democracy

Phil Agre (pagre who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Mon, 25 Mar 1996 19:45:41 -0800 (PST)

I was talking with Jim March the other day about the development of social
networking skills, and he said that in his youth it was a commonplace in
schools for children to be taught things like organizing committees. In
particular, his understanding was that a whole tradition of educational
ideals motivated by democratic values existed back then but was washed out
by the rise of a more individualistic, cognitive orientation. (No doubt
I've oversimplified his comments, but perhaps that's the gist of them.)
Not being an educationalist, though, he couldn't provide me with references
to this democratic tradition in mid-century American educational thought.
Presumably Dewey has something to do with it. Now, I'm familiar with a
whole extensive tradition that encourages things like "clubs" with a formal
apparatus of officers, meetings, agendas, and so forth, but I think of this
stuff as a misleading simulacrum of democracy, designed to be easily channeled
by authorities and lacking in the skills of actual organizing (e.g., identifying
issues, building coalitions) and social capital formation (this being the 1996
term for social networking). (This tradition is discussed at length by Wm.
Graebner, The Engineering of Consent: Democracy and Authority in Twentieth-
Century America, University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.) Can anybody provide
me with names or references for more genuinely democratic traditions of
teaching social skills, either in the US context or anyplace else for which
relevant literature might be available in English?

Thanks a lot

Phil Agre