The fact of religious pluralism is one of the most challenging questions for contemporary liberal democracies. Political theorists variously argue that religious belief and practice can be a support for prosocial morality, can cause social division, may prevent citizens from adopting important civic norms, or should simply be an area of civic competence. All of these positions carry significant consequences for democratic education. This chapter surveys a range of positions present in political theory and democratic education literature, drawing on historical and contemporary examples from Western democracies, particularly the American context. The chapter concludes by exploring the possibility that modern liberal democratic regimes are properly considered religious themselves, and by considering the implications of this notion for debates regarding democratic education.

Democratic education is central to the functioning and flourishing of modern multicultural democracies, and yet it is subject to increasing public controversy and political pressure. Waning public trust in government institutions, sustained attacks on democratic values and customs from populist politicians and organizations, political sectarianism, and increasing trends toward privatization and chartering in the educational landscape have placed immense strain on the existing structures of public education and generally worked to undermine public confidence in democratic education. In light of these developments, it seems to us to be of central importance to return to the essential concepts, theories and values of democratic education, both as a social ideal and a political institution. This Handbook aims to offer an expansive view of the formation of individuals for democratic life and includes a diversity of theoretical traditions, topics, and thinkers that are relevant to the theory and practice of democratic education.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to far-reaching challenges in the field of (democratic) education. This chapter focuses on two aspects. First, as a measure to contain the spread of the coronavirus, schools in many countries were closed for extended periods of time. In this chapter, school closures are discussed as an issue of educational justice, with particular attention to the problem of an education for democratic participation. Second, the pandemic has raised questions of democratic legitimacy: The political measures taken to combat the virus were seen as illegitimate by parts of the population. In this context, there is disagreement about the basic facts regarding the virus and the response to it. The chapter discusses how teachers should deal with this kind of disagreement, in the classroom.

When teachers address controversial issues with their students in class, parents, society, and the teaching profession often expect them to adopt a neutral or impartial pedagogical stance. However, scholars have expressed doubts about whether this duty of impartiality is realistic and questioned whether it is educationally desirable. This chapter defends the duty of impartiality by arguing that the key reservations voiced against it in the academic literature are based on different misconceptions about impartial teaching and teacher neutrality: about the meaning of “controversial issue,” about the educational value of being flexible about neutrality in teaching situations, and about what constitutes a reasonable standard of impartiality. Drawing on the legal concept of evenhandedness, the chapter concludes by putting forward an alternative standard of teacher impartiality that walks the line between the inevitably value-laden nature of teaching and the expectation that teachers exercise their authority in a reasonable and responsible way.

Both democratic education and moral education have significant formative components. That is to say, educators in both domains are concerned not only with imparting knowledge and understanding and equipping pupils with skills and competences, but also with cultivating dispositions and attitudes. A central aim of democratic education is to dispose children toward democracy and a central aim of moral education is to make children moral. My particular interest in this chapter is in how we should understand the relationship between these two formative projects. Is the cultivation of democratic dispositions and attitudes an exercise in moral formation? Are democratic educators, to that extent at least, also moral educators?

One of the most fundamental challenges to democratic education is the “epistocratic” challenge. According to proponents of epistocracy, the ordinary citizenry is too stupid, irrational, and demotivated to vote intelligently and better-quality government would result if the franchise were restricted to a small elite of the best informed, most rational, and best-motivated citizens. If correct, epistocracy would imply that many of the ideals of democratic education are misplaced and that the educational practice of preparing all citizens to vote would be pointless. In this chapter, I review the theory of epistocracy as it is presented in the work of historical and contemporary philosophers from Plato and John Stuart Mill to Bryan Caplan and – most notably – Jason Brennan. I also discuss the implications of epistocracy for democratic education. I hold that, even if Brennan is right that the franchise should be restricted to a small cognitive elite, the question of how one should educate that elite becomes even more important. In the final analysis, I hold that Brennan’s scheme for ensuring that the cognitive elite is representative of society will require a broadening of political education opportunities that will result in a reintroduction of a democratic form of education through the epistocratic back door.

In this chapter, I analyze the moral transformation of Derek Black in order to acquire insights into the capacities exercised by his friends in helping him overcome his racist ideology – capacities that democratic education should foster in students. Black grew up in the white nationalist movement, but then later repudiated it after college, citing the influence of close friends as a major factor. Analysis of this case suggests that Black’s college friends possessed at least two major sets of capacities, the first concerning friendship and the other regarding the promotion of truth and justice. Efforts aimed at democratic education that aspire to address racism would do well to incorporate the development of these two capacities among their objectives.

