from male domination by integrating them into associative relations
of production. (Honneth 2017: 85)
As class and party affiliations become looser and more difficult to define, so the
challenges become greater for democratic socialists in their efforts to attract people
to their ideas and beliefs—contemporary identity has a fluidity that does not lend
itself readily to older categories or means of grouping people. From its beginnings,
according to Honneth, democratic socialism has held in tension the potential conflict
between the individual and the communal:
Because the hope for reconciling freedom and solidarity rested entirely on the prospect of a
communitarian reorganization of the economic sphere, socialists felt they could dissolve all
individual rights into a cooperative community, leaving no legitimate place for the individual.
(Honneth 2017: 35)
The sophistication of modern advertising, technology and communication has cre-

ated a set of circumstances where people feel a sense of attachment or identification
that often transcends boundaries or their immediate environment. A sense of mutual
vested interests can be cultural as much as economic. If we look at the social move-
ments that have transformed the political landscape since the Second World War, it
could be argued that the catalyst for change has often been cultural as well as (or
instead of) economic interests whether we are speaking of the independence move-
ments in Africa and Asia in the 1940s and 1950s, the agitation for civil rights in the
United States in the 1950s and 1960s, the burgeoning feminist demand for women’s
rights from the 1960s onwards, and the increasing voice of gay, lesbian and trans-
gender people in their articulation of tolerance and equality for all irrespective of
sexual orientation or gender identity.
What I am not arguing here is that economic interests have become peripheral
to current democratic socialist thinking—far from it. The fallout from the recession
of 2008 has made obvious the deep and continuing disparities in wealth and power
within individual countries and between the Global North and South. The Occupy
Wall Street movement and the demonstrations that have accompanied G7 and G20
conferences are only a few of the many protests (violent and peaceful) that have
occurred as a result of prevailing economic interests. When CEOs award themselves
salary increases and bonuses fifty or a hundred times the average wage for a worker in
the company (and justify it as the ‘going rate’ for people in these positions even when
they don’t meet their targets), then something is seriously wrong with the current
economic system and democratic socialists should (and do) expose such inequalities
and agitate for change. What I am stating, after Honneth, is that focusing on economic
interests as the sole means of bringing people together will be insufficient in terms
of creating lasting democratic socialist movements in the twenty-first century.
What Bobbio reminds us of, however, are the dangers of conformity and ‘mass
culture’ that come with increasing technology and the widening parameters of com-
munication. These concerns are not new—critics such as Ortega y Gasset, Adorno
and Horkheimer were voicing them from earlier in the twentieth century—but Bob-
bio places a particular concern on the relationship between mass culture and modern
democracy:
The effect of the rise of mass culture, from which all major societies are suffering, is a general
conformism. The indoctrination characteristic of mass societies tends to repress and suppress
the individual’s sense of personal responsibility which is the corner-stone of a democratic
society. (Bobbio 2007: 72)
A case could be made that the rise in political populism in various countries over the
past decade or so has been due to developments in broadcast and social media. The
nature of the sound bite and tweet often lend themselves to opinions that offer simple
solutions to intractable problems and tend to reward a pugnacious tone of voice over
one that is more meditative. Interestingly, however, the invention of digital technolo-
gies has led to a movement away from mass distribution and circulation of media
towards narrow casting and the creation of niche audiences as the capacity for bespoke
channels increases. People pick up news feeds from algorithms sorted according to
personal interest on tablets and mobile phones. Bobbio’s fears of indoctrination from
mass culture has morphed into a concern that the body politic has become fragmented
and national forums for debate are increasingly difficult to establish. Mouffe, on an
international level at least, is sanguine about such developments:
I strongly believe that it is high time for left-wing intellectuals to adopt a pluralist approach
and to reject the type of universalism that postulates the rational and moral superiority of
Western modernity. (Mouffe 2013: loc. 90)
Such circumstances lead to what Mouffe has termed ‘a multipolar world’ (Mouffe
2013: 22), where no one source of power is dominant and where diversity of attitude
and belief are acknowledged and facilitated.
One of the challenges contemporary democratic socialism thus faces is the main-
tenance of diversity without fragmentation in a bid to avoid the conformity and
indoctrination Bobbio and others have associated with mass culture. For all three
thinkers highlighted in this chapter, socialism must come to terms with democracy
in order to meet such a challenge. Bobbio has neatly encapsulated the conundrum:
[W]e immediately come up against a basic contradiction, which is the real stumbling block of
democratic socialism (not to be confused with social democracy): socialism is unattainable
via democracy; however, socialism which is attained non-democratically fails to find the
route by which a dictatorial regime can be converted into a democratic regime. (Bobbio
2007: 44)
Is socialism thus antithetical to democracy? Is there something inherent in socialism

that makes its relationship with modern democracy problematic at best? Honneth
once again points to socialism’s roots as an ideology focusing primarily on economic
inequality as a major drawback in its relationship with democracy:
[S]ocialism has been incapable of finding productive access to the idea of political democracy.
Although socialists occasionally considered plans to establish economic democracy, workers
councils and similar institutions of collective self-organization, these all applied exclusively
to the economic sphere, because it was assumed that in the future there would no longer
be any need for a process of ethical and political will-formation, i.e. for democratic self-
government. (Honneth 2017: 76)
For many on the left historically, socialism has been seen as a stepping stone towards
communism, the transition between a bourgeois state and a genuinely classless one. It
is partly this that has distinguished socialism, in the eyes of Bobbio and others, from
social democracy where there is an acknowledgement of a mixed economy com-
prising private and state-owned enterprises. Within such terms, social democracy is
viewed as working inside the established frameworks of representative democracy
to achieve power whilst socialism (when defined as a transitional stage to commu-
nism) is ultimately aiming at the removal of representative democracy as conceived
in western, capitalist states. In the words of Bobbio
Social democracy claims to represent an advance on liberal democracy in that its declaration
of rights embraces social rights as well as rights to liberty; with respect to socialist democracy,
on the other hand, it claims only to be a first phase. (Bobbio 2005: 78)
I appreciate that what I am saying here is, to some extent, a simplification as the
nuances between what are purportedly social democratic movements and democratic
socialist ones are almost infinite. However, the differences (although often minute)
have played an important part in how socialism is perceived in relation to democracy
(as Bobbio and Honneth have explained immediately above).
I think it is politically impossible for socialism to avoid full and deep engagement
with democracy in all its political forms if it is to survive as a credible ideology in the
twenty-first century. The experiment in one-party regimes in the old Soviet Union
and elsewhere has, with some honourable exceptions, ultimately failed because the
discipline needed to maintain such regimes required the curtailing of the people’s
fundamental rights (particularly the freedom of speech and the freedom of move-
ment). Socialism, in this version, was unable to come to terms with the main tenets
of liberalism because liberalism exemplified the elements of the bourgeois state
(choice, individualism, competition) that these regimes wanted to move away from.
For some, socialism will now be forever identified with bread queues and the secret
police because of this. But contemporary socialism has to come to terms with liberal-
ism and the democratic structures liberalism reflects to retain its validity and purpose
in a high technology, multipolar world where citizens often have a variety of iden-
tities—Rawls’s articulation of modern democratic societies as comprising citizens
with a range of conceptions of the good is an influential example from the philosoph-
ical literature (Rawls 2005). Mouffe makes a controversial call for the downplaying
of individualism in the endeavor to forge links between socialism, liberalism and
democracy:
By putting the particular individual with her interests, needs and rights at the origin of
society, the individualistic conception made possible, not only the liberal state but also the
modern idea of democracy, whose fundamental principle is that the source of power is the
independent individual, with every individual counting equally … I agree with Bobbio about
the importance of individualism in the birth of [the] modern conception of society, but it
seems to me that the real question is to ask whether today such an individualistic conception
has not become an obstacle to the extension of the democratic ideal. Many of the problems
Bobbio finds in modern democracies could be attributed to the effects of individualism.
(Mouffe 2005: 95)
So what would a democratic socialism that engages at a deep level with liberalism
and democracy actually look like? How do we prevent such a form of democratic
socialism from becoming simply a variant of liberalism itself? Honneth offers a
possible way forward:
[I]t is not enough for a renewed socialism to discover the potential for freedom in personal
relationships, the economy and democratic will-formation. It must also have a rough idea
about the relationship of interdependence between these different spheres. (Honneth 2017:
90)
Democratic socialism’s concern with the collective can be of potential advantage

