This article shows how City-As-School, a progressive public school in New York City, used descriptive inquiry to deepen shared decision making, which is a central value of the school and part of a democratic way of life. Descriptive inquiry is a democratic knowledge-making process that was developed at the Prospect School in North Bennington,…

This article reflects on the experiences of a Fulbright scholar, drawing heavily on the collected writings from her Zimbabwean students. The story tells of the emerging identity of the first generation to be born in an independent Zimbabwe. The article explores the intersection of traditional culture, gender, and democracy that these students face…

Our ways of living together, communicating, and learning shape social life and our responses to problems such as economic injustice, racism, or climate change. That insight led John Dewey to identify democracy and its engine, democratic education, as the best means for assembling the knowledge necessary to address complex challenges and to ensure…

This article is an inquiry into the work of educators at the James Baldwin School (JBS), a New York City public school with an explicit commitment to democracy in its mission and core values. The author was founding principal at JBS for the first six years, has stayed in touch, and recently went back to talk with faculty about how their work has…

This article revisits the Eight-Year Study, which was a set of simultaneous experiments in secondary education carried out by 30 schools from 1933 to 1941. These schools were free from the usual subject and unit requirements for college admission for a period of eight years, beginning with the class entering college in 1936. Freed from the demands…

Education, once known as the "great equalizer," is now being called to task for its tendency to disenfranchise and to legitimate inequality due to its obedience to the tenets of capitalism. Two of the nation's greatest educational thinkers, George S. Counts and Boyd H. Bode provided "instructions" for parents and teachers…

At a time when serious pronouncements and decisions about education are made by noneducators, it is important to take note of the practice and impact of teachers' collective reflective resistance. This means foregrounding learning that is organic, artful, and contemplative--that puts first the humanity of students and teachers. This is a story of…

The famous photo of Hazel Bryan jeering at Elizabeth Eckford as a mob helped drive Elizabeth from Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, on September 4, 1957, compels meditation on the nature of democratic politics. This scene is commemorative of the Little Rock events where school segregation was rampant. The author believes that the photo…

The old saying, that a single spark can start a prairie fire, appears in many forms and in different cultures carrying a range of shifting implications and meanings. In this article, William Ayers writes that in some instances, prairie fires are not always catastrophic. They are naturally occurring events necessary and renewing; removing the thick…