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Reconstructing/Reimagining Democratic Education: From Context to Theory to

Practice
Robert J. Helfenbein a; Nicholas J. Shudak b
a
Indiana University-Indianapolis, b Mount Marty College,
Online Publication Date: 01 January 2009
To cite this Article Helfenbein, Robert J. and Shudak, Nicholas J.(2009)'Reconstructing/Reimagining Democratic Education: From
Context to Theory to Practice',Educational Studies,45:1,5 — 23
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EDUCATIONAL STUDIES, 45: 5–23, 2009
Copyright
C American Educational Studies Association
ISSN: 0013-1946 print / 1532-6993 online
DOI: 10.1080/00131940802649110
ARTICLES
Reconstructing/Reimagining Democratic
Downloaded By: [IUPUI Indiana University] At: 19:32 30 January 2009
Education: From Context to Theory to

Practice
Robert J. Helfenbein
Indiana University-Indianapolis
Nicholas J. Shudak
Mount Marty College
Many have suggested that issues of democracy are fundamentally related to school
curricula and contexts (Conant, 1948; Dewey, 1944; Dimitriadis and Carlson, 2003;
West, 2004). Current social theorists have suggested that a globalized social, eco-
nomic, and cultural structure has necessitated a rethinking of the relationships be-
tween individuals, communities, and institutions. It follows, then, that the premise
that democracy must be reinvented (Dewey [1937] 1964; Foucault 2003; Hardt and
Negri, 2000) necessarily leads to new notions of curriculum, schools, and education
itself. This article argues that thinking through these notions as ways in which to
engage the social studies may prove fruitful for those working within critical ap-
proaches to education. This cultural studies approach holds as fundamental to our
argument that the shifting nature of the political, as part of a greater social structure,
simultaneously affects and requires a reimagining of the pedagogical.
Philosophy’s aim is to offer a reconstruction of the conditions that make communi-

cation not only possible but also effective and productive, both at the individual and
social levels. (Borradori 2003, 47)
Correspondence should be addressed to Robert J. Helfenbein, Jr., Indiana University-Indianapolis,

902 W. New York Street, Indianapolis, IN 46202. E-mail: rhelfenb@iupui.edu
6 HELFENBEIN AND SHUDAK
A recent tension under exploration by education scholars is the deceptively