here. Democratic socialism, as an ideology, is at odds with the notion of the atom-
ised individual and society as simply a set of mutually beneficial transactions—as
depicted in Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (Nozick 1974), for example.
There are links and responsibilities across communities that democratic socialism
is particularly effective at emphasising. It is also in relation to the spheres stated
by Honneth above that democratic socialists can take a positive stance on the envi-
ronment and climate change, the role of women and people of colour in business
and politics, the amount education should be allocated as part of a national budget
or the connection between politicians and their constituents (to name only a few
important contemporary issues). Democratic socialists need to be able to see how
inequality or disadvantage in one area can have ramifications in others—how, for
instance, the precariousness of employment affects morale within the household and
the children’s commitment towards school. Or how a district’s disaffection with the
political process can lead to a reduction in government or corporate investment.
Commentators such as Paul Mason are arguing that neoliberalism (in the form of
increasing technology) is itself morphing into something akin to postcapitalism:
There is a growing body of evidence that information technology, far from creating a new and
stable form of capitalism, is dissolving it: corroding market mechanisms, eroding property
rights and destroying the old relationship between wages, work and profit. (Mason 2015:
230)
Such waves of economic tumult can and do leave communities bereft and destitute.
Phenomena like the recession of 2008 onwards also challenge people’s confidence
in banks, money markets and the inner workings of the international stock exchange.
Over-reliance on organisations that manage to skirt around the niceties of democratic
oversight, be it ministers of finance, legislative committees or the Federal Reserve
and European Central Bank, do not engender confidence or a sense of legitimacy
in this state of affairs. People feel powerless and neglected—the seeds of Trump’s
triumph in the US presidential election of 2016, the vote for Brexit in the UK in the
same year, and the success of populist leaders in Hungary, Italy and Brazil are raised
on such soil. This is why the emphasis on strengthening the connections between
socialism and democracy take on a certain urgency—a revived faith in democracy in
many aspects of life (and not just the political or the economic) can potentially give
people back a sense of control and meaning that has been lost in the drive towards
multi-national companies and the globalisation of the labour force. In the words of
Mouffe, the ‘extension of representative democracy to more and more areas of social
life’ (Mouffe 2005: 94).
Mouffe talks of ‘associational socialism’, an adaptation of Hirst’s ‘associa-
tive democracy’ introduced earlier in this book. To recap very briefly, for Hirst,
‘[a]ssociations … empower those for whom services are provided in diverse ways.
Voluntary association is an alternative to top-down bureaucracy in the competent
provision of services’ (Hirst 1996: 19). According to Mouffe’s definition:
Associational socialism can give us an insight into ways of overcoming the obstacles to
democracy constituted by the two main forms of autocratic power, large corporations and
centralized big governments, and show us how to enhance the pluralism of modern societies.
It indicates the necessity of breaking with the universalistic and individualistic modes of
thought which have been dominant in the liberal tradition. (Mouffe 2005: 99)
Associational socialism has the benefit of locating the power and control over services
in the area of those who actually use and rely on such services. In this sense, it works
as a ‘middle way’ between the individual and the state and this has attractions for
those who are suspicious of too much importance being given to either the state,
large corporations or the individual. Associational socialism relies on the levers of
civil society, of local citizens willing to play an active part in the maintenance and
development of the services under their control. It is, therefore, as vulnerable to
the charge Oscar Wilde is attributed to have levelled at socialism generally, ‘that
it takes up too many evenings’ (Day 2000: 238). The time and energy required to
look after schools, hospitals, welfare services and businesses (if run on a cooperative
basis) cannot be dismissed although the sharing of responsibilities across a given
community would potentially ease the burden. There has been a resurgence in interest
recently in the nomination and election of people to posts through the drawing of lots
(harking back to the procedures adopted in Ancient Athens)—one recent example of
this was the creation of the Irish Citizens’ Assembly through the random selection of
one hundred citizens to investigate possible amendments to the Irish Constitution. A
combination of this alongside the more conventional ballot might ensure the burden of
public service is fair and represents all sections of the community. What is important
is that people feel a sense of collective control over the issues that affect their lives.
This would mean a significant diversification and devolution of public services down
towards the local level rather than a reliance on the centralising organs of the state. It
would also mean that democratic socialists would need to let go of any homogenising
tendencies they might have in favour of facilitating what is best in a specific context or
situation at a given time. As Mouffe has stated above, universalism (beyond, perhaps,
a basic array of needs, requirements or rights) will be compromised and that will
be difficult for some to bear, but a ‘one size fits all’ response runs counter to the
dexterity democratic socialism needs to show if it is to survive in the twenty-first
century.
The following chapters focus specifically on issues within education and how
the democratic socialist theories discussed above can inform ways forward. As I
noted in Chap. 1, the challenges state education systems face are the increasing
reliance on international assessment rankings, the alignment of the curriculum to
national economic productivity, the creation (in some jurisdictions) of a market for
schools and colleges based around the ethos of consumer choice, and the notion that
students’ well being, progress and achievement is best measured using quantitative
data. I will discuss the curriculum, pedagogy and governance in successive chapters
to investigate these issues.
This chapter has introduced the work of Bobbio, Honneth and Mouffe as exam-
ples of important contemporary thinking on democratic socialism. For democratic
socialism to remain a relevant ideology in the twenty-first century, these writers argue
that it is vital for it to engage with liberal discourse around democracy, rights and
individual autonomy. It is also critical to acknowledge and reflect upon the increas-
ing diversity of modern societies (often through forms of social media and other
technologies). The concept of ‘associative democracy’ was also introduced here as a
possible model for participatory bodies and organisations, particularly in the realm
of public services.
References
Bobbio, N. (2005). Liberalism and democracy (M. Ryle & K. Soper, Trans.). London: Verso.
Bobbio, N. (2007). Which socialism? (R. Griffin, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press.
Day, B. (Ed.). (2000). Oscar Wilde: A life in quotes. London: Metro Books.
Polity Press.
References 17
Honneth, A. (2017). The idea of socialism: Towards a renewal (J. Ganahl, Trans.). Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Mason, P. (2015). Postcapitalism: A guide to our future. London: Penguin.
Newman, M. (2005). Socialism: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nozick, R. (1974). Anarchy, state and Utopia. Oxford: Blackwell.
Chapter 3
Towards a Democratic Socialist
Curriculum
Abstract It is argued that the curriculum is one of the most politicised aspects of
contemporary state education and has come under increasingly centralised control
in many educational systems. This chapter presents the need for an element of local
stakeholder control of the curriculum to foster greater democratic accountability on
what is taught. In terms of the content of the curriculum itself, it will be argued that a
common curriculum that encompasses elements of the ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’
for all students (echoing Dewey) is preferable to a situation where students are
‘streamed’ into specific areas of learning. A democratic socialist curriculum will
also emphasise the need for citizenship and collaboration as key educational aims
that go beyond the striving for employability and qualifications.
Keywords Curriculum · Democratic · Socialist · Common · Citizenship
In some respects, the curriculum is the most political of the processes within state
education. It determines what will be taught and to whom, the hours and weeks
devoted to particular themes or subjects, how the students will be assessed to ensure
the teaching has been effective and progress has been achieved, and the transition
from one class or form to the next, one phase of education to another. It is the
educational hub from which everything else in education emanates outwards. And
yet, in terms of the word’s definition and complexity, it can come across as a relatively
straightforward concept. A. V. Kelly [citing Kerr (1968)] describes the curriculum
simply as ‘all the learning which is planned and guided by the school, whether it is
carried on in groups or individually, inside or outside of school’ (Kelly 2009: 12).
But, as Kelly himself acknowledges, this definition is deceptive in its simplicity as
it encompasses all the elements that I have just mentioned above.
So the curriculum can be both a potential agent of emancipation and of social
control depending on the circumstances in which the teaching and learning take
place and how power manifests itself in determining who ultimately decides the
content and scope. In the words of Foucault:
[D]iscourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a
stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. Dis-
course transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it,
renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it. (Foucault 1979: 100–101)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18937-2_3
20 3 Towards a Democratic Socialist Curriculum
The language or register in which the curriculum and knowledge is framed will
determine, according to Foucault, who will be able to access and apply it. In this
sense, it is potentially restrictive and privileges those who are already familiar
with such registers. However, Foucault can also see the potential for change or
challenge—students who are not originally familiar with the register or language
associated with a given curriculum can still acquire, through education, the knowl-
edge associated with it and use this power for alternative purposes.
I indicated in Chap. 1 that the neoliberal turn in state education that occurred from
the 1970s onwards (depending on the country and system in question) led to a close
connection being made between quantifiable education progress and achievement on
the one hand and economic productivity on the other. It would be foolish to pretend
that links were not made before this period between state education and the health
of a nation’s economy—what distinguishes the neoliberal approach sought by many
countries is the reliance on measurable data to ascertain whether improvements in
education are being made and the potential effects these are having on Gross National
Product or worker efficiency (compared with competitors). The creation by the OECD
and others of international educational rankings according to specific tests (in the
guise of PISA, TIMSS, etc.) has reinforced these trends—the data is now arranged
into neat league tables where ministers and commentators can immediately chart the
performance of students in their country against dozens of others. Reporters keenly
relay to their readers the implications for government, schools, colleges and business
of a rise or fall in the rankings. Indeed, some jurisdictions (Finland, South Korea,
Singapore, for example) have been touted as educationally pre-eminent on the basis
of such rankings. It is important to state that these international comparisons are not
without any benefit—they do provide, at least, the results of a sample of students
in different countries on particular tasks. What is more worrying is the reliance
education ministries, journalists and chambers of commerce attach to the findings.
Alexander has written:
In many countries, including the UK, the potential of international student achievement
surveys such as TIMSS and PISA is being subverted by political and media fixation on the
resulting league tables. These prompt not just well-founded efforts to learn from others’
success but also ill-founded assertions about educational cause and effect, inappropriate
transplanting of the policies to which success is attributed, and even the reconfiguring of
entire national curricula to respond less to national culture, values and needs than to the
dubious claims of ‘international benchmarking’ and ‘world class’ educational standards.
(Alexander 2012: 4)
Because international achievement surveys tend to focus on reading, mathematics

