Democracy and the Crisis of Public Education

Abstract

The current crisis of public education in the United States provides the basis for offering some speculation and critical questioning of two events in post-Civil Rights America. The first has to do with the current state of American political culture: the declining interest in and cynicism about mainstream national politics, their decidedly negative impact on the democratic process, and how such entrenched dispositions might be reversed. Emptied of any substantial content, democracy appears imperiled as individuals are unable to translate their privately suffered misery into broadly shared public concerns and collective action. Civic engagement now appears impotent and public values are rendered invisible in light of the growing power of multinational corporations to shape the content of most mainstream media as they privatize remaining public space. Political exhaustion, the empty ritual of voting, and, impoverished intellectual visions are fed by the increasingly popular assumption that there are no alternatives to the present state of affairs.¹