Encoding models of neuroimaging data combine assumptions about underlying neural processes with knowledge of the task and the type of neuroimaging technique being used to produce equations that predict values of the dependent variable that is measured at each recording site (e.g., the fMRI BOLD response). Voxel-based encoding models include an encoding model that predicts how every hypothesized neural population responds to each stimulus, and a measurement model that first transforms neural population responses into aggregate neural activity and then into values of the dependent variable being measured. Encoding models can be inverted to produce decoding schemes that use the observed data to make predictions about what stimulus was presented on each trial, thereby allowing unique tests of a mathematical model. Representational similarity analysis is a multivariate method that provides unique tests of a model by comparing its predicted similarity structures to similarity structures extracted from neuroimaging data. Model-based fMRI is a set of methods that were developed to test the validity of purely behavioral computational models against fMRI data. Collectively, encoding methods provide useful and powerful new tests of models – even purely cognitive models – that would have been considered fantasy just a few decades ago.

Approximate Bayesian analysis is presented as the solution for complex computational models where no explicit maximum likelihood estimation is possible. The activation-suppression racemodel (ASR), which does have a likelihood amenable to Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, is used to demonstrate the accuracy with which parameters can be estimated with the approximate Bayesian methods.

“Populism” is a much used but still rather vague term employed mostly in political but also in educational discourses. To understand what is meant by “populist challenges to democratic education” this chapter first analyzes the historical relations between liberal democracy and public education. I then refer to a discussion of “populism” using a social-political definition of the term that was coined by American sociologist Edward Shils. This is followed by a discussion of populist changes in public discourse and education created by new media. My main focus is on the populist challenges to systems education systems and the challenges of populist positions in education itself. Finally, I will suggest the perspectives that remain for democratic education.

Cognitive diagnosis models originated in the field of educational measurement as a psychometric tool to provide finer-grained information more suitable for formative assessment. Typically,but not necessarily, these models classify examinees as masters or nonmasters on a set of binary attributes. This chapter aims to provide a general overview of the original models and the extensions, and methodological developments, that have been made in the last decade. The main topics covered in this chapter include model estimation, Q-matrix specification, model fit evaluation, and procedures for gathering validity and reliability evidences. The chapter ends with a discussion of future trends in the field.

In this chapter, I claim that the central question of global justice in education is which – if any – educational inequalities between citizens and non-citizens in a democratic state are morally legitimate, and which inequalities between them contradict the normative foundations of democratic education. By trying to find a convincing answer to this question, I first briefly recapitulate the controversy between the cosmopolitan and the state-nationalist approaches to it. Then I elaborate on the question, whether special obligations to a privileged treatment of cocitizens over noncitizens apply to institutionalized education. I make the claim that the answer to that question depends on how we understand education – whether we spell it out as a traditionalist-authoritarian, or as democratic social practice. I argue that democratic education necessarily implies moral universalism. It requires not only the recognition of the equal moral status of all students, but also the inclusion of their individual experiences, worldviews, and ideals, regardless of their nationalities, or ethnic or cultural backgrounds, in an open and “diversity-friendly” ethical discourse that should be established in every classroom. I conclude that since democratic education is necessarily cosmopolitan in its essence, democratic educational institutions should be supranationally orientated.

Although it is widely thought that more education is a reliable remedy for democratic ills, I argue that it is not always so. The problem arises because education plays a role in shaping what I call people’s trust networks: the set of sources of information they regard as trustworthy. A democratic society can falter if its citizens live on isolated epistemic islands (i.e., occupy nonoverlapping trust networks). If the educational system serves to reinforce one kind of trust network rather than help people build bridges between trust networks, education will rearrange the population of these islands but potentially make the underlying topography less democracy-friendly. The chapter makes this case and then looks at some potential educational remedies to the problem it outlines.

Response inhibition refers to an organism’s ability to suppress unwanted impulses, or actions and responses that are no longer required or have become inappropriate.In the stop-signal task, participants perform a response time task (go task), and occasionally, the go stimulus is followed by a stop signal after a variable delay, indicating subjects to withhold their response (stop task). The main interest of modeling is in estimating the unobservable latency of the stopping process as a characterization of the response inhibition mechanism. Here we analyze and compare the underlying assumptions of different models, including parametric and non-parametric versions of the race model. New model classes based on the concept of copulas are introduced and a number of unsolved problems facing all existing models are pointed out.