and science, those countries concerned with their place in the rankings (and which
country isn’t?) will often amend their curriculum in such a way as to maximise the
possibilities of rising in the next round of research. This invariably means an increase
in the study of native languages, mathematics and the ‘hard’ sciences at the expense
of other subjects or activities that might be seen as being equally important to children
and young people as part of their education. The creative arts, vocational subjects,
the humanities (in general) and physical education are typical victims as a result of
this emphasis on ‘core’ subjects. No-one is saying that students shouldn’t be adept
3 Towards a Democratic Socialist Curriculum 21
in their mother tongue, the use of number and knowledge of scientific theory and
experimentation. The concern is that increasingly, for many, this becomes an almost
exclusive menu with everything else relegated to the role of meagre side dishes.
In terms of philosophy of education, discussion of the curriculum has had a long
and detailed development. For R. S. Peters, education was a form of initiation into a
public world, a form of social inheritance. He says in Ethics and Education:
A child born with a consciousness not yet differentiated into beliefs, purposes, and feelings
… The objects of consciousness are first and foremost objects in a public world that are
marked out and differentiated by a public language … Differentiation develops as the mastery
of the basic skills opens the gates to a vast inheritance by those versed in more specific
modes of thought and awareness such as science, history, mathematics, religion and aesthetic
awareness … for all who get on inside such a form of thought … the contours of that public
world are transformed. The process of initiation into such modes of thought and awareness
is the process of education. (Peters 1970: 49–51)
It is clear from this passage that Peters envisages a curriculum that goes well beyond
a focus on native language, mathematics and science. Education is essentially an
induction into the complexities of culture, giving children and young people the
language and background in order to engage in public discourse and debate. It is
therefore imperative that students are exposed to the creative arts and humanities as
part of this experience, to acquire the necessary knowledge to appreciate where they
have come from, what their predecessors created and discovered, and how the world
is evolving in their own lifetime. Paul Hirst, a colleague of Peters, developed ideas
regarding the aims of a curriculum and what constituted conceptual and propositional
knowledge within a curriculum. According to Christopher Winch:
For Hirst, propositional knowledge is important, but so also are conceptual structure and
methods of investigation. Forms of knowledge can be distinguished through variation across
all three of these dimensions. For Hirst, this approach yielded distinctive areas of: Math-
ematics and Logic, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences and History, Literature and the Fine
Arts, Morals, Religion and Philosophy. (Winch 2013: 133)
What distinguishes both of these theories of knowledge (and the curricula associated
with them) is the apparent absence of vocational subjects from the area of discus-
sion. Perhaps this is due to the focus on culture (for Peters) and propositional and
conceptual knowledge (for Hirst) in the passages above. It is a significant absence,
nevertheless. One key player for whom vocational education was at the forefront of
any worthwhile programme of study was John Dewey. Dewey was concerned over
the separation of theory and application as a means of understanding how knowl-
edge is conceptualised which he traced back, ultimately, to Plato. With this separation
evolved a hierarchy where the ‘intellectual’ took precedence over the ‘practical’, the
‘mental’ over the ‘physical’:
The contempt for the physical as compared with mathematical and logical science, for the
senses and sense observation; the feeling that knowledge is high and worthy in the degree in
which it deals with ideal symbols instead of with the concrete; the scorn of particulars except
as they are deductively brought under a universal; the disregard for the body; the depreciation
of the arts and crafts as intellectual instrumentalities, all sought shelter and found sanction
under this estimate of the respective values of experience and reason – or, what came to the
same thing, of the practical and the intellectual. (Dewey 2007: 196)
I am not trying to set up Dewey in opposition to Peters and Hirst—after all, he values
many of the same things as them, particularly in the importance he attaches to the
arts, for instance. What must be noted, however, is Dewey’s particular emphasis on
the relationship between theory and practice in his theory of knowledge and attitudes
to education. His concern was that this separation at the level of epistemology is then
reflected in what and how children learn. From the ‘intellectual’ and the ‘practical’,
we then devise curricula that are termed ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’ for different
classes of students as though these were inherently different things. As a philosophical
pragmatist, Dewey believed these were false dichotomies:
[W]e have no right to call anything knowledge except where our activity has actually pro-
duced certain physical changes in things, which agree with and confirm the conception
entertained. (Dewey 2007: 247)
A balanced curriculum should be one where the mind, hand, body and eye should be
resorted to equally. Students steered into either an academic or a vocational curricu-
lum are deprived in similar measure—the only difference is that the academic student
will at least benefit from participating in a curriculum that has a certain prestige and
opportunities for advancement. One of Dewey’s goals in Democracy and Education
is to raise the reputation of vocational learning to an extent that there is no longer
any need to view it as separate from the academic:
[A]n education which acknowledges the full intellectual and social meaning of a vocation
would include instruction in the historic background of present conditions; training in science
to give intelligence and initiative in dealing with material and agencies of production; and
the study of economics, civics, and politics, to bring the future worker into touch with the
problems of the day and the various methods proposed for its improvement. (Dewey 2007:
234)
In such circumstances, with such a curriculum, the partition between the academic
and the vocational is steadily dismantled—there is a sense of the learning as a holistic
process where students are able to investigate the dynamic between thought and deed.
There is also an interaction between and across disciplines—study is not confined
always to discrete subject areas. Dewey was not against learning defined accord-
ing to subjects as such—he could see the benefit that comes from learning within a
disciplinary framework (like Peters and Hirst). What Dewey wanted to avoid was a
situation where the emphasis on subject learning came at the expense of exploring
opportunities for cross-curricula development. He believed ‘[t]he scheme of a cur-
riculum must take account of the adaptation of studies to the needs of the existing
community life’ (Dewey 2007: 145). Just as the social world does not necessarily fit
knowledge into neat boxes then neither always should the education system which
forms part of it.
More recently, John White has advocated a curriculum similar to Dewey’s in its
relationship between subject areas and curriculum themes or topics. White has stated:
The timetabled curriculum is not necessarily confined to school subjects. We need to know
the most appropriate vehicles for realising the aims and should not assume that these will
always be discrete subjects … Topic-based or integrated courses; various practical activities;
periods of free private study; wider groupings such as ‘the arts’ rather than music, visual arts
and literature as separate subjects, are all in the ring … On the other hand, subjects do reflect
to some extent logical differences in the organisation of knowledge and awareness; and they
have behind them years of experience in internal structuring and sequencing of learning. It
makes sense to draw on their strengths while avoiding their weaknesses. (White 2004: 28)
What we have, drawing on the work of Dewey and White particularly, is an idea of the
curriculum as broad based, incorporating a range of subjects and topics that might be
discrete or across curriculum areas, and value the application of knowledge as much
as abstraction and theory. In the next section, I will explore how this overview of
curriculum frameworks informs the discussion on what might constitute a democratic
socialist curriculum.
So what could a democratic socialist curriculum look like? Is it credible to even

raise the idea of such a thing? The concept, on first hearing, might sound somewhat
far-fetched. However, if, as I contended at the beginning of this chapter, the arrange-
ment of programmes of study in state education is itself a political act, then why
shouldn’t we apply a certain political ideology to the curriculum? Seen in this light,
the endeavour does not seem so strange.
I wrote in the previous chapter how recent thinkers on socialism (Bobbio, Mouffe
and Honneth) have identified the relationship between socialism and democracy as
a vital element in democratic socialist thinking for the twenty-first century. Dewey
therefore acts as the cornerstone, bringing together aspects of politics and education
under the overall concept of ‘democracy’. Indeed, Honneth explicitly acknowledges
Dewey’s contribution to the search for a way of life that embodies creativity and
flourishing within social bonds:
The starting point for Dewey’s far-reaching considerations consists in his claim that ‘asso-
ciational’ or ‘communal’ behavior [sic] constitutes a basic feature of all things; therefore, as
history unfolds, potentials are unleashed and realized by the establishment of connections
between hitherto isolated ‘individual things’. (Honneth 2017: 60)
What comes across clearly here is a reiteration of associational life and organisa-
tion—the idea that services and processes are best arranged when the people involved
and affected are responsible for the decisions taken. In the words of Hirst, ‘associa-
tionism has a strong potential to attract radicals, who favour alternative and demo-
cratic organization, as well as those who favour the principle of consumer choice’
(Hirst 1996: 433). Associationism is akin to forms of participatory budgeting that
have been implemented across various countries with varying degrees of success.
One of the most notable internationally, in terms of education, has been the admin-
istration in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Gandin and Apple (2002) have
gone into detail on how the city administration (then under the control of the Work-
ers’ Party) created a network of ‘citizen schools’ where control of the curriculum
was a cumulative and ongoing process between teachers, students, parents and local
districts within the city to establish a curriculum that best suited local needs through
the forum of organised debate and discussion. The benefits and drawbacks of such
an experiment are easy to identify—the process allows stakeholders to voice their

proposals in a potentially fair and meaningful way so they feel that the curriculum
belongs to them at a certain level. Nevertheless, the procedures involved could be
seen as cumbersome, time-consuming and bureaucratic, inhibiting the very people
from participating that the project seeks to involve. One of the challenges of a demo-
cratic socialist curriculum is to incorporate the principle of stakeholder voice without
becoming mired in interminable committees that resolve little and create frustration.
One possible solution to the tension between democratic participation in the cur-
riculum and administrative overkill is offered by the ‘Cambridge Primary Review’,
a team of researchers based at the University of Cambridge. As part of their final
report, Children, their World, their Education (Alexander 2010), the review recom-
mended a primary curriculum seventy per cent of which was devised nationally and
thirty per cent locally. This would have the advantage of having parts of the curricu-
lum that are consistent across localities (an important consideration as populations
become increasingly mobile) but giving space for innovation and experiment where
individual schools or districts can tailor the learning to their specific contexts. On a
small scale, this epitomises Mouffe’s notion of a multipolar world:
Democracy in a multipolar world can take a variety of forms, according to the different
modes of inscription of the democratic ideal in a variety of contexts. (Mouffe 2013: 28)
Where Mouffe differs in her approach is that she identifies the multipolar world as a
site of conflict between oppositional forces who define and implement the democratic
ideal in different ways. This sense of opposition and conflict need not be case where
schools or local authorities in different areas are formulating a variety of measures
to enable them to meet the needs of stakeholders in relation to the curriculum. The
centres of power could, in my example, be complementary or act in parallel.
My proposal shouldn’t be confused with examples of deregulation that have hap-
pened in England, for instance, where schools have been allowed to opt out of local
authority control and create a direct connection between themselves and central gov-
ernment. As part of this change, schools that choose to become academies (or are
created from scratch as free schools) are no longer required to teach the English
National Curriculum—they are only required, by law, to provide a ‘balanced and
broadly based curriculum’ (HM Government 2010). Superficially, this appears to
model what I have been saying above about devolving power down to local stake-
holders. However, the reality has often been very different—the deregulation has
allowed some corporate players to amass large ‘multi academy trusts’ where the
room for individual schools and teachers to innovate and contextualise on the cur-
riculum is limited. Some multi academy trusts run on a strict profit basis and display
in a significant way the traits of educational neoliberalism I discussed in Chap. 1. A
democratic socialist curriculum, by contrast, must be subject to democratic control
for it to be defined as such (according to my interpretation). As Bobbio reiterates:
[A] political system is democratic where collective decisions, i.e. decisions which affect the
whole of a community (no matter how small or large), are taken by all of its members [my
emphasis]. (Bobbio 2007: 90)
It is not enough that power over the curriculum has been distributed downwards from
central government—the question then arises: ‘Who has the power been distributed
to?’ I have said elsewhere:
The democratic curriculum has, at its core, the idea that learning is a negotiation between
those with a vested interest in such learning. Stakeholders are likely to include government,
educational administrators, teachers, students, employers and the local community. There
are practical implications in terms of the ability, confidence and age of the students involved,
as well as the potential difficulty in consulting the various stakeholders over individual
programmes. However, the principle of negotiation is key—no one agent or agency should
own the curriculum to the extent of determining aims and objectives without the agreement
of other stakeholders (Hopkins 2014: 426).
To this extent, the democratic socialist curriculum and the liberal democratic cur-
riculum are synonymous—there should not be, where feasibly possible, a sense of
imposition or lack of ownership for those the curriculum directly affects. I accept
that there are issues regarding the level of agency we should grant to children (espe-
cially very young children) but even here we need to tread carefully when using
phrases such as ‘these are the things children must learn’—research has shown that
even young children can make informed comments and decisions on their learning
(see Brough 2012; Flutter 2007). A democratic socialist curriculum needs to have
students’ voices (children included) at the epicentre of any decision making.
Alongside the communal or associational aspects of Dewey cited by Honneth

