Supplement
for Fourth Class:
Copyright
© 2026 Bruce W. Hauptli
I.
Questions Last Time.
II. Insufficiently Clarified
Material:
We began first class discussion of “What Is Democracy?” with “citizens not subjects,” talk of rule of law as well as guardrails. Note that Franklin responded to a question outside the Continental Congress that they had come up with a plan for a democracy which would last “if we can keep it. Are the guardrails alone sufficient to sustain our democracy?
Because the answer here is clear “no,” I want to turn our attention to Gutmann’s presumption that we are dealing with a multicultural democracy where citizens disagree about “what is good” and “what is moral,” and to her view that we need to ensure that Democratic Values are taught if we are to maintain and develop our democracy:
95 The democratic purposes of primary schooling constrain as well as empower democratic communities, but not in the name of parental choice, liberal autonomy, or conservative virtue. The principles of nonrepression and nondiscrimination limit democratic authority in the name of democracy itself. A society is undemocratic—it cannot engage in conscious social reproduction—if it restricts rational deliberation or includes some educable citizens from an adequate education. Nonrepression and nondiscrimination are therefore intrinsic to the ideal of a democratic society, as parental choice, liberal autonomy, and conservative virtue are not.
95-96 We value democracy not primarily as a pure process that defines what is just, nor as a perfect process that guarantees justice (defined by some nonprocedural standard). Rather because it is the best way by which we can discover what a community values for itself and its children.
Gutmann wants to talk about how our democracy can be consciously social reproduced—hoe it can be restored, maintained, and continued into the future; and she believes democratic education is the key here:
58 …schools have a much greater capacity than most parents and voluntary associations…for teaching children to reason out loud about disagreements that arise in democratic politics and to understand the political morality appropriate for democracy.
She disagrees with those who hold a Family State theory who [23] “…expect to create a level of like-mindedness…among citizens that most of us expect to find only within families….The purpose of education [here] is to cultivate unity…by inculcating in them the desire to pursue the good life above all inferior ones.” She contends that even Plato’s Republic, for example, fails to provide a promising model for such states.
She disagrees with those who hold a State of Families theory because they [32-33] “…abdicate all educational authority to parents….
The “pluralism” commonly identified [here] is superficial because its internal variety serves as little more than an ornament for onlookers. Pluralism is an important political value insofar as social diversity enriches our lives by expanding our understanding of differing ways of life. To reap the benefits of social diversity, children must be exposed to ways of life different from their parents and—in the course of their exposure—must embrace certain values, such as mutual respect among persons, that make social diversity both possible and desirable.
She disagrees with those who hold a State of Individuals view who would limit teaching to values clarification (treating very moral opinion as equally worthy and encourage children in the false subjectivism). [37] She contends that “the same argument that holds against the family state holds against the state of individuals: being right is not a necessary or sufficient condition because parents and citizens have a legitimate interest (independent of their “rightness”) in passing some of their most salient values on to their children.” Going on to say in the next paragraph, “why must freedom be the sole end of education, given that most of us value things that conflict with freedom? We value, for example, the moral sensibility that enables us to discriminate between good and bad lives. A well-cultivated moral character constrains choice among lives at least as much as it expands choice.”
So, summing up the discussion of the other theories and transitioning to her discussion of the educational theory for a Democratic State, she maintains:
39 we disagree over the relative value of freedom and virtue, the nature of the good life, and the elements of moral character. But our desire to search for a more inclusive ground presupposes a common commitment that is, broadly speaking, political. We are committed to collectively re-creating the society that we share. Although we are not collectively committed to any particular set of educational aims, we are committed to arriving at an agreement on our educational aims (an agreement that could take the form of justifying a diverse set of educational aims and authorities).
First, who is included in her ‘we’? She wrote in 1987 and 1999, and I think she clearly believe it applies today—but is this true of all of us, most of us, a majority of us, …? The importance of this question needs to be emphasized, as is evidenced by the current situation in Florida. Of course, in February of 2023 any discussion of “states and education “is going to suggest a discussion of the situation in Florida.
44-45 Second, clearly the two Democratic [political] Values she emphasizes are non-repression and non-discrimination. They are key to democracy, and must be encouraged and taught in a democratic education, and they can encourage future citizens to develop the deliberative characteristic which is necessary for democratic citizenship.
Importantly, she responds to those who object to this sort of foundation for the educational system: [39] “The virtues and or character we are cultivating…are necessary to give children the chance collectively to shape their society. The kind of character you are asking us to cultivate would deprive children of that chance, the very chance that legitimates your on claim to educational authority.”