simple schooling as if democracy matters. We humbly suggest that, at least in
some way, this is presumptuous, in that some foundational concepts implied
here complicate this tension and deserve a closer look. We contend that social
studies educators (part of our field of analysis), in general, within the United
States are always teaching democracy, albeit at times quite tacitly and for in often
unexamined ways. The related question, with which we struggle, however, is
“What are the challenges to teaching democracy within the multiple sites of social
studies education, as well as within a dynamic and fluid social order?” Put another
way, in what ways have the reconstruction and reinvention of contemporary society
called for reconstructing/reinventing democratic education? From our experiences,
one of the most concerning evidences of these shifts is that students come to teacher
education classrooms with conceptual constraints on both terms—education and
democracy—that challenge their receptivity to accept the dare to teach democracy.
An anecdote might help.
In a recent social studies methods class, an author of this article stopped showing
a documentary on the life of Howard Zinn (2004) because of the visible signs of
irritation and/or discomfort evinced by some of the students. The intention of
showing the film was two-fold: while teaching the content of the Civil Rights
Movement and the era of the 60s & 70s, we might also engage in the deeper
questions surrounding the ethical commitments of social studies teachers. Our
conversation began with commentary on the era and seemed to be organically
moving towards the decisions made by Zinn himself (i.e., participating in teach-
ins, sit-ins, defying the school administrations, etc., as democratic acts).
Perceiving this moment of discomfort as a teachable one, our class discussion
shifted from some of the more controversial choices of Zinn to what it might
mean to be an activist teacher, striving through democratic processes to open
democratic spaces. At one point, a student, clearly troubled, raised his hand to
offer a comment. To paraphrase,
Student:
Those actions in the 60s were great and all, but . . . we can’t do that now.
Instructor:
What . . . . what do you mean? Why not?
Student:
[after weighty pause] . . . Standards.
It must be admitted that this student’s response was stunning and, sadly, no pow-
erful, insightful instructor response was forthcoming. Most striking was the fact
that this was not a practicing teacher with a new batch of disheartening scores;
this was someone who hasn’t even been in a classroom yet.
The previous anecdote, although brief, is no mere isolated incident in social
studies teacher education classrooms as preservice teachers seem to come to
EDUCATIONAL STUDIES 7
Schools of Education with clear notions of state standards and their connection
to high-stakes assessment (arguably something that did not happen pre-NCLB).
In a very real sense it illustrates that preservice social studies teachers, those
who are ostensibly least impacted by standards, as compared with math teachers,
are coming into the profession with a constrained view of teaching their subject
matter, and even of what their own sense of identity as teachers might be. This
constrained view, one that is arguably conditioned to limit teaching and education
to what can be done under the banner of standards, seemingly compels these
students to think “this can’t be done,” rather than “how, as a teacher, can I do
this and make it relevant to standards?” For the previously-mentioned student, a
concern with standards has eclipsed the effective democratic social work of the
Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war efforts of a Howard Zinn; such work and
action are not concerns of the new cadres of preservice teachers; standards are.
What is more concerning to us, however, is how standards and other conceptual
constraints students bring, as well as inherent limitations of teacher education
programs—duration—are affecting students’ ability to ask critical questions, such
as why standards even matter to American democracy.
The problem is essentially a problem of context, or of contextualizing, which
implicates imagination. Borrowing from Myles Horton in his dialogue with Paulo
Freire concerning the difficulties of enacting revolutionary adult education pro-
grams in the late Twentieth Century, he asserts that “There’s no equivalency today
to any of those [adult education] programs [of the past]” (Horton and Friere 1990,
92). For Horton, there is no equivalency because the times, the contexts, are so
radically different. Concerning the efforts of those interested in starting new pro-
grams, Horton comments that “They’re at a disadvantage in that we were working
in really a revolutionary situation” (Horton & Freire 1990, 92). In concurring
and extending Horton’s point, Freire responds that, yes, “They happened in some
historical space, in a context with some special historical, political, social, cultural
elements in the atmosphere. Now possibly you would not get the same results.
[But this] does not mean that you could not get similar results in some areas of
the country, at some times” (92–93).
We tend to agree with Horton and Freire (1990) on this point of context. It
is our contention that not having an understanding of context is problematic to
teaching democracy, and that many entering the teaching profession are not aware
of the many contexts in which they are embedded and that touch and affect their
lives, another conceptual constraint. Thus, impeded are imaginative and legitimate
comparisons across historical, educational, social, and democratic contexts to what
can or cannot be done in terms of democratic social action or taught in social studies
classrooms concerning democracy.
In light of these conceptual constraints that make identifying and shifting across
contexts difficult, we offer the following suggestion. Taking seriously the difficulty
of teaching democracy, this article suggests that social studies educators challenge
their students to think about teaching democracy in a way that moves from context
to theory to practice. Accepting the pedagogical challenge in writing for any
audience, we move from context to theory to practice as a way of developing
an understanding of a particular challenge to teaching democracy as well as to
democracy itself: global Empire.
Although contexts are many, the context of concern for this article is democracy
as it historically and philosophically connects with the process of public education.
In particular, we develop an understanding of this relationship as a prelude to a
discussion regarding a unique threat to democratic action—Empire as defined
by Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004)—which, in turn, challenges the teaching of
democracy itself. In doing this, we posit a reimagining of democracy in a globalized
context and its connection with education in general and the social studies in
particular. We follow with a theorizing of the changing social forces at work
on the ways we make meaning of seemingly fundamental terms as democracy,
liberty, and identity. And to close, we suggest possible considerations for practicing
democracy through the social studies.
I. REIMAGINING: DEMOCRACY AS CONTEXT
Recently, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg offered concern that, “on
important issues like the balance between liberty and security, if the public doesn’t
care, then the security side is going to overweigh the other” (quoted in West 2004,
6). This holds as the point of departure for connecting democracy with education:
The political is always pedagogical. Social studies teachers are implicated on this
point. Not only must such educators teach the public to care as in civic education;
they must also engage in the struggle over what they care about, which is to say
that they must engage in the battle—or the marketplace, to borrow a pervasive yet
troubling phrase—of ideas.
Accepting this as a principle of social studies education, teachers, borrowing
from Boyd H. Bode (1939), carry a heavy and disturbing burden of intellectual and
moral responsibility concerning the instruction in and of democracy. According to
Bode, such instruction means the reconstruction of ingrained beliefs and habits,
the reshaping of our entire way of life. [Such an] undertaking must be accepted
as a personal responsibility and cannot be shifted to some obliging dictator. A
democratic social order will not undertake to prescribe beliefs, but it clearly cannot
ignore the duty of providing assistance in this matter to its members. . . . The most
immediate agency for this purpose is obviously the public school (61–62).
Highlighting the connection, then, between the pedagogical and the political via
school curricula and pedagogy diametrically opposes the notion that the masses
are incapable of responding to structures of power and, its sister idea, that only an
intellectual elite knows what’s good for them.
The premise of such a position is that American democracy is the larger context
in which social studies teachers are embedded; it is their terrain. And, as such,
teachers of social studies, if they are to help their students successfully negotiate
such terrain outside of school walls, must know the challenges that they, as well
as their students, face.
Our source here, as good social studies teachers, is Thomas Jefferson. In a letter
to William Charles Jarvis, Jefferson submits:
I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people them-
selves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with
a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their
discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power