earlier on in this chapter, there was also talk of ‘potentials [being] unleashed and
realized’ (Honneth 2017: 60). What goes into a curriculum is as important as who
makes the decision itself. I have already referred in this chapter to the tendency in
many countries to select students according to ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’ criteria
and steer them into what is seen as the appropriate curriculum for them. The assump-
tion is that students will excel in either one area or the other but a state curriculum
cannot accommodate both aspects for all students. This situation does not necessarily
have to be the case, however. In Central Europe and Scandinavia (for example), there
is a strong educational culture that incorporates the academic and the vocational into
an integrated curriculum (as a means of articulating my notion of equality of treat-
ment outlined in the introduction). Georg Kerschensteiner is a key historical figure
in the development of such a curriculum. Kerschensteiner was the Munich director
of schools in the late nineteenth century. According to Winch and Hyland:
Kerschensteiner’s [method] in Munich was to increase the practical element in school edu-
cation in the Volksschule or elementary school … and to develop a mandatory element of
college education for apprentices … Thus developed the Berufsschule or vocational college,
which worked in concert with the workplace to develop an integrated vocational education
for apprentices between the ages of 14 and 20. (Winch and Hyland 2007: 34)
Kerschensteiner was influential in the highly-respected German apprenticeship

model that has attracted over the decades students who aspire to a well-regarded
industrial training instead of (or alongside) entry into the world of higher education.
The links between Dewey’s and Kerschensteiner’s theories of education are tangible,
particularly in the emphasis they place on fusing academic and vocational aspects
of learning into a given curriculum and, interestingly, the democratic implications
for students undertaking such learning: ‘[Kerschensteiner] considered vocational
education—which he wanted to be recognised as an essential component of educa-
tion—to be an important requisite for citizenship’ (Gonon 2009: 15). Both thinkers
were viewing education from a holistic and social point of view—learning needed
to coordinate the mind and senses through what Dewey called ‘occupations’. Dewey
defined this term as:
[A] continuous activity having a purpose. Education through occupations consequently com-
bines within itself more of the factors conducive to learning than any other method. It calls
instincts and habits into play; it is a foe of passive receptivity. (Dewey 2007: 228)
The learning involved is collaborative—as well as integrating different aspects of a

person’s awareness and intelligence, it requires students to work together in order to
achieve the purpose (I will expand on these ideas in Chap. 4 when I discuss pedagogy).
In this sense, it is similar to social constructivist views of education based on the
work of Lev Vygotsky and others. What differentiates Dewey and Kerschensteiner
from some in social constructivist theory is the deliberate emphasis they place on
collaborative learning, citizenship and democracy.
A contemporary democratic socialist curriculum, therefore, needs to be integra-
tive as well as democratic in its composition. It challenges the notion that students
can be divided into broad categories such as ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’ because this
presents a two-dimensional view of what knowledge is and how it relates to the world.
An unintegrated curriculum does not provide students with the necessary opportuni-
ties to investigate the relationships between theoretical and practical knowledge in
the way Dewey advocated. Students are encouraged to over-specialise in a certain
area of the curriculum at the expense of other potential learning. Over-specialisation
was a genuine concern for Dewey—there is a ‘tendency for every distinctive vocation
to become too dominant, too exclusive and absorbing in its specialized aspect. This
means emphasis upon skill or technical method at the expense of meaning’ (Dewey
2007: 227). Dewey was speaking here of craft-based learning but the same could be
said of concentration on certain academic subjects to the detriment of other elements
of the curriculum. Over-specialisation is a form of restriction and prevents students
from experiencing the full range of educational opportunities. It can also reinforce
social reproduction in terms of the expectations placed upon students regarding their
goals and future roles (particularly for women, students of colour, and working-class
students).
It is outside the scope of this book to give a detailed account of what a specific
curriculum should look like for a given age group or phase of education. What this
book is endeavoring to say is that democratic socialism places a premium on the
collective wealth and benefits that need to be shared throughout communities. A
democratic socialist curriculum, if it is to have meaning, needs to enable all students
to access the variety of intellectual, technological, athletic, practical and artistic
opportunities that are potentially on offer (again, in order to facilitate equality of

treatment). Students have their own interests and aptitudes and this will reflect what
they ultimately go on to pursue in detail. But specialisation needs to occur towards the
end point of the educational journey and not before. Exposure to different subjects,
technologies and crafts also enables children and young people to appreciate those
areas in which they do not excel but in which others do. We learn to appreciate our
diversity within such a collectivity. This is similar to Mouffe when she writes:
[The] aim should be to create a bond among … different components, while nevertheless
respecting their differences … in creating a form of commonality that leaves room for
heterogeneity. (Mouffe 2013: 49)
What I am arguing for, in effect, is a return to the common curriculum, a place where
students encounter a sharing of experiences, where they learn to work together and
respect their different ideas, skills and interests. It would be a flexible curriculum
because it would be open to the various stakeholders to suggest changes or innova-
tions. I also suspect it would be a combination of subject- and topic-based learning
depending what was being investigated or discussed.
The success of a curriculum should not be predicated on the results of a few

subjects but requires a much more rounded view—this is why Dewey and Kerschen-
steiner were keen to underline the role education plays in a democratic society.
Citizenship is, to some extent, the centre of a socialist, democratic curriculum—if
success in a curriculum has to be measured, Dewey and Kerschensteiner would,
undoubtedly, have put the ability to play a productive part in a democratic society at
the heart of it. Citizenship has come to play an important role in the curriculum in
many countries in Western Europe (especially) over the past two decades. This has
been due to a number of factors, the most prominent of which was the perceived drop
in political participation amongst young people in so-called ‘mature’ democracies
and the terrorist threat associated with religious and political extremism in contem-
porary politics. Citizenship education has been seen as a means of re-establishing
national identity and encourage young people to feel a sense of belonging within
their national communities. Bobbio has identified a possible source for some of the
disaffection with democracy amongst both the young and old:
The sovereignty of the individual citizen is limited by the fact that the major decisions which
affect economic development either are made without consulting representative bodies, or
if they are consulted it is only after decisions have already been made in the corridors of
power. (Bobbio 2007: 83)
It is with such reflections that governments fear students will veer towards the radical
left and right. Citizenship in the curriculum has lead to a variety of practices, from a
strictly ‘book-based’ approach where students are expected to absorb the events and
facts surrounding their national political history, to a more participatory interpretation
that involves students engaging with local or national projects that have some political
significance. One of the criticisms raised about some citizenship programmes is that
they conform to the prevailing culture of measurement in education. Gert Biesta and
Robert Lawy have spoken of ‘[t]he idea of citizenship as outcome’ (Biesta and Lawy
2006: 72) and go on to say:
[citizenship as outcome] reveals a strong instrumentalist orientation in the idea of citizenship
education. The focus is mainly on the effective means to bring about ‘good citizenship’ rather
than on the question of what ‘good citizenship’ actually is or might be. (Biesta and Lawy
2006: 72)
There is often a lack of debate over what constitutes ‘good citizenship’. It is seen as a
given, something upon which any ‘reasonable’ person would agree. In England, there
has been a clear case of this in the formulation of what have been called ‘Fundamental
British Values’. These were formulated by the government after a scare concerning
supposed religious radicalisation in a group of schools in Birmingham in 2014. State
school teachers are now expected to adhere to ‘Fundamental British Values’ as part
of the Teachers’ Standards (DfE 2011). As I have said elsewhere:
On the surface, FBV could be seen as relatively benign – a statement of values that most
‘reasonable’ people would conform and adhere to as a means of working and living together
within a multicultural society. However, the labelling of these values as ‘British’ has caused
considerable debate … There is little that is inherently ‘British’ regarding the values them-
selves and it is often taken as read what the concepts mean. (Hopkins 2018: 434)
In contrast, Dewey had a much more expansive view of citizenship and democratic
education:
A society which makes provision for participation in its good of all its members on equal terms
and which secures flexible readjustment of its institutions through interaction of the different
forms of associated life is … democratic. Such a society must have a type of education which
gives individuals a personal interest in social relationships and control, and the habits of
mind which secure social change without introducing disorder [my emphasis]. (Dewey 2007:
76)
A democratic socialist curriculum should see citizenship as integral to all learning if

the aim is to encourage students to develop the attitudes and skills that are necessary
to participating in a democratic society. How citizenship is accommodated within the
curriculum will depend upon the age of the students and the environment in which the
learning takes place. As I have advocated, using Dewey as a forerunner, the notion of
citizenship needs to be as expansive as appropriate, encompassing the local, national
and international in its direction and scope. Students should be encouraged to see
themselves as citizens beyond the confines of local and national borders. Honneth
makes links between Dewey’s notion of expanding communication and early socialist
theories,
the presumption of a strong resemblance between, on the one hand, Dewey’s claim that all of
human history is marked by the gradual expansion of communication and social interaction,
and, on the other hand, the notion that early socialists believed that they could apply to the
economic sphere. (Honneth 2017: 63)
Globalisation is not just an economic phenomenon—social media and other techno-

