This chapter attempts to answer two questions. First, what does democratic education informed by critical theory minimally entail? Second, what does it take for a critical democratic education to succeed? The chapter argues that attention to local contexts is a necessary aspect for developing critical and democratic virtues. The chapter first sets the stage by offering a sketch of both democratic education and critical theory. The following section draws out a common occluding characteristic of both democratic education and critical education, namely, their preoccupation with national and global scopes. The next two sections draw on the work of Iris Murdoch and John McDowell to argue that cultivating moral attention to one’s local setting must be seen as an essential aspect of critical democratic education. The chapter concludes by offering brief educational applications and responses to objections related to objectivity and the threat of parochialism.

The current retributive system of school punishment conflicts with the aims of democratic education because it impedes the cultivation of essential democratic values and capabilities. To be legitimate, however, school punishment in democratic societies ought to align with, or at least not impede, the aims of democratic education. This suggests that punishment should be consistent with the communicative and inclusive nature of democracy and support the cultivation of essential democratic capabilities. Restorative justice provides such a model of school punishment by prioritizing communication and inclusion, facilitating the cultivation of democratic capabilities, and legitimizing punishment as a means of communicating remorse instead of inflicting retribution to wrongdoers. The authors argue that for school punishment to align with and support the aims of democratic education, it must shift from the retributive justice model currently employed in most schools to a restorative justice model.

This chapter explores the conceptual, educational and political challenges involved in articulating a postcolonial perspective on democratic education. It understands democracy as a universal aspiration, a critical practice with a deliberative range that accommodates particular, local contexts. Colonial rule has both provoked and rejected demands for self-determination, while rendering democracy difficult to establish in newly independent states after formal decolonization. Following a description of colonial education, a currently influential yet problematic approach to decolonial education is considered. While some sense might be made of the notions of postcolonial knowledge and epistemology, the decolonialist position – at its most extreme – is epistemologically unviable. The chapter ends by outlining a perspective on postcolonial democratic education as a form of liberal education, universal in some shared features, that needs to resist the universal presence of neoliberal capitalism as a recent form of coloniality that is universally inimical to both education and democracy.

Although learning was a key focus during the early years of mathematical psychology, the cognitive revolution of the 1960s caused the field to languish for several decades. Two breakthroughs in neuroscience resurrected the field. The first was the discovery of long-term potentiation and long-term depression, which served as promising models of learning at the cellular level. The second was the discovery that humans have multiple learning and memory systems that each require a qualitatively different kind of model. Currently, the field is well represented at all of Marr’s three levels of analysis. Descriptive and process models of human learning are dominated by two different, but converging, approaches – one rooted in Bayesian statistics and one based on popular machine-learning algorithms. Implementational models are in the form of neural networks that mimic known neuroanatomy and account for learning via biologically plausible models of synaptic plasticity. Models of all these types are reviewed, and advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches are considered.

What kind of characters might develop in a flourishing democratic culture? What citizen virtues are needed to safeguard democracy against its ever-present enemies? This chapter explores John Dewey’s answers to these questions and illuminates their bearing on his educational philosophy. It argues that Dewey is important not just because of his insights into “progressive” schooling, but also because of his affirming vision of the educative and enriching quality of democratic life. In our day, his conception of education for and by democracy can still serve as a vital antidote to democratic disenchantment.

In this chapter, Hannah Arendt is characterized as a “pedagogue of the public realm” and, at the same time, as an antipode to John Dewey and his ideas of democracy and education. Arendt’s understanding of the political sphere – the so-called “political” – is illuminated and questioned in its proximity to political thoughts of Jacques Rancière. The elementary political dimension of education is asserted in line with, or even despite, Arendt’s insights and skepticism.

Public education is crucial to the health of democracy. Recent educational initiatives in many countries, however, focus narrowly on science and technology, neglecting the arts and humanities. They also focus on internalization of information, rather than on the formation of the student’s critical and imaginative capacities. This chapter argues that such a narrow focus is dangerous for democracy’s future. Drawing on the ideas of Rabindranath Tagore, the chapter proposes a three‐part model for the development of young people’s capabilities through education, focusing on critical thinking, world citizenship, and imaginative understanding.

