Item 1: Reformers must prioritize reform of attitudes over changing policies.
The main point of this item is that reformers frequently get caught up in particular policy goals, and don’t do enough to change the way that the public thinks about an issue. That makes the policy successes vulnerable if the public officials who enacted them change their minds or are no longer in office to defend them. I’m not dismissing the importance of policy changes and successes. I’m just saying that reformers need to keep one eye on the long game and build up support.
For example, when Ed Rendell was governor of Pennsylvania, he did a lot to increase funding for education. That was an important policy success. But no one really did much to make the Pennsylvania voters share that commitment to education, or to change the attitudes that a lot of voters in central and upstate Pennsylvania have toward Philadelphia. So as soon as Rendell was out of office, his successor undid a lot of those policy moves. If it’s possible, that’s something that reformers should try to avoid.
On one hand it would seem pretty easy for a school to fulfill this element of the framework. After all, schools don’t really spend a lot of time lobbying politicians to pass specific laws. They spend time teaching students, and in teaching students, schools influence their attitudes. But what attitudes are they trying to instill?
In The Public and Its Problems, Dewey argues that the “essential problem is that of transforming the action of [individual] hands so that it will be animated by regard for social ends†(PP 286, emphasis added). This does not mean that the individual sacrifices himself or herself for the group. It means that the individual’s actions always take place in a social context, and individuals should consider how their choices will affect that context. If I were to spend all of my time on this blog insulting everybody who isn’t exactly like me, then sure, I would be promoting my individuality. In the process I would destroy the audience which is the point of posting to a blog and not just ranting at my wall. So we definitely want to encourage students to look beyond themselves, and the staff at a democratic reform school should be doing the same thing. As a teacher, I should be asking myself if the way I teach a class makes it harder or easier for my colleagues to achieve their goals. I should be asking if the policies and structures of the school promote the building of a community that supports its members. And I should be doing that in a public way that lets my students see that this is an example of citizenship.
There’s another important element of a robust democracy. If we are all going to be inquiring citizens, we need a common framework to share our claims, proposals, and evidence. This is why Dewey and other pragmatist philosophers put so much emphasis on empiricism over faith or rationalism. (By rationalism I mean the philosophical idea that I can figure out important truths just by using logic and reason without testing those conclusions by investigating the sensible world.) A democratic school should be promoting this empiricist attitude.
Again, I am not saying here that schools should force one particular attitude or point of view on all of their students. We all come to the world with a unique perspective that is the result of our own lived experience. Indeed, one of the virtues of democracy is pluralism – the idea that there can be more than one valid way to look at a situation, and that we can benefit from sharing these different perspectives. But it should be possible to broaden one’s perspective through the checks and balances of a community of inquirers, inquirers who can speak in a common language with one another because they can appeal to a collection of empirical investigations that are shared throughout the community. Rather than use a priori reasoning or religious tradition to discover an ideal structure and then try to graft it onto the actual world, we should turn to the actual sensible world to discover what structure it will best accommodate.
There are people who are going to have a problem with that idea. Frankly, there are a lot of Americans who do not embrace empiricism or pluralism. If a school explicitly and consistently promotes and exhibits these traits, there are going to be people who accuse the school of indoctrinating students or violating parents’ rights to instruct their children. Now, I don’t think that you can communicate anything without taking a stance on the world, and I don’t think a community can exist without norms to guide it. If a student or a student’s family have beliefs that somehow conflict with the values of democracy, then a democratic reform school is not going to be able to accommodate them. So the staff of such a school needs to be prepared to defend this approach and speak to the larger community to build support. Already it should be obvious that being part of a democratic reform school is going to require a commitment beyond the commitments educators make during and after school hours. The benefit is that in the process, everyone involved is building a more robust kind of citizenship that has its own rewards.