logical innovations have made communication across borders easier than in the past.
Dewey’s ideas on the gradual expansion of social interaction appear to be playing
out through the increased use of digital technology and widely-accessible platforms.
The notion of citizenship that limits itself to purely local or national domains is
ignoring these developments in human communication. A democratic socialist cur-
riculum needs to acknowledge these developments—they are, to some extent, the
social and cultural parallels to early Marxist thought on the economic interests of the
working class transcending national borders. As mentioned in Chap. 2, identities are
becoming increasingly fluid as issues of gender, ethnicity, environmentalism, human
rights, sexual orientation and lifestyle generally play a greater role in how people
envisage themselves and how they are perceived by others. Technology is the vehicle
through which people are making international connections based on such identities.
This is not to downplay the vital local, regional and national identities people have
within their cultural DNA but citizenship education that has a solely national aspect,
for example, will inevitably restrict the more expansive, international elements of
people’s sense of belonging.
Citizenship in the democratic socialist curriculum should probably look to the
form of cosmopolitanism advocated by Kwame Anthony Appiah. Appiah states:
So there are two strands that intertwine in the notion of cosmopolitanism. One is the idea that
we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related
by the ties of kith and kin, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship. The other is
that we take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which
means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance. (Appiah
2007: 14)
This account is attractive as it describes our ties and duties to others using both a wide
angle and a narrow angle lens, viewing our relationships to people in general and
in particular. It will also potentially create tensions which the curriculum (and those
involved with it) need to be able to facilitate—the debate over Brexit, for instance,
has demonstrated the divisions that are created in the debate over the general and the
particular, the national and the international. What a democratic socialist curriculum
cannot do, in my view, is restrict such discussion to a discrete, standalone subject
entitled ‘citizenship’, ‘civics’ or the like. If democracy, in Dewey’s conception of the
term, is more a way of life than a means of selecting political representatives, then
citizenship should be explored throughout the curriculum whether this is arranged
according to subject or theme. This is likely to enable citizenship to come across as
more relevant and important to students than when it is dealt with separately (and
often as a subject outside of the inner ‘core’ of subjects).
This chapter has taken, as its focus, the notion of a socialist, democratic curricu-
lum. I have argued that a democratic socialist curriculum for the twenty-first century
should be open to discussion from a variety of stakeholders (local and national) in
terms of what should go into a programme of study. The chapter has also advo-
cated a more integrated approach to the curriculum, based on the thinking of Dewey
and Kerschensteiner, to encompass both ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’ elements for
all students. The notion of a common curriculum available to everyone is in order
for students to develop their understanding of the links between theoretical and the
practical in collaborative ways. Finally, I argue that citizenship is a central aspect of
a democratic socialist curriculum if the aim is to encourage students to participate in
a democratic society. Citizenship needs to be incorporated across the curriculum and
reflect the dynamic nature of twenty-first century identities facilitated by the onset
of digital technologies. The next chapter will look at how pedagogy can be informed
by current democratic socialist thinking.
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Brough, C. J. (2012). Implementing the democratic principles and practices of student-centred
curriculum integration in primary schools. The Curriculum Journal, 23(2), 345–369.
Department for Education [England] (DfE). (2011). Teachers’ standards [online]. Available at:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/
file/665520/Teachers__Standards.pdf. Accessed January 14, 2019.
Dewey, J. (2007 [1916]). Democracy and education. Teddington: Echo Library.
Flutter, J. (2007). Teacher development and pupil voice. The Curriculum Journal, 18(3), 343–354.
Foucault, M. (1979). The history of sexuality (vol. 1) (R. Hurley, Trans.). London: Allen Lane.
Gandin, L. A., & Apple, M. (2002). Challenging neo-liberalism, building democracy: Creating the
Citizens School in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Journal of Educational Policy, 17(2), 259–279.
Gonon, P. (2009). The quest for modern vocational education—Georg Kerschensteiner between
Dewey, Weber and Simmel. Bern: Peter Lang.
HM Government. (2010). Academies act [England] [online]. Available at: https://www.legislation.
gov.uk/ukpga/2010/32/section/1A. Accessed January 11, 2019.
Polity Press.
Polity Press.
Hopkins, N. (2014). The democratic curriculum: Concept and practice. Journal of Philosophy of
Education, 48(3), 416–427.
Hopkins, N. (2018). Dewey, democracy and education, and the school curriculum. Education 3-13,
46(4), 433–440.
Kelly, A. V. (2009). The curriculum: Theory and practice (6th ed.). London: Sage.
Peters, R. S. (1970). Ethics and education. London: Allen & Unwin.
References 31
White, J. (2004). Rethinking the school curriculum: Values, aims and purposes. London: Rout-
ledgeFalmer.
Winch, C. (2013). Curriculum design and epistemic ascent. Journal of Philosophy of Education,
47(1), 128–146.
Winch, C., & Hyland, T. (2007). A guide to vocational education and training. London: Continuum.
Chapter 4
In Search of a Democratic Socialist
Pedagogy
Abstract How the curriculum is taught is as important as what goes into it. In this
chapter, the social and collaborative aspects of learning are re-visited in relation to
pedagogy. Using the work of Robin Alexander in particular, it will be argued that
dialogic learning has a close affinity with democratic socialist ideas regarding the
notion of knowledge as something that is acquired and constructed through dialogue
between students and the teacher. The work of Freire and Dewey will also be impor-
tant in this chapter regarding the use of pedagogy as a means of challenging existing
hierarchies in education and how a social view of learning fosters ideas regarding
education and citizenship.
Keywords Democratic · Socialist · Pedagogy · Socratic · Dialogical
Just as it might sound counter-intuitive to discuss the idea of a democratic socialist

curriculum (as in the last chapter), so the same question could be raised about intro-
ducing the concept of a democratic socialist pedagogy. Pedagogy, after all, is usually
thought of as the science of teaching or transmitting knowledge. Scientific inves-
tigation is often framed within the conventions of positivism (in terms of research
methodologies). According to Michael Crotty,
from this … viewpoint, scientists are required to keep the distinction between objective,
empirically verifiable knowledge and subjective, unverifiable knowledge very much in mind.
It emerges as the distinction between fact and value and founds the goal of value-neutral
science. (Crotty 1998: loc. 550–554)
Within such a paradigm, the political is subjective and therefore to be treated with
suspicion by those who aspire to be value-neutral. Granted, there are certainly aspects
of teaching and learning that lend themselves readily to such investigations—the
Behaviourist school of educational theory, although comprehensively challenged on
many of its central tenets, has still been able to show the benefits of orthodox scientific
study within the classroom. However, as with any human endeavour, orthodox science
can only tell part of the story. Although the current educational climate is one that
places considerable weight on what is measurable, empirical and evidence-based,
I contend that teaching is as much an artform or creative pursuit as it is an object
of scientific research. There is a side to teaching that lends itself to narrative, the
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18937-2_4
34 4 In Search of a Democratic Socialist Pedagogy
description and analysis of the behaviour, thought and dialogue that occurs within
a learning environment during a certain passage of time. Teaching also involves the
creation of resources and artefacts that are then introduced into the classroom to
stimulate understanding and inspiration.
If we determine pedagogy, therefore, as a combination of science and art then,
perhaps, the notion of a democratic socialist pedagogy becomes more difficult to
dismiss. This more inclusive view of pedagogy is reinforced by Alexander’s own
definition—Alexander (2001) is himself an important thinker on pedagogy across
different national contexts: ‘pedagogy … is the act of teaching together with the ideas,
values and beliefs by which that act is informed, sustained and justified’ (Alexander
2008: 4). If values and beliefs are integral to our concept of pedagogy, then political
views are likely to be a factor in how teachers teach. What needs to be addressed if
this is the case are concerns over indoctrination—how can we prevent political views
spilling over into situations where students are vulnerable to one-sided opinions or
even brainwashing? When I speak of pedagogy in this chapter, I will not be discussing
specific political content. It is right and appropriate from an ethical standpoint that
teachers present a broad and balanced view on any given subject (particularly if the
issue involves sensitive political, religious or moral overtones). My focus in this
chapter is to explore how and where current democratic socialist theory can inform
the way we teach. Is there something in the writings of those democratic socialist
thinkers I have chosen to concentrate upon that can clarify or challenge how we
interact with one another in learning situations? How is knowledge constructed and
who has the responsibility for this construction?
One of the texts that has been extremely influential in terms of pedagogy as a form
of empowerment has been Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire takes
a radical stance on teaching methods and the hierarchies these often entail. Friere
criticises what he calls the ‘banking’ model of pedagogy where ‘the educator’s role
is to regulate the way the world “enters into’ the students’ (Freire 1996: 57). In its
place, Freire offers the concept of ‘problem-posing’ education:
[P]roblem-posing education … breaks with the vertical patterns characteristic of banking
education … Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher
cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with student-teachers. The teacher
is not merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself [sic] taught in dialogue with the
students, who in turn while being taught also teach. (Freire 1996: 61)
It must be acknowledged that Freire’s concepts concerning pedagogy were formu-

lated primarily during his time as an adult educator with rural, illiterate students.
However, his advocacy of dialogue and the flattening of educational hierarchies as
part of the teaching and learning process has pertinence across all phases of educa-
tion. If, as I argued in Chap. 3, it is important that children and young people have a
say into what goes into their own curriculum, then a pedagogy that emphasises dia-
logue and the sharing of ideas and knowledge across the classroom is more likely to
facilitate such discussion. Honneth, again referring to Dewey, put this into a broader
context:
4 In Search of a Democratic Socialist Pedagogy 35
Dewey argues that the more potentials we unleash and realize, the more freely the individual
elements will be able to interact with one another. This moves Dewey to conclude that
within the reality of human communities, possibilities can only be completely realized if all
members are able to participate as freely as possible in the kind of meaningful communication
that is typical of such communities. (Honneth 2017: 60–61)
I am arguing that classrooms are such communities. This doesn’t mean that the
teacher is absolved of all responsibility, as is often depicted in nightmare scenarios
of ‘progressive’ education run wild with children as masters and teachers as ser-
vants. Dewey states that the teacher ‘can arrange conditions that are conducive to
community activity’ (Dewey 1950: 64) as part of her or his professional duties. What
such a situation encourages is an atmosphere in which students are treated as part-
ners rather than as receptacles in the educational process. I mentioned in Chap. 1
of educational cultures that strive for targets and results in an effort to demonstrate
‘measurable progress’—such cultures are in danger of reverting to the ‘banking’
mode of education described by Freire in their bid to maximise outcomes.
So what does dialogue actually mean in relation to pedagogy? How is talk used
in ways that are participatory and meaningful? And, importantly, where does this
connect with recent democratic socialist thinking? Robin Alexander has been a sig-
nificant advocate of dialogical teaching in the classroom—for him, such teaching
has five recurring principles:
1. collective: teachers and children address learning tasks together, whether as a group or
as a class;
2. reciprocal: teachers and children listen to each other, share ideas and consider alternative
viewpoints;
3. supportive: children articulate their ideas freely, without fear of embarrassment over
‘wrong’ answers; and they help each other to reach common understandings;
4. cumulative: teachers and children build on their own and each others’ ideas and chain
them into coherent lines of thinking and enquiry;
5. purposeful: teachers plan and steer classroom talk with specific educational goals in
view. (Alexander 2008: 112–113)
What this summary of dialogical teaching and learning has is an emphasis on