(Thomas Jefferson 1820[1899]).
Jefferson, long a proponent of public education and its role in the fledgling democ-
racy, offers that the connection between the two terms serves as a bulwark against
the abuse of power. The type of protection Jefferson has in mind is not necessarily
the reactively defensive type, but what Dewey ([1922] 1940) would consider as
preemptive “inward protection” against being duped and manipulated by those
clamoring for power; by those who purposefully mislead for their own power
resulting in Freire’s (1973) massification: The phenomenon characterized by peo-
ple handing over their critically evaluative faculties to someone else. Quoting
Jefferson once again, and regarding inner protections, he state,s
those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into
tyranny; and it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing [this slow
perversion] would be, to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people
at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts, which history
exhibiteth, that, possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries,
they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their
natural powers to defeat its purposes. (Thomas Jefferson, Bill 79 of 1779 For The
“More General Diffusion of Knowledge)
Again, as social studies educators, it is easy to agree that the connection between
democracy and education is the necessity to know and identify political ambition
that perverts democracy into tyranny, ambitions that systematically seek to strip
people of their critical faculties. However, the connection between education and
democracy, not set in any stone beyond individuals’ tenuous historical memory,
finds itself under attack—all the more reason perhaps to set such an understanding
in stone, one that could guide the social studies. The following challenge highlights
the importance of helping students imagine democracy and its connection with
education. Another classroom anecdote informs.
An online discussion board used in one of the authors’ courses provides inter-
esting insight into the mindset of this challenge. Mathew [a pseudonym] currently
studies in a certification-only program in hopes of acquiring a social studies teach-

ing license. A very vocal and opinionated student, Mathew’s contributions, overall,
have been a welcomed addition to the class—notably, here, a methods course rather
than foundations, Teaching and Learning in Middle School—showing a thought-
ful engagement with both the class and the broader social context. Although often
controversial, this student’s participation makes for a lively online extension of
the ideas of the course and the School of Education in general. In the following is
the prompt for a new thread in the discussion board and the surprising response
by this particular student.
P:
The conversation has turned to issues of empowerment in education within a broader
social structure. i [sic] might ask to the class, what do you think is the role of
education in a democracy? i add the democratic aspect as it, so far, seems to be
absent from the conversation. i also remind you that at [our university] our mission
is not only to PUBLIC education but also to inner city schools—this should color
the debate i think. have at it.
M:
Education plays a role in our society; that is for sure. As it relates to our form of
government . . . well . . .
What has been and still is being discussed is for all intents (relating to money
redistribution) is NOT democracy. If you want to be literal about the theory of a
democratic government, then there is NO place for public education. For that matter,
there is NO place for any government sponsored public works except for such things
as Infrastructure, Military, Currency minting, and possibly other basal components
as police and emergency services. As for the rest of government sponsored programs
. . . . well, they are Un-democratic to the extreme.
There are a multitude of government agencies that were created in the early 1930’s
that never existed prior. These agencies serve to effectively “take from those that
have”, and “give to those that don’t”. It is really as simple as that. That principle is
wholly and surely NOT democratic.
Public education, in principle, is great. Undemocratic, but great. Not many people
would really like a TRUE democratic nation . . . . unless you’re disgustingly wealthy.
Not touching empowerment . . . .
At first glance, Mathew’s position espouses libertarian perspectives regarding

