Publications on citizenship, democracy, and disability tend to focus almost exclusively on the labor market, the political system, as well as assistance and support, and not on education. The same holds true in reverse. Democracy in relation to education and schooling is often discussed in a restricted manner. Disability is not treated with specific interest in this context. This chapter addresses this gap with a specific focus on John Dewey’s theoretical considerations. It first outline key aspects of Dewey’s theoretical framework before turning to the issue of disability and the specific risks it entails for democratic life in general and democratic participation in particular. It then explores the question of whether Dewey’s pragmatist approach can be used to make progress for disabled people’s education. It particularly discusses tensions and dilemmas that disability poses for democratic and inclusive education.

In Emile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau describes the education of a fictional student who follows his interests and discovers facts by problem-solving. Rousseau’s educational philosophy was embraced by child-centered progressives committed to advancing a distinctively democratic conception of education. They believed that Rousseau outlined principles for forming autonomous and independent citizens – precisely the kind of citizens ready to meet the demands of democratic self-government. In other works, however, Rousseau calls for a system of public schooling that forms patriots. He writes that education “must give souls the national form, and so direct their tastes and opinions that they will be patriotic by inclination, passion, necessity.” Can this authoritarian approach to education be reconciled with the laissez-faire principles of Emile? Should either of these educational visions be called democratic? This chapter offers answers to those questions and argues that, ultimately, both approaches aim to improve how citizens relate to one another.

In many policies for and practices of education for democratic citizenship it is assumed that the democratic community is a community of shared democratic values. On such an account, education has the task of including “newcomers” into this community by ensuring that they adopt and internalize the common democratic values. In this chapter, I discuss the work of two authors, Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière, who both have challenged this understanding of democracy and the democratic community. Both authors highlight the contested (Mouffe) and sporadic (Rancière) nature of the democratic community, thus bringing into view the work done to constitute the political community. They also highlight that this constitution does not happen before democratic politics can take place, but actually is an essential part of it. I provide a reconstruction of Mouffe’s and Rancière’s ideas and explore the implications for education.

Higher education in the United States advanced democracy during the much of the twentieth century by fostering social mobility and by deepening students’ understanding of democratic citizenship, as well as strengthening their capacity to participate in a democratic polity. Concurrently, higher education enjoyed widespread esteem in the United States, while colleges and universities became highly stratified by financial capital, or endowment size, which was closely correlated with prestige. Yet, this financial stratification widened into a yawning "wealth gap" that precipitated a decline in public esteem near the end of the twentieth century. This historical chapter explains these developments and argues that wealth concentration in higher education and wealth inequality in the US population are interrelated, and this interrelationship weakens social mobility and democracy in the twenty-first century.

In this chapter, I turn to an unlikely source for democratic inspiration: Plato’s Republic. I argue that, understood correctly, Plato’s Republic provides insights into what a flourishing democracy looks like and how education can help produce such a democracy. While Plato does not provide an explicit defense of democracy, his criticism of corrupt democracies in Book VIII and his often-ignored advocacy of egalitarian communities in Books II, III, and IV offer contemporary educators insights into a mode of education that could strengthen contemporary democracies. Once this interpretation is in place, I will discuss the ways contemporary democratic educators might use Plato’s ideas to support students in their development as democratic citizens.

This chapter explores the duties of college teachers to teach and mentor undergraduate students. It argues that teaching and mentoring are currently suboptimal because college teachers are not trained to do either, and have little incentive to improve. The result is that students emerge from college suboptimally prepared both to participate productively in the economy and to participate reasonably and responsibly as democratic citizens. This is a cost to them, and to the public good. Reform is needed. But the second half of the chapter argues that, even absent reform, and even absent improvement from their colleagues, individual college teachers have stringent responsibilities to improve their own teaching and mentoring.

Statistical decision theory provides a general account of perceptual decision-making in a wide variety of tasks that range from simple target detection to complete identification. The fundamental assumptions are that all sensory representations are inherently noisy and that every behavior, no matter how trivial, requires a decision. Statistical decision theory is referred to as signal detection theory (SDT) when the stimuli vary on only one sensory dimension, and general recognition theory (GRT) when the stimuli vary on two or more sensory dimensions. SDT and GRT are both reviewed. The SDT review focuses on applications to the two-stimulus identification task and multiple-look experiments, and on response-time extensions of the model (e.g., the drift-diffusion model). The GRT review focuses on applications to identification and categorization experiments, and in the former case, especially on experiments in which the stimuli are constructed by factorially combining several levels of two stimulus dimensions. The basic GRT properties of perceptual separability, decisional separability, perceptual independence, and holism are described. In the case of identification experiments, the summary statistics method for testing perceptual interactions is described, and so is the model-fitting approach. Response time and neuroscience extensions of GRT are reviewed.

Whether patriotism has a valuable part to play in the educational system of a democratic society is now a highly contentious matter. This chapter argues that it does, principally because such a society is a kind of cooperative practice that requires its members to enact, enforce, and – in most cases – obey the laws that govern their self-governing polity. Democracies rely on rules, and especially the rule of law, to provide the reasonably clear expectations necessary to coordinate public activities and to overcome collective-action problems. By encouraging citizens to set aside personal advantage and play a cooperative part in democratic life, patriotism contributes to the public spirit essential to democracy. For that reason, promoting patriotic attitudes is a worthy aim of democratic education.

