San Antonio College Library

"The Agenda for Education in a Democracy proposed by the authors is more than an effort to simply revitalize a faltering civics curriculum. It is about restoring a shared humanity to the educational process. It is about the need to make caring, compassion, freedom, dignity, and responsibility central to the mission of schooling. It is about placing power and responsibility - a concept more demanding of the individual than is accountability - in the...

"The essays in this volume address the educational issues which arise when national, sub-national, and supra-national identities compete. How can we determine the limits of parental educational rights when the concern of liberalism to protect and promote children's autonomy conflicts with the desire to maintain communal integrity? Given the advances made by the forces of globalization, can the liberal-democratic state morally justify its traditional...

Who should have the authority to shape the education of citizens in a democracy? This is the central question posed by Amy Gutmann in the first book-length study of the democratic theory of education. The author tackles a wide range of issues, from the democratic case against book banning to the role of teachers' unions in education, as well as the vexed questions of public support for private schools and affirmative action in college admissions.