the relegation of the government to only the most basic infrastructure. But most
striking and relevant to this project is the characterization of democracy, itself. It
is new to us that a preservice teacher, even a libertarian, actually argues that public
education is undemocratic and not part of the government’s basic infrastructure,
especially in light of America’s rich tradition of connecting education and effica-
cious democratic self-rule—starting perhaps with Massachusetts’ Olde Deluder
Satan act of 1647.
The intention of including this brief exchange in this work is to suggest that
although social thinkers on the left—ourselves included—may be arguing for a
rethinking of democracy and education, the fact is that thinkers on the right and, in
this case the far-right, are already engaged in the project of rearticulating democ-
racy as context. This is something that needs acknowledgment and exploration.
Embarking from a cultural studies approach and citing from disparate sources,
it is our intention to think through the forces at work in changing conceptions of
democracy and education before discussing the challenge to democracy at hand.
David Held (1987) as he introduces his Models of Democracy, reminds readers that
“the history of the idea of democracy is curious; the history of democracies is puz-
zling” (p. 1). We argue that the rise of the global market in what some have referred
to as the Information Age, after the decades-long conflict of the Cold War, has cre-
ated new terms in the age-old conflict between the forces of liberty and the forces
of power (perhaps even more curious, more puzzling). Borrowing from Dewey
(1944) on this point, social studies educators are in a position to challenge their
students to reimagine the old conceptions of democracy and education into the new.
A starting place for teachers is looking at the notion of liberty to compare
the uses and understandings of liberty across times and places (contexts) so as to
understand the concept of democracy. Dewey (2000) offers a conceptual beacon by
stating that “nothing is clearer than that the conception of liberty is always relative
to forces that at a given time and place are increasingly felt to be oppressive.
Liberty in the concrete signifies release from the impact of particular oppressive
forces; emancipation from something once taken as a normal part of human life
but now experienced as bondage” (54). Liberty’s historic—temporal and spatial—
relativity as articulated by Dewey indicates a constant need for such reimagining.
The connection, then, between democracy and liberty is that a democratically
organized society is one wherein ordinary citizens are in a position, borrowing
from the International IDEA Democracy Assessment, to popularly control “public
decisions and decision makers (Beetham et al. 2001, 4). Ostensibly, the decisions
controlled are ones affecting their condition of liberty, of what persons can and
cannot do. And because a democracy is predicated on the idea that people cannot
be forced to be free by others (a dilemma when closed cultures migrate to open
societies), decisions must be made by the ordinary citizens, and those decisions
being made must be informed by a sense of their impact on other persons, thus
Jefferson’s concern with education to establish and ensure enlightened self-rule.
If this premise is taken seriously, then liberty as a historically relative phe-
nomenon is always changing, and if so, then so is democracy, the teaching of
democracy, and democratic social action. Through the social studies, students can
grasp their particular “historic position” while interpreting liberty, which, in turn,
helps account for different understandings of democracy and the role of education.
Our contention is primarily that using the old conceptions of any of these terms—
democracy, education, liberty, etc—not only lessens the possibilities for political
and social progress, but, indeed, plays into the hands of the opposing position.
An example of the changing rhetorical play and the need for reimagining,
indeed, comes from none other than the self-proclaimed conservative talk-radio
host Rush Limbaugh—conservative being a term that we also think needs new
examination. Responding to the Left’s perceived inability to mount a sustaining
challenge to the neoconservatism of the Bush administration, Limbaugh, in re-
ferring to both the tactics of the antiwar movement of 2003 and the Democratic
election strategies of 2004 and 2008, commented that the Left cannot mount an
attack because they are “using the old playbook.” Certainly Rush Limbaugh’s lan-
guage serves a rhetorical purpose in that he hoped, and to some extent succeeded,
in characterizing the antiwar movement as old hippies from a decade that almost
destroyed America; hippies, following Horton’s admonition, using rhetoric that
did not imagine the old into the new so as to provide an alternative to the dominant
rhetoric at that time, hippies who were out of context. What is significant here
is that the voice box of a certain brand of American conservatism heralds a new
playbook, a new age. It is in this paradox, this contradiction that the most interest-
ing aspects of democratic context emerge; here we offer (again; see Shudak and
Helfenbein 2005) that it is not the conservative in neoconservatism that deserves
attention—that people know pretty well—but, rather, the neo.
Our point in this section is to suggest that democracy, itself, is already within
a process of being reimagined. As the political is necessarily pedagogical, we are
always and already within an ideological struggle for what these fundamental terms
mean. As the language of the political Right and, in particular, the neoconservative
Right insists that the world, itself, is operating differently after the attacks of 9–11,
teaching democracy requires an investigation of those logics (see Kornfield 2005;
Shudak and Helfenbein 2005) and, ultimately, we suggest, a counterlogic, a way
of rearticulating the terrain.
II. THEORIZING: REARTICULATING THE TERRAIN

