Chapter 4: Can we Teach Deep Democracy: And Can It Make a Difference?

Giroux (1995) agrees with the often heard lament that American education is in crisis, but qualifies the thought with a much more controversial statement: “It is not an isolated crisis … [but] a crisis that is implicated in and produced by a transformation in the very nature of democracy itself” (p. 295). Later, he describes it as a “crisis of citizenship and ethics” (p. 297). Macedo (1995, p. 140) argues that the crisis is exacerbated by a “myth that schools are very much kept independent of society and dislodged from the political reality that shapes them historically.” Because of the general failure of education to attend to issues of democratic citizenship, these authors and many others (see, for example, Bode, 2001; Giroux, 2005; Shields, 2009) call for a transformation in education—one that would reemphasize not only individual progress but “the public meaning of public education” (Barber, 2001, p. 19).