Debate and deliberation are two commonly promoted strategies for democratic education. Both strategies are designed to unearth different points of view and then engage in reason-giving and argumentation; in other words, they help students to recognize pluralism. When done well, both also model inquiry and deepen understanding about the issues being investigated. In this chapter, we discuss the theoretical justification for each and show how the adversarial aspect of debate engages a different set of democratic skills than the more collaborative approach of deliberation. These differences require teachers to make judgments about how best to use these strategies in the classroom. We conclude by addressing some critiques of these strategies and discuss how alternative discussion designs might overcome some of the limitations of deliberation and debate.

The work of Paulo Freire has had an enduring impact on the development of progressive, democratic pedagogies around the world. Freire’s ideas on democracy emerged from his experiences with impoverished communities in Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s. For Freire, democratic education is a part of the process of humanization: becoming more fully human through transformative, critical, dialogical reflection and action. From a Freirean perspective, democracy is not just a form of government but a mode of being: a distinctive approach to living, with others, in a world that is always dynamically in the making. Democratic life demands a willingness to live uncertainties and an acknowledgment of our incompleteness. Freire delineates a number of key democratic virtues, including humility, openness, tolerance, and a willingness to listen. He argues against both authoritarian and “anything goes” pedagogical orientations. This chapter discusses Freire’s views on democracy and education in the light of his wider ontological, epistemological, and ethical position, and considers the ongoing significance of his ideas in the twenty-first century.

In order for democratic deliberative interactions in educational settings to fruitfully occur, certain favorable conditions must obtain. In this chapter, I chiefly concern myself with one of these putative conditions, namely that of school integration, believed by many liberal scholars to be necessary for consensus-building and legitimate decision-making. I provide a critical assessment of the belief that integration is a necessary facilitative condition for democratic deliberation in the classroom. I demonstrate that liberal versions of democratic deliberation predicated on this condition are puzzlingly inattentive both to the inevitability of segregation, as well as the inequities occasioned by “school integration.” I then move to probe the possibilities for democratic education in the absence of integration. I argue that neither the possibilities for deliberation nor the cultivation of civic virtue turn on an environment being “integrated.” Indeed, some kinds of segregation may be more conducive to fostering both deliberation and civic virtue.

This chapter analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of democracies over nondemocracies when it comes to responding adequately to climate change in order to reflect on their implications for democratic education, understood as an ideal of education in which those educated come to a personal, informed awareness of the nature of political reality and a personal and informed understanding and assessment of the value of the two main components of the ideal of democracy: popular sovereignty and the recognition of human beings’ fundamental equality. The chapter offers three conclusions. First, we have reason to invest in democratic education – not just climate education. Second, radical (or agonistic) democratic education can be considered an important corrective and supplement to other approaches. Third, the primary value of democratic education, in the face of climate change, lies in responsibilizing students – fostering serious personal engagement with the issue.

The investigation of processes involved in merging information from different sensory modalities has become the subject of research in many areas, including anatomy, physiology, and behavioral sciences. This field of research termed "multisensory integration’’ is flourishing, crossing borders between psychology and neuroscience. The focus of this chapter is on measures of multisensory integration based on numerical data collected from single neurons and in behavioral paradigms:spike numbers, reaction time, frequency of correct or incorrect responses in detection, recognition, and discrimination tasks. Defining that somewhat fuzzy term, it has been observed that at least some kind of numerical measurement assessing the strength of crossmodal effects is required. On the empirical side, these measures typically serve to quantify effects of various covariates on multisensory integration like age, certain disorders, developmental conditions, training and rehabilitation, in addition to attention and learning. On the theoretical side, these measures often help to probe hypotheses about underlying integration mechanisms like optimality in combining information or inverse effectiveness, without necessarily subscribing to a specific model.