AND THE CHALLENGE OF EMPIRE
Hardt and Negri (2000; 2004) offer that, after the Cold War, a new single logic
of rule emerged in contemporary global relations—a new sovereignty they dub
Empire. Although Hardt and Negri insist that modernist notions of imperialism no
longer operate in a world steeped in a global market in the same ways, we offer
that their conception of the contextual process by which the terms democracy
and liberty are defined sheds light on our struggles as educators concerned with
social studies. Four characteristics of this concept and context of Empire frame
their analysis: (a) conceptions of space differ markedly in Empire, “the concept
. . . posits a regime that effectively encompasses the spatial totality”(xiv); (b) as
a concept, Empire frames itself outside of the trajectory of history, “not as a

transitory moment . . . but as a regime with no temporal boundaries” (xv); (c)
Empire is not only descriptive but productive, “the rule of Empire operates on all
registers of the social order extending down to the depths of the social world”
(xv); and (d) Empire has both an ideological focus and a very real material impact,
“although the practice of Empire is continually bathed in blood, the concept of
Empire is always dedicated to peace—a perpetual and universal peace outside of
history” (xv). Although controversial, at best, Hardt and Negri offer an analysis
of global conditions that differs significantly from traditional depictions, serving
to trouble those terms that this argument suggests we must: democracy, liberty,
sovereignty, imperialism, and finally, democratic education.
Interestingly, a similar point has been made by Thomas Friedman (1999) re-
garding the flip side to free markets. This conception, however, does not embrace
a nostalgia for old dynamics or a hopeless determinism but, rather, suggests
that by better understanding the relations and directions of Empire, democratic
countermovements—or what they term, the Multitude—are possible that subvert
through the process of rearticulation, a process that is by definition educative. It
is here where we dare to teach democracy.
So then, in what ways are democratic countermovements possible within the
formulation of Empire? Hardt and Negri’s (2004) concept of the multitude—
which is a constitutive part of the formulation and perpetuation of Empire itself—
provides the space for the possibility of countermovement. It is here in which
application to work in education, and social studies in particular, may engage in
the political knowledge project that addresses concerns of both the global and
the local. Indeed, here it is necessary for theoretical work to be taken up pre-
cisely because the power structures within Empire have embraced the work of
identity construction and continue to pursue the ideological framing of Empire
within the world of schools. More will be said of this later. Hardt and Negri
define Multitude as “productive, creative subjectivities of globalization that have
learned to sail on this enormous sea. They are in perpetual motion and they form
constellations of singularities and events that impose continual global reconfig-
urations on the system” (60). Multitude then—a continual and fluid process of
identity formation in the mode of hybrid, cyborg, or meztizaje—not only resists
the global power formulations of Empire but, in effect, serves to create it. The
old paradigms of sovereignty in the political sense, commodity in the economic
sense, and identity in the cultural sense now—under Empire—mean and behave
differently. If sovereignty, commodity, and identity mean and behave differently,
so, too, must one’s sense of liberty and democracy; both context and practice have
shifted.
Hardt and Negri (2000) propose that, “we need to discover the means and
forces of the production of social reality along with the subjectivities that animate
it” ..(22). Certainly curriculum operates as the art of the means and forces of
production. For example, the accountability movement in this country—now so

pervasive that it has assumed the position of a given in discussion of educational
reform—works in the conventional wisdom as an obvious connection between the
dynamics of the business world and the world of schools. Working out a logic
that James Gee et al. (1996) call “fast capitalism”, the accountability discourse
permeates not only public policy debate but the material lives of students across
the country. One need not look far to see how such a logic operates on both global
(i.e., the political rhetorics of either party on education) and local (the presence of
vomit bags in Texas elementary schools during testing) levels.
It is, however, important to note that social production works from an ideolog-
ical trajectory and it is in this way that one can think of Empire as curriculum.
Like all curricula—we argue—it takes place within negotiated interactions whose
results are neither predetermined nor guaranteed. As the rule of Empire operates
“bathed in blood but in the name of peace, so, too, does Empire’s curriculum of
educational reform operate to obfuscate its true intentions with rhetorical salves
like accountability and No Child Left Behind. But, in the spirit of globalization—
in particular the neoconservatism embraced by the administration of George W.
Bush—the overarching goal remains the privatization of public services under the
auspices of so-called free trade. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, and
member of the most elite organizations of the planet (i.e., Bilderberg, Council on
Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission), explain American thought in
a press club meeting of March 28, 1999:
For globalization to work, America can’t be afraid to act like the almighty superpower
that it is. The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist.
McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonald-Douglas, the designer of the F-15,
and the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technology is called
the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.
At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of