the common and collective without sacrificing individual students’ attitudes and
ideas. This is the pedagogical counterpart to my thoughts on the curriculum in
Chap. 3—students, in collaboration with each other and the teacher, are able to
explore, through supported speech, the issues, experiments or problems they are
working on in an atmosphere of ‘two heads are better than one’. The learning is
inherently social. Freire has said that ‘[o]nly dialogue, which requires critical think-
ing, is also capable of generating critical thinking’ (Freire 1996: 73). By adopting
such a process, in Alexander’s words,
we see young children discussing with increasing sophistication and sensitivity the dynamics
and mechanisms of interaction: the use of eye contact, listening taking turns, handling the
dominant individual and supporting the reticent one, engaging with what others say rather
than merely voicing their own opinions. (Alexander 2008: 115)
What we have here, in effect, is a pedagogical model for what democratic education
(in the Deweyan mode) ought to look like. The students in this passage are developing
the skills and attitudes one associates with citizenship in a democratic society. But
what connections can be made to democratic socialist thought—is there any sense
in which dialogical learning finds an echo in the work of contemporary democratic
socialist thinkers? If we take dialogical learning to be an instance of direct democracy
(where individuals articulate their thoughts and opinions directly in a public forum
rather than mediated through a representative) then Bobbio’s writings do yield poten-
tial links: ‘the concept of direct democracy is the central idea, I would almost say
the sole central idea, behind the socialist theory of the state’ (Bobbio 2007: 79). I
accept that there is a jump between classroom activity and theories of the state but
the notion that direct democracy is a socialist idea and that the classroom can be an
instance of direct democracy in action (when suitably arranged and facilitated) is an
important one. It reinforces the idea that learning, like decision making, should be a
social and collective enterprise although the teacher will often need to retain ultimate
responsibility in the classroom (depending upon the age of the students and context
in which the learning takes place). That said, we must also be careful to not make a
‘fetish’ out of direct democracy (Bobbio 2007: 78–82) and see it as a panacea for all
of society’s ills or a cure for every poor decision-making process—by placing too
much store in such a system (within the classroom and elsewhere), we are likely to
be deceived by its apparent virtues.
Honneth also thinks collaborative learning actually leads to more effective answers
and better decision making.
The more those who are affected by a problem are involved in the search for solutions to
that problem, the more such socialhistorical [sic] experiments will lead to better and more
stable solutions (Honneth 2017: 61).
The exchange of different viewpoints that comes with dialogical forms of pedagogy
enables students to peer into a problem and look at it from the various sides before
establishing a fact or coming to a conclusion. The solution is more stable because it
has been built by many hands, is the product not of a hierarchy where the information
is fed to students in an ‘input-output’ manner but where they have had some ownership
of the process and the endeavours that have gone into it.
Dialogical learning is a good example of student voice. I will be discussing student
voice in relation to educational governance in the next chapter but some commenta-
tors have gone so far as to use dialogue to encourage students to work with teachers
on pedagogical practice. Flutter (2007), for instance, makes a strong case for the use
of ‘pupil voice’ as a means of developing teachers’ own practice by eliciting ongoing
feedback from students that will, in time, develop into a dialogue on what is effective
teaching and learning. This is, in a small way, a manifestation of Freire’s concepts of
the teacher-student and student-teacher. Flutter acknowledges that such negotiations
need to be gradual and dealt with sensitively (to ensure teacher professionalism is
not undermined and that all students in a given class, and not just the most articulate,
are heard).What it does show is that the appraisal of pedagogy is not necessarily a
procedure left to the teacher and her/his colleagues but can involve the students as
well. Dialogue, when trust has been engendered, can often bridge the apparent divide
between the roles of teacher and student.
I have made much in my advocacy of the benefits of dialogical learning and the
use of discussion in the preceding section. But talk is always prone to trigger conflict
in the classroom as elsewhere. Conflict is usually seen as a thing to avoid because
of the emotions and actions it produces. Mouffe, on the other hand, takes a different
stance towards it:
Conflict in liberal democracies cannot and should not be eradicated, since the specificity
of pluralist democracy is precisely the recognition and the legitimation of conflict. (Mouffe
2013: 7)
The reasoning is clear. According to Mouffe, contemporary liberal democratic soci-

eties are, by their nature, plural—there is no agreement on what constitutes a good
life. People will adhere to what John Rawls has called ‘reasonable though incompat-
ible religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines’ (Rawls 2005: xviii). For Mouffe,
conflict is necessary because it is only through conflict that gains are made by dis-
enfranchised and disempowered groups in society. Conflict also demonstrates the
fact that, in modern, plural democracies, there are often opposing belief systems that
cannot be drawn together into some sort of consensus in a given aspect of life—it is
a manifestation of deep-rooted diversity.
How can we deal with conflict in the classroom if, as Mouffe states, it is some-
thing that is fundamental to contemporary democratic societies and should not be
eradicated? One possible answer is by using Alexander’s depiction of what he calls
‘primordial values’ in relation to pedagogy. Alexander describes these values as:
• Individualism puts self above others and personal rights before collective respon-
sibilities. It emphasises unconstrained freedom of action and thought.
• Community centres on human interdependence, caring for others, sharing and
collaborating.
• Collectivism also emphasises human interdependence, but only in so far as it serves
the larger needs of society, or the state … as a whole.
[emphasis in the original] (Alexander 2008: 100–101).
I noted in Chap. 2 the trends in current democratic socialist thinking towards an
engagement with some of the central tenets of liberalism (especially the importance of
individual rights and the need to respect individual identities). Looking at Alexander’s
list above, a democratic socialist pedagogy would need to probably incorporate all
three elements in some shape or form. I would, however, expect an emphasis on
the first two at the expense of the latter one. This is because students need to be
able to have freedom of thought and action (this is central to dialogical learning)
although this cannot be unconstrained because education, as I have said previously,
tends towards the ‘community’ element in Alexander’s set of values. Conflict often
comes at the interface between the individual and the community—people often
assume or acquire their sense of rights and freedoms through their association with
the communities they identify with. With contentious issues, the rights associated
with speech (in the school, college or elsewhere) often come into conflict with the
rights of others in the classroom community not to be abused, victimised, etc. A
democratic socialist pedagogy, when using dialogical learning particularly, needs to
strike a balance between individual rights and the rights of different communities
when using discussion as a form of learning.
Socratic questioning is one possible way of addressing this balance—it challenges
the source of the conflict in ways that are not aggressive or inflammatory and encour-
ages the students to ‘think through’ their views and opinions and arrive at an answer,
through discussion with others, that has been through a sort of refining filter. Socratic
questioning will not eradicate conflict (or its less volatile variant, profound disagree-
ment)—Mouffe and Rawls have shown that this is an inevitable consequence of the
diversity that epitomises modern democracies. However, the probing and seeking for
clarification that comes with such questioning enables students (and the teacher) the
space and permission to think. In such an environment, the individual is respected
but is also seen as part of something greater—the collective endeavour towards a
firmer understanding of the world in which we live and the role we have to play
within it. This doesn’t minimise conflict but prevents it from destroying the very aim
it is trying to seek. Dewey put the process neatly:
The school has the function … of coordinating within the disposition of each individual the
diverse influences of the various social environments he enters … The development within
the young of the attitudes and dispositions necessary to the continuous and progressive life
of a society … takes place through the intermediary of the environment. (Dewey 2007: 21)
A democratic socialist pedagogy, using the tools of dialogical learning and socratic
questioning, offers the prospect of valuing both the individual student and the com-
munities in which she/he is a participant. It is on this balance between respect for
the individual and the demands of a diverse society where contemporary democratic
socialism attempts to find its footing.
This chapter has looked at the idea of a democratic socialist pedagogy. I have
argued that applying a political ideology to the concept of pedagogy is not counter-
intuitive if we see the term as a combination of both art and science. Beliefs and
values do play an important part in both the teacher’s and students’ notions of what
constitutes effective teaching and learning. Dialogical learning epitomises the idea
that we come to acquire knowledge and understanding through our interaction with
others. In this sense, facilitated discussion enables us to get to the heart of the mat-
ter—it is a communal enterprise. I advocate the use of socratic questioning as a means
of probing views and opinions and addressing concerns over conflict when debat-
ing controversial issues. Socratic questioning allies itself with dialogical learning in
acknowledging the individual student within a process that is inherently social.
References
Alexander, R. (2001). Culture and pedagogy. Oxford: Blackwell.

