Supplement for Seventh Class: Chapter Remaining Portions of Nine:
Educating Adults
and Conclusion: The Primacy of Political Education
Copyright © 2026 Bruce W.
Hauptli
I. Questions From
Last Time.
II. Remaining
Portions of Chapter Nine: Educating Adults
We will pick up where we left off.
III. Gutmann’s
Conclusion: The Primacy of Political Education:
282 Gutmann begins her conclusion by noting that laws which violate the principles of nondiscrimination or nonrepression may arise in any democracy, and educational laws may fail to institute practices which educate children to become responsible citizens. The fact that education or citizenship is very demanding makes such lapses understandable.
282-287 Discretion In Work and Participation In Politics:
282-285 The aims of democratic education will not be fully realized until citizens have additional opportunities to exercise discretion in their daily work. Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and many others recognize that industrial employment can work against democratic engagement of citizens.
287-288 Political Education:
288 Democratic politics puts a high premium on citizens being both knowledgeable and articulate, and democratic education must be a shared trust between parents, citizens, teachers, and public officials—it thrives when all these participants are responsible democratic deliberators.
Democratic Education and Democratic Theory:
In this section Gutmann emphasizes that democratic education provides the foundation upon which democratic society. But the “dependency is reciprocal.” If the participants in the education of future citizens are not democratically inclined, the education provided may not yield citizens who are democratic.
288-289 ...our concern for democratic education lies at the core of our commitments to democracy. The ideal of democracy is often said to be collective self-determination. But is there a “collective self” to be determined? Are there not just so many individual selves that must find a fair way of sharing the goods of a society together? It would be dangerous (as critics often charge) to assume that the democratic state constitutes the “collective self” of a society, and that its policies in turn define the best interests of its individual members.
We need no such metaphysical assumption, however, to defend an ideal closely related to that of collective self-determination—an ideal of citizens sharing in deliberatively determining the future shape of their society. If democratic society is the “self” that citizens determine, it is a self that does not define their best interests. There remain independent standards for defining the best interests of individuals and reasons for thinking that individuals, rather than collectivities, are often the best judges of their own interests. To avoid the misleading metaphysical connotations of the concept of collective self-determination, we might better understand the democratic ideal as that of conscious social reproduction, the same ideal that guided democratic education.
289 The dependency is reciprocal.
But doesn’t this raise “the chicken and egg problem”: if deliberative democratic citizens are needed for democratic education, and democratic education is necessary if we are to have democratic education, isn’t democracy impossible?
289-290 Similarly, families are not democratic, yet they play an important role in democratic education, which may promote increased democracy in families.
(end of chapter)
So, then how may the air of paradox be dispelled here? Well, let’s look at American History:
were the English Colonies democratic?
were all “Americans” revolutionaries?
was the initial US Government under the Articles of Confederation democratic? Was it approved by a vote of “the people” or by a vote “the colonies/states?” Was there broad public discussion of the Articles?
When that government was replaced by a Federal Constitution, was it approved by “the people” or “the States?” Was there broad public discussion of the proposed Constitution? Did such discussion yield changes in the Constitution?
Were all “white” males able to vote at first? When were women allowed to vote, “black” Americans, indigenous people?
Did most citizens receive a “democratic education” initially? How did that change over the past 247 years?
While it wasn’t, in any way, guaranteed that a democracy would arise, did democratically-inclined (and educated) individuals successfully lead the way toward our imperfect democracy? Were there always antidemocratically-inclined citizens?
So, is there a paradox here, or a tender plant in need of careful care and cultivation?
Are the histories of other democracies [England/United Kingdom, Switzerland, France, Germany, Japan, India….) much different?
We will not have time to address her Epilogue.
I greatly appreciate comments and
corrections.
Email: hauptli@fiu.edu
Last revised on 03/06/26