Democracy’s Education: Stirrings of Change
For many, science itself is at least partly to blame for higher education's travails, to the extent that it has become higher education's leading edge. Continue reading →
View ArticleWalker’s "Drafting Error" and the Democratic Promise of Executive Function
Walker's attack has traction for the same reason extremist forces have been able to attack education across the country. The purpose and cultural logic of education have shrunk, creating...
View ArticleCivic Agency and Executive Function: An Emerging Conversation
A conversation is just beginning between practitioners and theorists of civic agency and scholars and educators promoting educational experiences which develop Executive Function. It may have large...
View ArticleThe March Is Not Over Yet: A Different Education for the 21st Century
Television scenes of nonviolent demonstrators beaten by police shocked the nation. As the movie Selma details, the March played a critical role in the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Continue...
View ArticleJohn Dewey and the Rag Tag and Bobtail of Humanity
Only an education animated by belief in each person's potential can reverse the dramatic shrinkage which has been taking place in our imaginations about democracy, citizenship, and people themselves....
View ArticleUniversities, Public Spaces and the Democratic Way of Life
Public spaces allow for expressions of higher education's best democratic values -- free exchange of ideas, thoughtful discussion, appeal to evidence and respect for different perspectives. Such spaces...
View ArticleCommunity Organizing and the Next Stage of Democracy
Expert-led knowledge power is on the march, embodied in "Big Data," predictive technologies, and movements like translational science. All seek to fix people and problems from the outside, and view...
View ArticleTwo Concepts of Public Art
Public art often protests injustice and oppression, seeking to raise public awareness. Pablo Picasso's famous painting Guernica, finished in 1937, is an example. Continue reading →
View ArticleRobert Putnam’s ‘Our Kids’ and the Story of Us
Putnam calls for citizens to lobby for federal policies such as expanded tax credits for the poor, more day care and growth in community colleges -- much the legislative agenda of President Obama, who...
View ArticleCornel West’s Race Matters and the Politics of Democratic Respect
In 1993, responding to what he saw as misleading treatments of the Watts riots following the acquittal of four police officers a year earlier in Los Angeles after the violent beating of an unarmed...
View ArticleThe Theft of Democracy’s Memory
In this coming election season we need to challenge ourselves and candidates of whatever party and at whatever level to recall the work of citizenship. And we need to ask candidates to stop pretending...
View ArticleRegrowing Democracy — The Role of Higher Education
If, as William Hastie, the first black federal judge, put it, "democracy is a journey not a destination," we've gotten off track. Continue reading →
View ArticleReviving the Real American Dream
As we head into an election season marked by bitter polarization, how can we develop a renewed sense of ourselves as a whole people, responsible for democracy as a way of life, not simply elections?...
View ArticleThe Pope and the Politics of Hope
Pope Francis' encyclical on climate change, Laudato Si, is a bold and brilliant challenge to business as usual. Already, conservatives and liberals alike have mounted rebuttals in ways that illustrate...
View ArticleElla Baker and the Politics of Hope — Lessons From the Civil Rights Movement
As I argued recently, Pope Francis' climate encyclical, Laudato Si, shows powerful resources in Catholic and other faith traditions for addressing the challenge of climate change. But in immediate...
View ArticleMartin Luther King’s Politics of Hope – Beyond Polarization
The Pope follows in the tradition of Martin Luther King and others in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Keenly aware of the power of southern segregationists, they advanced a...
View ArticleWho Owns Democracy? The Great Debate
Over the coming long months of public focus on elections, we need to talk about who owns democracy and what it means. College and university campuses, as well as other sites, have potential to be...
View ArticleThe Pope’s Unsettling Message
As if Republicans did not have enough to worry about with Donald Trump, the visit of Pope Francis to the United States in September, which includes an unprecedented address to a joint session of...
View ArticleObama’s Politics and the Nuclear Deal With Iran
Politics in the older sense of the word, descending from the Greeks, conveys the practice humans have developed to negotiate the irreducible plurality of the human condition. It is the method to...
View ArticleThe Pope and Civic Studies
Civic studies is a movement to challenge detachment. We seek to reintegrate what the modern world and theories of knowledge based on the stance of being "outside the world" have split apart. Laudato...
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