Alexander, R. (2008). Essays on pedagogy. Abingdon: Routledge.
Crotty, M. (1998). The foundations of social research. London: Sage.
Dewey, J. (1950 [1938]). Experience and education. New York: Macmillan.
Flutter, J. (2007). Teacher development and pupil voice. The Curriculum Journal, 18(3), 343–354.
Freire, P. (1996 [1970]). The pedagogy of the oppressed. London: Penguin.
Polity Press.
Chapter 5
Democratic Socialism and Governance
in Education
Abstract The issue of governance is the final educational issue addressed in the
book. This chapter states that citizenship education can be extended to provide a
‘whole organisational approach’ to ensure that citizenship extends to forms of demo-
cratic decision making and accountability within educational institutions. Demo-
cratic socialist ideas in educational governance will be explored in relation to stake-
holder control, participatory budgeting and associationist democracy. Discussion will
also be extended to notions of pupil/student voice and how far schools and colleges
can facilitate this in their endeavours to become more democratic and accountable
to learners.
Keywords Democratic · Socialist · Associationalism · Stakeholder · Governance
In Chap. 1, I outlined a climate in education that tended towards the neoliberal with
regards to emphasising efficiency (in relation to measurable outcomes), customer
choice (for parents, carers or the student), international comparison and competition
(in the form of PISA, TIMSS and the like), and the role of the private sector in
the running of schools and colleges. I stated in Chap. 1 that the neoliberal turn in
education has led to a movement away from the social or civic aspects of state educa-
tion towards a situation where education is increasingly seen as a private transaction
between the consumer on one side (student, parent, carer, etc.) and the provider on
the other. Parallel to this is a curriculum that places a premium on a ‘core’ set of
subjects to bolster national performance in international educational rankings as well
as economic growth and productivity. In some jurisdictions currently, there is some-
times little sense of the wider aspects of education beyond the instrumental. Ruth
Heilbronn, Christine Doddington and Rupert Higham offer an alternative:
Taking humanistic aims for education means not starting from the idea of skills and prepa-
ration for employment, although these are important, but from a question about what should
count as an educated young person today. This question requires thinking about which human
qualities we wish to nurture and develop and how education may foster them. (Heilbronn
et al. 2018: 3)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18937-2_5
42 5 Democratic Socialism and Governance in Education
How can democratic socialism inform the way we arrange organisation and decision
making in educational institutions to enable a move away from over-reliance on the
neoliberal aspects of education and a greater appreciation of what Heilbronn et al.
are advocating? This chapter will explore this theme. There will be a certain degree
of overlap with Chaps. 3 and 4 as issues of curriculum, pedagogy and governance
are intertwined to a greater or lesser degree.
I made a point in the previous chapter, using Bobbio, that schools and colleges can
often be seen as forms of democracy in miniature or, as Heilbronn et al. describe them,
‘small democracies’ (Heilbronn et al. 2018: 6). As we have already seen, Bobbio
makes close connections between democracy and socialist theory and practice. He
states:
The history of the development of democracy in a certain country is made to coincide with
the various stages in the spread of political rights. I get the impression that it is not widely
enough acknowledged that now when there is talk of extending democracy something else
is intended, namely spreading participation in collective decision making to areas outside of
the strictly political sphere. (Bobbio 2007: 113–114)
I have made reference already in this book to the idea of stakeholders in educa-
tion—those with a vested interest having a say in how an organisation is controlled
and managed. To widen the application of democracy, in the form of stakeholder
control in education, is, indeed, to spread participation in collective decision making
to areas outside of the political sphere or outside of what Rawls has called the ‘basic
structure’ (Rawls 2005: 257–285). I am making the same argument here as I did in
Chap. 3 regarding the curriculum—I am unconvinced of the supposed political neu-
trality in relation to education systems. The creation, maintenance and modification
of state education are themselves political acts.
So a democratic socialist stance on governance in education takes democracy
as its starting point. As with the curriculum, this means devolving power as far
as possible down to the grassroots in order that local stakeholder voices (students,
teachers, parents, interested community members) can have the agency and authority
to express and initiate proposals. This is similar to ideas put forward by Hirst in his
description of associative democracy:
Big government has grown at the expense of individual rights and freedoms. The attempted
uniformity of state policy and forms of social provision has meant the imposition of common
rules and standard services on the increasingly diverse and pluralistic objectives of members
of modern societies … Associations, by contrast, empower those for whom services are
provided in diverse ways. Voluntary association is an alternative to top-down bureaucracy
in the competent provision of services. (Hirst 1996: 18–19)
We are returning here again to Mouffe’s concept of the ‘multipolar’, the fact that
contemporary societies are not uniform or standard in their beliefs or approaches
to life. Schools and colleges operate in local contexts and are deeply embedded
within their local communities. Each locality will have its own aims and focus and
the educational institutions within the area will need to reflect these. A democratic
socialist approach to governance should strive to increase local power and account-
5 Democratic Socialism and Governance in Education 43
ability. In Honneth’s words, ‘socialism must remain rooted in geographical spaces

with enough cultural and legal commonalities to enable public space to come about
at all’ (Honneth 2017: 102). The challenge is to enable this to occur without the edu-
cation system becoming so diffuse that it ceases to be a system at all. One possible
answer is through subsidiarity, a term that plays a key part, for instance, in the law
of the European Union. According to the European Union:
Subsidiarity aims to ensure that decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen and
that constant checks are made to verify that action at [the central] level is justified in light
of the possibilities available at … [the] regional or local level. (EUR-Lex 2019)
It is beyond the scope of this book to investigate the minutiae on how subsidiarity
could affect how schools and colleges are governed in specific countries or regions.
It is introduced here more as a principle to influence where power should reside to
ensure control is located at the lowest level possible without sacrificing the workings
of a given education system overall. I am arguing that democratic socialists, if they
believe in public services having a democratic structure with priority given to the local
level, should subscribe to some form of subsidiarity when thinking about governance
in schools and colleges.
I have spoken about the need for stakeholder control in the running of educational
institutions but how might that look in practice? Granted, many countries already
implement processes that accommodate stakeholders voices within the governing
bodies of specific schools and colleges. These might include representatives from
the student body, members of staff, parents, figures from local businesses and the
community at large, and elected officials from the relevant local authority. They
are often formulated through a mixture of election and appointment (depending on
the constituency the members are representing) but tend to have the same length of
tenure. What stakeholder accountability enables is the assurance that ‘points-of-view
are raised and listened to from different perspectives’ (Hopkins 2014b: 421) within
any educational community. I have already alluded to Gandin and Apple’s depiction
of community control in the Citizens Schools in Porto Alegre, Brazil and this is a
good example of stakeholder agency in action. Porto Alegre established a series of
forums from street to city level. In order to establish the aims and actions of the
Citizen School ‘a democratic, deliberative and participatory forum was created—the
Constituent Congress of Education’ (Gandin and Apple 2002: 264) According to the
authors:
Through a long process of mobilization of the school communities … a Congress was
constructed whose objective was to constitute the organizing principles that would guide the
policy for schools in Porto Alegre. (Gandin and Apple 2002: 264)
The benefits of involving the different stakeholders from the city in terms of school
administration are made clear by Gandin and Apple:
By paying attention to the more substantive forms of collective participation and, just as
importantly, by devoting resources to encourage such participation, Porto Alegre has demon-
strated that it is possible to have a ‘thicker’ democracy, even in times of … economic crisis …
[T]hick democracy offers realistic alternatives to the eviscerated versions of thin democracy
found under neo-liberalism… The Citizen School is organically linked to and considered
part of the larger process of transforming the whole city. (Gandin and Apple 2002: 260–263)
Such a way of involving the community in the running of schools and colleges is
potentially attractive from a democratic socialist perspective—it ensures that voices
from all corners of education are given the space to articulate their views and opin-
ions on what should happen within their local educational institutions. It also embeds
democratic practice into school and college governance as a means of strengthening
the links with the local community. Where difficulties could occur is in the poten-
tial for relentless procedure, bureaucracy and committee forming (similar to what I
highlighted in the earlier discussion over a democratically-accountable curriculum).
Citizens do not necessarily have the time and energy to devote to long meetings
over school regulation or debate over staffing costs. One possible solution might be
a form of ‘citizen service’ where people are given an allocation of hours paid leave
per year to participate in community projects—this might prevent the tendency for
people with flexible employment or ‘time rich’ circumstances potentially dominating
such ventures. Mouffe can see the benefits of this form of ‘associational socialism’
(borrowing ideas from the work of Hirst):
Particularly compelling is the argument that associational socialism, because of its empha-
sis on the plurality and autonomy of enterprises and collective bodies as decision-making
agencies, is a means of enhancing the tradition of Western pluralism and liberalism (Mouffe
2005: 98).
What we find here (as elsewhere in the book) are possible links between contemporary
democratic socialism and liberalism, the emphasis on local autonomy in the decision-
making process to meet the needs of specific communities. It is beyond the scope
of this book to explore how such decisions are made, the composition of governing
bodies (although elections should be a key aspect of selection) or how these relate
back to national structures and agendas. What I have endeavoured to do in this section
is give an idea of what school and college governance could look like through the
lens of associational socialism. It is hoped I have shown that it is possible to equate
socialism with a belief in stakeholder power within local environments.
Perhaps the knottiest issue with regards to governance in education is the role
students should play in the running of schools and colleges. There has been much
discussion on how far student voices (particularly if very young) can influence what
occurs within state education. I hope to have demonstrated in the chapters on the
curriculum and pedagogy that it is possible and, indeed, necessary that even very
young children should have a say in what they learn and how it is taught. But to what
lengths can this be taken? The point was made earlier that citizenship, as well as
5 Democratic Socialism and Governance in Education 45
being an integral aspect of the curriculum, should also be the guiding factor in terms
of how educational institutions are governed. I have said in a previous book:
Issues that are raised within the classroom [and] workshop … can be carried across to …
wider … forums as part of a culture of creating informed choices and full participation in
key … concerns. (Hopkins 2014a: 155)
Citizenship becomes part of a ‘whole organisational approach’ in terms of discussing