Curriculum Studies, Robert J. Helfenbein offered a discussion of high-stakes test-
ing that modeled the theoretical work of Stuart Hall in Policing the Crisis (see
Helfenbein, 2004). Central to his argument there was the recognition of a contra-
diction in the traditional commentary on educational reform by the rising forces of
neoconservatism. Confused by the renewed Republican interest in federally man-
dated policies of educational reform, his paper proposed that the crisis in American
public education had, indeed, been manufactured to construct a policing appara-
tus to respond to the impending curriculum and pedagogy shifts necessitated by
the coming of the Information Age. In a sense, we saw No Child Left Behind
as something of knee-jerk reaction to the inevitable loss of curricular control
that information technology brings to classroom experiences. Sadly, our view has
increasingly become more pessimistic.
Although, without question, technological innovation plays a major role in the

processes of globalization—and for our purposes, Empire—the contention that
neoconservative forces were struggling against the paradigmatic shift in the way
schools would operate seems less than sufficient. Instead, we offer an even more
troubling metaphor for Empire’s curriculum of reform than “policing the crisis”—
shock and awe, the carpet bombing of Iraq. Hoping not to appear sensationalistic
but recognizing the timely context of such a comparison, we offer that both the
current administration’s foreign policy in regards to Iraq (and others) and its
continued and seemingly contradictory policy of educational reform follow the
ideological trajectory—including its rhetorical obfuscations—of Empire. This is
the challenge to democracy affecting social studies educators.
To begin such a comparison, we quickly note that the conquest of Iraq was
characterized by an extensive bombing campaign, dubbed “shock and awe,” that
targeted not only military targets, but infrastructure as well. Following the so-called
liberation of Iraq, much media attention was given to the widespread looting
of public and private facilities unchecked by the U.S. military. Naomi Klein
(2003) and others have pointed out that the policy of the U.S.-led coalition on
a post-war Iraq has been one of reconstruction, but it increasingly looks to be
a reconstruction on the ruins of Iraqi infrastructure (including schools!). The
more that is destroyed (or deconstructed, if the reader will forgive the pun) the
easier—and more rhetorically logical in the conventional wisdom—the goal of
reconstruction. Klein (2003) points out that “the country is being treated as a
blank state on which the most ideological Washington neoliberals can design
their dream economy: fully privatized, foreign owned, and open for business”.
Certainly disturbing in its own right, and perhaps more urgent at the moment, it
seems one could draw a parallel conclusion about the educational reform policies
of the current administration, specifically No Child Left Behind.
It has been suggested that 80% of American public schools would be found
wanting if the currently unfunded mandates of No Child Left Behind (hereafter
NCLB) are enacted. Setting up American education to fail serves to open the
door for increased public support for vouchers and private industry initiatives in
educational reform. As the carpet bombs of Baghdad leveled the infrastructure
there to clear the way for privatization, so, too, will the policies of accountability
level American schooling as it exists today. It’s worth noting that the much more
literal deconstruction of schools in Iraq already benefits American interests. The
Research Triangle Institute, based in Raleigh, North Carolina, has been awarded
an initial award of $7.9 million to primarily reconstruct Iraqi schools. Entitled
the “Revitalization of Iraqi Schools and Stabilization of Education,” the project’s
stated goals include decentralizing authority and responsibility, improving local-
level school governance, and improving the use of information in decision-making
(RTI, 2003). Mirroring the traditional conservative views on education and the
state, the lack of a NCLB or similar national initiative suggests that, perhaps, a
transitory step is unnecessary. Thus, we offer that NCLB for America is precisely
the transitory step, or as some consider a moment of transit, that “shock and awe”
made unnecessary in Iraq.
III. PRACTICE: ISSUES TO CONSIDER WHEN

PRACTICING DEMOCRACY
Thus far, we have identified democracy as a theoretical and organizational context.

In this article, it is considered a negotiated terrain of organizational sovereignty.
Teachers help students navigate such a context by educating their students through
social studies to constantly reimagine democracy, and thus reshape its contours
and power of organizing. Also, we have identified Empire as described by Hardt
and Negri (2000; 2004). Empire, as previously theorized, is a competing organiza-
tional context. It is one that challenges democracy as an organizational principle
of nationhood and sovereignty that follows from any identifiable liberal tradition.
Empire challenges what we consider democracy through the subtle and nuanced
reimagining of democracy by Empire builders, who then inscribed the new imagin-
ing within the very nondemocratic organization of Empire. From here, we discuss
considerations for practicing democracy that might withstand the totalizing nature
of Empire.
The difficulty with discussions concerning practice is that, usually, both the
readers and authors are set up for failure. If the piece flirts too obsequiously with
the theoretical, there is a tendency toward platitude, and the reader walks away
without any real conception of methodological implementation. Conversely, if the
piece is heavy on the methodological, the result is a starchy prescription with not
much room left open for the multiplicity within practices. Our error is toward the
former.
The particular context chosen for this article is democracy. And a particular
challenge to democratic practice is that of Empire. As discussed, Empire has
been theorized as a phenomenon in which the quality of life of ordinary people
is increasingly outside the confines of their control, and that control in terms of
governing bodies has, in effect, escaped historically and culturally known borders
and forms of legislation. However, this system of sovereignty operates within
a system of consent, a system that exploits the productive power of citizens but
does not exclude it, thereby making democratic practice a necessary evil within the
context of Empire. In short, Empire needs Multitude to function; the tension itself is
what drives the machine. If global Empire represents the structure that democracy
works against, and one is situated and embedded within the contexts of efforts to
limit democratic action, then the move to practice becomes even more pressing, and
is geared toward a normalizing of democracy by, in fact, practicing it—knowing,
identifying, and exercising democracy. Democratic action, or countermovement,
then, needs to be seen as a necessary and opposing component of the two-sided
coin of Empire and Multitude. Although intricately related, knowing, identifying,

