Chapter 93: Theorizing Democratic and Social Justice Education: Conundrum or Impossibility?

Despite John Donne’s assertion that we live in interdependence with others and are diminished by their suffering or death, disparities among rich and poor, powerful and less powerful, those who live in countries with abundant resources and others whose lands are (or have been) impoverished, all suggest that somehow, we permit inequity to exist without allowing ourselves to feel diminished. Because freedoms, resources, material goods, and opportunities are still remarkably inequitably distributed, it is necessary to develop robust ways to theorize and advance education for democracy and social justice.

Despite the need to clarify what is meant by democratic and social justice education, it is challenging, indeed likely impossible to develop a one-size-fits-all— good-for-all-contexts—theory. The task is compounded by the prevalence of competing ideological definitions of both social justice and democracy. Both social justice and democracy, for our purposes here, imply the prevalence of certain values and not particular systems of distribution of goods or of participatory or representative government.