Education and democratic public sphere: a neglected chapter of the political philosophy

Abstract

The text discusses the relationship between education and democratic organization of the republican government. For the author, at least since Kant’s political philosophy classical theorists were convinced that a good education and a republican state order depend from and are complementary to one another. to educate citizens for freedom so that, as autonomous citizens, they can institutionalize a public education that enables their children to find the way for the political majority. But today we can see a divorce between the twin theories of democracy and education. Reasons that may have led to this split he finds in the combination, by elective affinities, between a truncated conception of democracy, which depends on traditional and even religious communities to reproduce the own ethical and cultural foundations, and a false normative conception of the neutrality of the state, conceiving teachers not as public servants serving a democratic state of law, but as parents servants. In contrast to the decoupling between the formation of the autonomous citizens and the self-government, between pedagogy and political theory, the author reconstructs the classical conception of a fundamental link between education and political freedom, between education and democracy. Far from advocating for a return to the traditional thought, the author draws attention to two major challenges pedagogy and democratic theory must confront together: the impact of the digital revolution on the public sphere and the growing cultural diversity of citizens, especially in Western democracies. Only so education can again be the place of learning democratic culture. (Editor’s abstract).