People should laud the Partnership for 21st Century Skills for highlighting civic literacy. Today, people have a much more robust understanding of what constitutes high-quality democratic education than they have ever had in the past, and this framework represents an opportunity for improving the civic and political literacy of the nation's youth.…

Creation of the Instituts Universitaires de Formation des Maitres (IUFMs) testifies to the ambition to train new teachers who are in a better position to respond to the challenges of democratisation of secondary education. It is an issue of adding fresh impetus while taking into account a number of the consequences. However, if by and large, the…

A day-long symposium in June 2007 by the Center for Teaching through Children's Books and the National College of Education Office of Partnerships at National-Louis University (NLU) convened for the purpose of immersing the professional community in the goal of teaching for social justice through literature for children and adolescents. The…

This article identifies different types of religious education, as different countries and cultures provide different rationales for the appearance or non-appearance of religion in the curriculum of their public schools. It examines the nature of indoctrination and four principal ways in which indoctrination operates. The possibility of secular…

Leading researchers describe the field of special education as sharply divided between two different theories of disability. In this article Scot Danforth takes as his project addressing that division from the perspective of a Deweyan philosophy of the education of students with intellectual disabilities. In 1922, John Dewey authored two articles…

Using micro-level public opinion data from the "Pew Global Attitudes Project" 2005, this study investigates the effect of educational attainment and income on support for democracy in five predominantly Muslim countries: Indonesia, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Turkey. Holding all else constant and compared to not finishing primary…

In this paper I chart the origins of modern day "biopedagogy" through an analysis of two historically specific figures of abnormality: the nervous child and the degenerate. These two figures form the positive (hygienic) and negative (eugenic) surfaces of biopolitics in education, sustained and articulated through the category of immunization. By…

In November of 2001, less than two months after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Nebraska's state board of education approved a patriotism bill specifying content for the high school social studies curriculum in accordance with the state's 1949 statute--the Nebraska Americanism law. Nebraska was not alone. Within a few months, more…

A dominant conjecture underlying the literature about leadership for social justice brought up in Jean-Marie, Normore, and Brooks' (2009) paper suggests that leadership preparation programs (LPPs) need to prepare school leaders to promote a broader and deeper understanding of social justice, democracy, and equity, as well as to struggle with forms…

As democratic citizenship education gains importance worldwide, one wonders whether common civic education practices in the United States, such as mock elections, are adequate models for other countries, or whether they fall short of realizing the goal of promoting democracy in different regions and cultures. Despite various controversies, one…

Using a case study approach, the authors examine the democratic and civic engagement learning outcomes of a campus protest. The conceptual framework is built on the ideas outlined in "Learning Reconsidered" (Keeling 2004) and modeled in its pragmatic follow-up, "Learning Reconsidered 2" (Keeling 2006). Results suggest student and campus…

This article presents the authors' response to the commentaries on their article. In reply to Julie Allan they contend that it is not so much the exposure to democratic ideas that they are against as much as the argument that democratic practices ought to be a central element in schooling. Moreover, they do not argue that introducing democratic…

This article presents the author's response to "Tocqueville on Democracy and Inclusive Education: A More Ardent and Enduring Love of Equality than of Liberty" written by Steven Connolley and Rune Sarromaa Hausstatter. Connolley and Hausstatter frame their critique of inclusive education and its relationship to democracy, liberty and equality using…

In this essay, Dennis Carlson explores some of the implications of Derrida's "hospitality politics" in helping articulate a progressive response to a rightist cultural politics in the United States of policing national, linguistic, and other borders. He applies the concept of hospitality politics to a critical analysis of the social construction…

The contribution of philosophical ethics to the development of a just conception of education becomes increasingly complex under modern conditions of democratic pluralism. This is because the justification of moral policies for education faces the skeptical challenge of showing how the substantive moral principles upon which a policy rests do not…