Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T16:22:36.946Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Liberalism Versus Democracy? Schooling Private Citizens in the Public Square

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 1997

MEIRA LEVINSON
Affiliation:
Nuffield College, Oxford

Abstract

This article examines the conflict in political liberalism between the demands placed on education by liberalism and those placed on education by democracy. In so far as the principles of political liberalism entail both that the state not interfere with individuals' private commitments and that it ensure the maintenance of liberal democratic institutions, I suggest that it is rent by an internal tension that poses particular dilemmas for education. This tension is explored through three competing models of the school as a politically liberal institution, expressed in terms of a schematic analysis of three countries' approach to education: England, the United States and France. I argue that while all three countries capture important aspects of the politically liberal educational project, and while the American approach especially successfully and self-consciously addresses the balance between liberalism and democracy in constructing the school as a public square, no model in theory or in practice is able to meet the diverse and competing demands of political liberalism. In so far as any political system is viable only if it is able to maintain itself across generations, however, I conclude that political liberalism fails as a theory in at least one important respect, and that the problem of education thus deserves much deeper attention from liberal political theorists than it has yet enjoyed.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 1997 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)