This chapter addresses Aristotle’s conception of the civic purposes of education, how the education he proposes would serve those purposes, his stance toward democracy and democratic education, and the compatibility of the education he proposes with a democratic society and system of government. It argues that his educational proposals aim to facilitate a partnership of all citizens in living the best kind of life and are thus focused on cultivating moral and intellectual virtues and educating diverse children together with a view to nurturing civic friendship. It concludes that Aristotle defends forms of shared governance in the common interest that would qualify as limited forms of democracy and that the education he proposes is recognizably democratic. Despite their elitist limitations, his works offer significant resources for understanding democracy and democratic education, most notably his conception of the role of common schools in promoting civic friendship and shared governance.

Vision science combines ideas from physics, biology, and psychology. The language and ideas of mathematics help scientists communicate and provide an initial framing for understanding the visual system. Mathematics combined with computational modeling adds important realism to the formulations. Together, mathematics and computational tools provide a realistic estimate of the initial signals the brain analyzes to render visual judgments (e.g., motion, depth, and color). This chapter first traces calculations from the representation of the light signal, to how that signal is transformed by the lens to the retinal image, and then how the image is converted into cone photoreceptor excitations. The central steps in the initial encoding rely heavily on linear systems theory and the mathematics of signal-dependent noise. We then describe computational methods that add more realism to the description of how light is encoded by cone excitations. Finally, we describe the mathematical formulation of the ideal observer using all the encoded information to perform a visual discrimination task, and Bayesian methods that combine prior information and sensory data to estimate the light input. These tools help us reason about the information present in the neural representation, what information is lost, and types of neural circuits for extracting information.

Education professionals regularly confront challenging ethical questions in the course of their work. Recently, education scholars and practitioners have embraced normative case studies – realistic accounts of the complex ethical dilemmas of educational practice and policy – as a key tool both for theorizing the ethical dimension of education work and for supporting the development of education professionals as moral agents. This chapter zooms in on the second, pedagogical aim of the normative case study and makes the case that this approach to professional education is best understood as a form of democratic education. Through careful facilitation and a structured discussion protocol, the normative case study approach: (i) allows participants to discuss ethical dilemmas that arise in their work in relations of democratic equality, fostering their development of moral sensitivity and moral agency; and (ii) supports participants in learning to sustain dialogue across reasonable disagreement.

This chapter reviews contemporary discussions in political philosophy and educational theory about the character of children’s rights and their importance to debates about the character of democratic education. It focuses on five areas in which there is contestation about the interpretation and implications of children’s rights: (i) issues about the appropriate content of democratic education; (ii) issues about children’s rights of access to education and the degree to which educational inequalities are acceptable; (ii) issues about the kind of control parents should exercise over the kind of education children receive; (iv) issues about the degree to which schools are themselves sites of democratic activity; and (v) issues about how educational institutions should be designed or reformed in order respect the educational rights of children.

Within liberal societies, citizens endorse a range of religious, moral, and philosophical views (e.g., Buddhism and utilitarianism). Despite this doctrinal diversity, John Rawls’ account of political liberalism holds that there is a form of democratic equality that is realizable by all citizens. Citizens can be equally politically autonomous if they enjoy equal political power and justify the exercise of that power with public reasons. A political liberal education for democratic citizenship would teach students how to participate in political decision-making, and how to use public reasons when helping to decide fundamental political questions. Political liberalism also can accommodate diverse educational options for families, but this accommodation is limited by political liberalism’s concern for the future political autonomy of students. This concern distinguishes the political liberal account from the “convergence” account of public justification. Unlike political liberalism, the convergence account fails to respect adequately the future political autonomy of students.

The idea that memory behavior relies on a gradually changing internal state has a long history in mathematical psychology. This chapter traces this line of thought from statistical learning theory in the 1950s, through distributed memory models in the latter part of the twentieth century and early part of the twenty-first century through to modern models based on a scale-invariant temporal history. We discuss the neural phenomena consistent with this form of representation and sketch the kinds of cognitive models that can be constructed and connections with formal models of various memory tasks.

This chapter illuminates the irreplaceable value of poetry in cultivating a cosmopolitan and democratic imagination. The authors contend that poetry evokes unanticipated or overlooked ideas, emotions, and possibilities; it provokes people to look beyond their settled views. Poetry uniquely fuels their ability to engage new thoughts, values, and practices. This ever-renewing quality of mind can, in turn, help people reimagine the nature and value of education continuously as circumstances and the needs they call out evolve. The authors suggest that these imaginative capacities are significant given the cosmopolitan and democratic challenges, and prospects, generated by an intensifying process of political, economic, and cultural globalization. The chapter features a reading of Walt Whitman’s well-known epic poem, “Song of Myself” (first published in 1855), which the authors show both articulates and enacts the most profound promise in a cosmopolitan and democratic imagination.

Rabindranath Tagore was a progressive educational philosopher whose ideas were far ahead of his time but are most relevant to the contemporary challenges of today. The first Asian Nobel Laureate, his cosmopolitan, democratic ideas, and experiments in education were pioneering. But he was primarily known as a literary genius, and his image as a mystical poet from the East obscured his educational vision and philosophy in the West. The purpose of education was to him the development of critical consciousness and of freedom not only from poverty and oppression, but of the mind from ignorance and prejudice. Strongly against British colonial rule he, nevertheless, loved English literature and music and admired Western science and technological developments. Although proud of India’s glorious past, he was strongly opposed to chauvinistic nationalism and imagined a world of unity of all peoples, a synthesis of the East and West. He built a university which would represent his international liberalism.