Schooling for Democracy: A Common School and a Common University? A Response to "Schooling for Democracy".

1 article response 1 Diane Reay is a professor of education at the University of Cambridge, with particular interests in social justice issues in education, Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory, and cultural analyses of social class. She has written widely on social inequalities in education. Her books include White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) with Gill Crozier and David James) and Degrees of Choice: Social Class, Race and Gender in Higher Education (Trentham Books, 2005) with Miriam E. David and Stephen Ball. However, vocational education has a long history of stigmatization—stereotyped and devalued as education that is desired by and more suitable for children of the working classes. As a result, in Britain, it has always approximated Dewey’s “narrow technical trade education for specialised callings, carried on under the control of others” (1916/2001, p. 325), a form of apprenticeship rather than education. Unsurprisingly, attempts to upgrade vocational education have failed because the British middle classes have never countenanced it as appropriate education for their own children (Tomlinson, 2005). Despite a great deal of rhetoric about high-status vocational routes, policies have always been directed at the lower, and indeed lowest, achieving young people (Wolf, 2002). Any sort of parity between vocational and academic education would require a transformation in both what vocational education constitutes and who engages in it. While Nel Noddings is There is a danger that vocational education will be interpreted in theory and practice as trade education: as a means of securing technical efficiency in specialized future pursuits. Education would then become an instrument of perpetuating unchanged the existing industrial order of society, instead of operating as a means of its transformation. The desired transformation is not difficult to define in a formal way. It signifies a society in which every person shall be occupied in something which makes the lives of others better worth living, and which accordingly makes the ties which bind persons together more perceptible—which breaks down the barriers of distance between them. (Dewey, 1916/2001, p. 325) Dewey’s vision for democratic vocational education has never been realized, although, as Nel Noddings’s article (2011) makes clear, there is a pressing need to revisit the arguments for and against vocational tracks in schooling. Her thoughtful, reflexive, and at times provocative piece raises fascinating and timely issues about both the nature and the place of vocational education, and more broadly about what constitutes democratic education. In the United Kingdom, as well as in the United States, concerns are currently being raised about the appropriateness of an academic education for all children and the need for vocational training for those who are seen to require more practical learning (Hurst, 2011, p. 1). Abstract This short paper is a response to Nel Noddings’s article on schooling for democracy. Whilst agreeing with the basic premises of Noddings’s argument, it questions the possibility of parity between academic and vocational tracks given the inequitable social and educational contexts the two types of learning would have to coexist within. Drawing on the educational philosophies of John Dewey and R. H. Tawney, I argue that both the United States and the United Kingdom need to create educational systems that reduce the social distance between people rather than, as the current systems do, exacerbate them. This is an issue of hearts and minds as well as policies and practices. As Dewey pointed out a hundred years ago, what is required is education that results in “mutual regard of all citizens for all other citizens,” and the paper concludes that both countries are still far away from achieving this. Schooling for Democracy: A Common School and a Common University? A Response to “Schooling for Democracy”