the workings of a school or college rather than as potentially isolated within the con-
fines of a curriculum area or subject. Debate raised within the classroom can translate
across to other aspects of working together within an institution. In this sense, the
students are able to become stakeholder participants within a wider conception of
citizenship education. Schools and colleges are often already very effective in facili-
tating this more expansive view of citizenship education through the guise of student
councils, parliaments and, where appropriate, student governors. These forums give
students the opportunity to engage in formal debate, stand for election, vote for spe-
cific candidates and represent others on school-wide bodies. Through such practices,
students are being socialised into what democratic decision making entails—the
respect for other people’s opinions, the need to allow turn taking, the search for com-
promise to ensure an agreement is reached (akin to the dialogical learning discussed
in Chap. 4). Where the system works well, students are a full and equal constituency
and make a valued contribution to the educational administration. Where it works
less well are in circumstances where student voice is a token gesture—the students
are listened to but do not have the agency to propose or implement changes (or the
changes that are allowed to occur are cosmetic or minimal). This is the challenge
for schools with very young children where there is a pronounced power differential
between the students and adults. It is in cases such as these where different means
of eliciting children’s view and opinions are, perhaps, necessary (using less formal
procedures to prevent children feeling inhibited from expressing their views).
The development of children’s rights, particularly with the drawing up and signing
by national governments of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the
Child in 1989 (Unicef 2019a), has become an increasingly important consideration
in relation to governance in education. Audrey Osler and Hugh Starkey have spoken
of ‘[t]he interdependence of democracy, human rights and education’ (Osler and
Starkey 2005: 35). The landscape of children’s rights (as well as the creation of
national laws to implement and bolster the UNCRC) has formalised children as key
stakeholders in their education. In England, for instance, a Children’s Commissioner
has been given statutory powers to advocate on behalf of children in relation to
their rights. At a more grassroots level, Unicef has developed a category of ‘Rights
Respecting Schools’ (Unicef 2019b) where children, as part of the wider curriculum
and decision-making process, learn about their rights and the rights of others. The
children in RRS are actively encouraged to voice their opinions in relation to their
school and play an active part in how decision are made. At its best, Right Respecting
Schools epitomise the notion of citizenship education as incorporating all aspects
of school life. Honneth warns contemporary democratic socialists of the trap early
socialists fell into with respect to the issue of rights:
it was impossible to incorporate basic liberal rights into socialist thinking, because the latter
did not accord any independent role to democratic politics. (Honneth 2017: 82)
To ignore liberal rights, and the associations they have with individual autonomy
and democratic practice, would be a mistake from an educational perspective. I have
already alluded to the importance of these in terms of the curriculum and forms of
pedagogy.
Some philosophers such as Onora O’Neill have questioned the concept of rights
when applied to children as being inadequate bearing in mind the duties significant
adults have towards them. O’Neill states:
Those who do only what the children they interact with have a (universal or special) right to
will do less than they ought. They will fulfill their perfect but not their imperfect obligations.
In particular parents or teachers who meet only their perfect obligations would fail as parents
and teachers. (O’Neill 1988: 449)
Granted, the language of rights does not fully cover the duties and responsibilities
significant adults such as parents and teachers have towards children within their
care. However, to replace, for the children themselves, the concept of rights with
obligations instead is to possibly take away those decision-making entitlements that
I have been advocating throughout this book. To say that children have rights to be
heard with respect to their education has strong political, legal and moral force.
This chapter has concerned itself with the theme of governance in schools and
colleges. I have taken the view that a democratic socialist perspective on education
needs to embrace the democratic governance of education through local stakeholder
accountability. This is to ensure that local voices from across the educational com-
munity (including the students themselves) are heard when decisions are made on
how schools and colleges are run. Also, stakeholder control of education is more
likely to create education systems that are diverse in scope and responsive to those
groups they affect. Democratic governance of schools and colleges also expands the
concept of citizenship education to include whole organisations.
References
EUR-Lex. (2019). Glossaries of summaries: Subsidiarity [online]. Available at: https://eur-lex.
europa.eu/summary/glossary/subsidiarity.html. Accessed January 17, 2019.
Gandin, L. A., & Apple, M. (2002). Chellenging neo-liberalism, building democracy: Creating the
Citizen School in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Journal of Educational Policy, 17(2), 259–279.
Heilbronn, R., Doddington, C., & Higham, R. (2018). Editors: the book, the conference and fighting
back. In R. Heilbronn, C. Doddington, & R. Higham (Eds.), Dewey and education in the 21st
century: Fighting back. Bingley: Emerald Publishing.
References 47
Polity Press.
Polity Press.
Hopkins, N. (2014a). Citizenship and democracy in further and adult education. Dordrecht:
Springer.
Hopkins, N. (2014b). The democratic curriculum: Concept and practice. Journal of Philosophy of
Education, 48(3), 416–427.
O’Neill, O. (1988). Children’s rights and children’s lives. Ethics, 98(3), 445–463.
Osler, A., & Starkey, H. (2005). Changing citizenship: Democracy and inclusion in education.
Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Unicef. (2019a). United Nations convention on the rights of the child [online]. Available at: http://
www.unicef.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/UNCRC_united_nations_convention_on_the_
rights_of_the_child.pdf. Accessed January 18, 2019.
Unicef. 2019b. Rights respecting school award [online]. Available at: https://www.unicef.org.uk/
rights-respecting-schools/. Accessed January 18, 2019.
Conclusion
This is a small book and my aim was to introduce and explore a group of issues
concerning contemporary democratic socialism and its potential influence on
twenty-first century state education systems. Inevitably, in a book of this scale with
a focus on a theoretically vast subject, there are themes or aspects which I haven’t
addressed within these covers. My hope is that the previous chapters have done
some justice, at least, to those themes that I have chosen to discuss.
As I said in Chap. 1, many educational systems over the past few decades have
adopted a neoliberal approach to the aims and function of state education. Since the
recession of 2008, however, that outlook has looked increasingly precarious in
relation to public services generally. In the words of Paul Mason:
[T]hrough austerity programmes, [the governments of major economies] transferred the
pain away from people who’d invested money stupidly, punishing instead welfare recipi-
ents, public sector workers, pensioners and, above all, future generations. In the worst-hit
countries, the pension system has been destroyed, the retirement age is being hiked so that
those currently leaving university will retire at seventy, and education is being privatized so
that graduates will face a lifetime of high debt. (Mason 2015: 34–35)
Such a set of circumstances is not sustainable over the medium to long term. The
question is whether there is an alternative. I believe the work of Bobbio, Honneth
and Mouffe offer such an alternative through their reinterpretation of democratic
socialism for the twenty-first century. What each of these authors articulate, albeit
with different perspectives and aims, is the idea that socialism needs to engage with
the diversity that democracy and liberalism provide and facilitate in order to remain
a valid and relevant ideology for contemporary times. All three authors also explore
the widening effects of globalisation and how this influences our notions of the
collective in terms of the local, national and international. For democratic socialism
to survive and thrive it needs to provide explanations that go beyond the purely
economic and embrace the cultural dimensions of people’s identity and sense of
purpose.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18937-2
50 Conclusion
My intention in this book has been to explore how contemporary versions of

democratic socialism can relate and inform state education systems. As well as
Bobbio, Honneth and Mouffe, I have also made frequent reference to Dewey and
Hirst—Dewey because of his major contribution to philosophy of education gen-
erally and ideas on democracy and education specifically; Hirst, due to his
important ideas on associative democracy and how this connects with democratic
socialist forms of participation, particularly at the local community level. I have
decided to address the curriculum, pedagogy and governance in turn and weigh the
possibilities of democratic socialist interpretations of each. I have argued that the
curriculum, for it to have democratic socialist elements, needs to be genuinely
inclusive, incorporating academic and vocational aspects in a common curriculum
that is an entitlement for all (as articulated by Fielding 2007) within the bounds of
equality of treatment. Construction of such a curriculum should model democratic
culture by including, where practical and feasible, the stakeholders who have a
vested collective interest in what is learnt and when. If the curriculum aspires to be
democratic in its formulation, then citizenship ideally plays an integral part
throughout. Students, as key stakeholders, learn the attitudes and skills necessary
for Dewey’s ‘mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience’
(Dewey 2007: 68).
I have envisaged a democratic socialist pedagogy to support the notion of
learning as a joint endeavor towards the acquisition of knowledge and under-
standing. State education is primarily a collective enterprise—it takes place in
classrooms where speech is the primary medium. With this in mind, dialogical
learning offers excellent opportunities for students and teachers to use the medium
of speech to work together through debate, investigation and research. This form of
pedagogy values the special attributes and responsibilities of the teacher but, when
done well, begins to diminish the hierarchies within the classroom. Over time,
dialogical learning can, potentially, develop the roles of ‘teacher-student’ and
‘student-teacher’ as outlined by Freire.
Finally, I have made a case for a more democratic form of governance regarding
how state schools and colleges are run. The idea of stakeholders also plays a key part
here. Educational institutions ought to reflect the communities in which they serve.
A democratic socialist outlook, in my view, should embrace the idea of subsidiarity
—where possible, power should be devolved to the lowest level manageable. This
will allow schools and colleges to reflect the diversity of their communities in ways
similar to that described by Hirst in his depiction of associative public services.
There is, however, a potential tension between diversity and equality for democratic
socialists to discuss when services are devolved and deregulated to local bodies—I
have offered subsidiarity as a means of addressing these concerns.
This book is intended to continue and enhance the debate democratic socialism
has had with education for at least the last one hundred and fifty years. In that time,
the educational landscape has, paradoxically, changed radically in some respects
and, in others, remained remarkably the same. It is my belief that democratic
socialism still has something to say to those concerned with contemporary edu-
cation and the issues that it faces going forward.
References 51
References
Fielding, M. (2007). On the necessity of radical state education: Democracy and the common
school. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 41(4), 539–557.
Mason, P. (2015). Postcapitalism: A guide to our future. London: Penguin.

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SPRINGER BRIEFS IN EDUC ATION

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/8914

ISSN 2211-1921 ISSN 2211-193X (electronic)

O! father and mother, if buds are nipp’d

How shall the summer arise in joy,

William Blake, from ‘The Schoolboy’,

Hertfordshire, UK Neil Hopkins

Gramsci in relation to contemporary ‘western’ democracies. His books include

In Chap. 2, the thinkers I have chosen to highlight (Mouffe, Bobbio and

Note on the Use of ‘Equality’

Bobbio, N. (2006). Liberalism and democracy. London: Verso.

1 Contemporary Education and Education Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Keywords Neoliberal · Consumerist · State · Education · Democratic

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 1

Alongside this trend towards ‘performativity’ (for institutions as a whole as well

to measure quantitatively the increased confidence or assertiveness a student might

education? Each of these questions provokes significant queries or challenges from

There is something functional or instrumental in this approach. As I stated earlier in

As well as the issue with individualism, citizenship education in some educational

Ball, S. J. (2013). Foucault, power, and education. Abingdon: Routledge.

Keywords Democratic · Socialist · Liberalism · Contemporary · Community

It is not my intention in this chapter to recapitulate a history of socialism in educa-

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 9

As soon as social conditions were radically changed by technological advance, structural

The sophistication of modern advertising, technology and communication has cre-

Is socialism thus antithetical to democracy? Is there something inherent in socialism

Democratic socialism’s concern with the collective can be of potential advantage

Keywords Curriculum · Democratic · Socialist · Common · Citizenship

Because international achievement surveys tend to focus on reading, mathematics

So what could a democratic socialist curriculum look like? Is it credible to even

an experiment are easy to identify—the process allows stakeholders to voice their

Alongside the communal or associational aspects of Dewey cited by Honneth

Kerschensteiner was influential in the highly-respected German apprenticeship

The learning involved is collaborative—as well as integrating different aspects of a

opportunities that are potentially on offer (again, in order to facilitate equality of

The success of a curriculum should not be predicated on the results of a few

A democratic socialist curriculum should see citizenship as integral to all learning if

Globalisation is not just an economic phenomenon—social media and other techno-

Keywords Democratic · Socialist · Pedagogy · Socratic · Dialogical

Just as it might sound counter-intuitive to discuss the idea of a democratic socialist

It must be acknowledged that Freire’s concepts concerning pedagogy were formu-

What this summary of dialogical teaching and learning has is an emphasis on

The reasoning is clear. According to Mouffe, contemporary liberal democratic soci-

Alexander, R. (2001). Culture and pedagogy. Oxford: Blackwell.

Keywords Democratic · Socialist · Associationalism · Stakeholder · Governance

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 41

ability. In Honneth’s words, ‘socialism must remain rooted in geographical spaces

Citizenship becomes part of a ‘whole organisational approach’ in terms of discussing

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 49

My intention in this book has been to explore how contemporary versions of

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