and exercising democratic action are discussed separately in what follows.
Knowing that democratic countermovement is possible, that it can be done,
represents the first step in acknowledging the potential power of the Multitude.
It is important to note again that Empire represents a complicit form of power
that depends ultimately on the diversity of forces at work within it—most notably
the Multitude. Localized resistance to gentrification or examples from the envi-
ronmental movement may prove fruitful here for pointing to this potential power,
but the challenge facing democratic education in the United States is that there
aren’t too many obvious reasons to know it. The civics test here or there simply
will not do. Bordering the general and the platitudinous for a moment, the United
States’ citizenry is lacking democratic knowledge for a simple reason: Many have
done nothing to earn such knowledge, knowledge that cannot necessarily come
from classrooms, and nor are there reasons for doing so. This is the social stud-
ies teacher’s paradox. How does one teach something that must be lived? How,
borrowing from Bode (1939), does the classroom clarify democracy and make it
conscious of itself? The answer, again, is context. It is the teacher’s job to identify
for and with the students their context, their lifeworlds, and to help them make
the necessary connections with democracy. The bridge to knowing democracy is
again found through liberty.
The connection between liberty and democracy, two essentially contested terms,
is action. Arguably, the history of democracy in the United States, as imported from
Britain, is the history of liberal thought and resistance against repressive state inter-
vention curbing and controlling free human (inter)action—liberty. Removing lib-
erty from the abstract, Dewey ([1935] 1964b) comments that, “If one wants to know
what the condition of liberty is at a given time, one has to examine what persons
can do and what they cannot do” (111) Understanding that both democracy and
liberty are historically relative terms that must continually be redefined, the exer-
cise for Dewey is one that challenges students to come to know democracy through
liberty and in terms of effective action. Presumably, he would have students look at
effective action as positive difference-making action in their lives that is done with
others, and to look at it as power to control their lives; a power and control that is
exercised in communion with others for the benefit of individuals. Such actions are
innumerable.
Knowing democracy through the aforementioned sense of liberty squares nicely
with the understanding of democracy as developed by the International Institute for
Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA). They would have people understand
democracy in terms of two simple principles: that democracy is characterized by
the “popular control over public decision making and decision makers” as well as
“equality between citizens in the exercise of that control (Beetham et al. 2001, 3).
This form of practice, however, falls flat on its face if students (and citizens) are
unable to identify effective action and its outlets, and are unable or unwilling to
justify why such action is necessary in their lives.
One next characteristic of practicing democracy is identifying the institutional
means through which effective action is possible. One of the difficulties we have
come across in our classrooms concerning the teaching of democracy is that,
although students are able to recite common textbook definitions of democracy,
they are not too adept at identifying institutional means of realizing democracy.
Furthermore, in recognizing the new social formations that comprise both Empire
and Multitude, an effective democratic curriculum points to both new and untried
spaces of effective resistance to the limitations of democracy; it also recognizes
the potential of new forms of collective action.
Identifying institutional means for realizing democracy within the political