Her discussion in Chapter Two begins to discuss purposes of primary education and the elaborates on how the other theories don’t promote what is necessary if we are to provide a foundation for democracy. I won’t travel over this land a second time, but I didn’t get to properly discuss 64-70 Parental Choice:
Those who advocate for “parental choice” which allow the options of private education. While public schooling in the states is the norm, there have been serious inequities which have arisen in states, and notable failures in the education of students, and she will discuss these schools in Chapter 4. Here she discusses a new movement of parents advocating for public vouchers for private schools:
65-66 to the extent that advocates of voucher plans focus on the rights of individual parents to control the schooling of their children, they rest their defense on the fundamental premise of the state of families….More sophisticated voucher plans…make substantial concessions to the democratic purposes of primary education by conditioning certification of voucher school on their meeting a set of minimal standards.
Here there is a “mixed” control of the education, and some theorists champion the idea that allowing for a variety of “mixture” might foster diversity. Gutmann contends that:
70 The problem with voucher programs is not that they leave too much room for parental choice but that they leave too little room for democratic deliberation.
The appeal of vouchers to many Americans who are not otherwise committed to a state of families stems…from three facts. One is that our public schools…are so centralized and bureaucratized that parents along with other citizens actually exercise very little democratic control over local schools. The second is that only poor parents lack the option of exiting from public schools and this seems unfair. The third, and most sweeping fact, is that the conditions of many public schools today is bleak by any common-sensical standard of what democratic education ought to be.
III. Chapter Three: Dimensions of
Democratic Participation:
71-75 Levels of Democratic Control:
75 In anything but a tiny city-state, community control over schools
cannot be identified with local
control because there are several
democratic communities that have a legitimate role to play in determining
school policy. For the same reason, federal and state control must not be all-encompassing,
otherwise local democratic control over schools is rendered meaningless. Local public schools play a legitimate role
in reflecting and responding to the more particular collective preferences of
face-to-face communities, a purpose that few other political institutions can
serve as effectively in our society.
75-79 Democratic Professionalism:
75-76 At all levels of American government, political control over
schools is challenged—and often shared—by other authorities: parents and parent-teacher
associations, teachers and teacher’ unions, accrediting
agencies, private foundations, civic
groups and lobbying organizations….Although all these groups help shape
what happens in American schools, the challenge posed by teachers and teachers’
unions is by far the most significant in upholding the principle of
nonrepression against democratic authority.
77-79 She discusses authority and professionalism in the
professions of medicine, law, and teaching:
77 too much autonomy leads to “the
insolence of office.” Too little
autonomy, on the other hand, leads to what one might call “the ossification
of office,” from which, by almost all accounts, the teaching profession in
the United States.
79 Far more than doctors or lawyers,
teachers make compromises in their professional standards for causes that are
often entirely beyond their personal control: too many students, too little
preparation time for teaching, too much administrative work, too little money
to support their families. Some of these
causes, however, may be within the collective power of teachers—organized by
professional teachers’ unions—to change.
79-88 Teachers’ Unions:
79 Such unions can “…create the conditions
teachers under which teachers can cultivate the capacity among students for
critical reflection on democratic culture.”
80 Such unions should have sufficient
authority to combat ossification of office, but not so much as to engender
insolence of office.
80-81 Such unions were begun to ensure
teachers have sufficient control over their work, and multiplied as they
secured better rates of pay.
81 Merit pay is an important way of
mitigating ossification. But, she adds:
“democratic education depends not only upon attracting intellectually
talented people with a sense of professional mission to teaching, but also on
cultivating and sustaining that sense during their career as teachers.”
82-84 While teacher pay is important to
teachers’ unions (as it is to both boards and teachers) professionalism is even more important, and one reason that teachers’ unions came
into being:
82 Although a school board may establish curriculum,
it must not dictate how teachers choose to teach the established curriculum, as long as they do not discriminate against students or
repress reasonable points of view.
Although a school board may control the textbooks teachers use, it may
not establish how teachers use the textbooks within the same principled
constraints). If teachers are not
permitted sufficient intellectual authority, they can not successfully teach students to be
intellectually independent. Of course
too much autonomy is as problematic as too little.
83 She discusses the move toward teacher
tenure for primary and secondary school teachers contending systems of
impartial review are key. Fostering
professionalism is important both in the classroom and in the larger school
context, and good schools can retain teachers by treating them as
professionals. She goes on to point out
differences between primary and secondary school teachers and college or
university professors:
84 “Teachers’ unions are ideally an interim
solution to the problem of professional ossification, but the interim is likely
to last a long time given the obstacles now standing in the way of teachers
gaining a greater role in shaping school policy.”
84-88 She identifies state, federal, and
large school district regulations and requirements as obstacles which
perpetuate the role of teachers’ unions.
I greatly appreciate comments and corrections--typos and infelicities are all too common and the curse of "auto-correct" plagues me!
Email: hauptli@fiu.edu
Last revised on 02/27/26