sphere and pointing to new possible social formations essentially helps students
realize the extent to which a society is democratic depends on the arrangements
of social institutions that allow for a society to be democratic. Such an activity
is geared toward helping students realize that democracy is the popular control
of forces that either accrue liberty or restrain it, with forces being understood
as a society’s institutions. When political and other forces are compromising the
amount of liberty, of effective action relative to quality of life, a challenge is being
posed to democracy.
One of the challenges of Empire to democratic action is the economic impulse
that equates choice in commerce with democracy, an impulse that has been spread-
ing rapidly and was evidenced by the student mentioned in the beginning of this
article. The eclipsing of the political by the economic is the “tragic breakdown
of democracy.” According to Dewey ([1935] 1964b), this breakdown “is due to
the fact that the identification of liberty with the maximum of unrestrained in-
dividualistic action in the economic sphere, under the institutions of capitalistic
finance, is as fatal to the realization of liberty for all as it is fatal to the realiza-
tion of equality” (116). This fatality is two-fold. First, conceiving of liberty in
terms of the economic presumes that there is an equality of access toward gaining
economic opportunity and employment. Although the traditions of Mann ([1848]
1957) suggest that schools are the machinery through which society is equalized,
we know this not to be necessarily true. The equality of opportunity to gain access
to liberty understood as economic is suspect for too many.
Second, if effective power and action to improve quality of life are considered
in terms of the economic, liberty is restrained because the economic imperative
within global capitalism requires resources of wealth to be distributed unequally
and in accordance with an exchange motive set by the markets, or those con-
trolling the markets. Liberty, the ability to act and control one’s life, is, then,
relative to accrued wealth. Wealth too often is distributed in accordance with
the exchange value of resources that are scarce. Many times, the scarce resource
is technical and privileged knowledge often earned through unequal access to
channels of schooling, credentialing, or licensing, something that cannot stand

as liberty. Unquestioning belief in this conflation of terms is what West (2004)
calls “free-market fundamentalism” and functions to “trivialize concern for the
public interest” (3–4). In this way, the counternarrative work of critical educators
becomes even more important; schools, in teaching about democracy, need to use
existential experiences of students to help define the term via Dewey’s ([1935]
1964b) conception of liberty, previously developed.
Near the beginning of this article, we stated that it is the job of the social
studies teacher to teach what it is that citizens should care about in a democracy
and why—two very difficult tasks. Unfortunately for democracy, the economic
liberty of immediate gratification of self-interests holds more appeal than the
slow, working mode of democratic change, as long, of course, as people are

benefiting from the current economic arrangements. Perhaps the best we can
do, and in relation to identifying institutional means for realizing democracy, is to
illustrate through various examples that even though the institutional arrangements
of democratic institutions for effecting quality of life and social change are slow,
they are at least in the best interests of citizens, because they are controlled by
citizens through the political.
Effective democratic action can occur through institutions promoting civil and
political rights, but first students need to be aware of what those rights are and how
to tap into those groups and organizations that help protect them. Easily identifiable
economic and social rights systems include those around elections, political party
affiliation and participation, and nongovernmental organizations. Civic education
efforts in schools are often geared toward citizenship skills curricula, service
learning opportunities, and the organizing that can occur through democratically
structured school groups. Participation in the support of independent media outlets
is yet another outlet for action—not to mention exercising one’s own freedom
of information—as well as effective legal address of grievances against another
citizen and, participating in local civic events (Beetham et al. 2001, 5). Helping
students identify institutional means of realizing democracy is an activity that goes
hand-in-hand with exercising and knowing democracy. Social studies classrooms
need more attention on identifying means of realizing democracy.
Furthermore, identifying less traditional social formations involved in the
democratic project proves educative in terms of teaching democracy. Pointing
to the historical markers of organizing for revolution against Britain, Abolitionist
Movement, workers movements, the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Move-
ment, and the fall of South African apartheid hold obvious promise—the coun-
ternarrative approach to teaching history (see Loewen, 1996; Zinn, 1999; Zinn
and Arnove, 2004). But other, less solidified examples point to the possibility of
Multitude, and include the Zapatistas in Mexico, the environmental movements,
the protests against the WTO in Seattle, groups concerned with border security,
and the innumerous new formations found on the Internet and within the context
of new technologies.
These formations prove harder to outline and track in terms of their place
in history, yet they hold the promise of democratic countermovement, just as
they hold the potential for abuse and exploitation. In many ways, information
technology provides the model for the dual nature and simultaneity of Empire and
Multitude. It is important to note, however, that students do not need education in
the practice of these new formations, for indeed, it is often they that do the forming
but rather, the pedagogical project is in the coming to see the political potential of
that practice.
Practicing democracy by exercising it is seemingly obvious; however, it is quite
difficult. Borrowing again from Dewey ([1935] 1964a), he warns that one of the
difficulties with the later inceptions of liberal democracy that is an ironic challenge
to democracy is that the individual is viewed as being something given, complete,
ready-made, and without contestation; and, that the modern time and place in
the West is wherein the rights of the individual are fully realized. Such popular
views, according to Dewey, represent the “fundamental defect” of understanding
liberal democracy as an organizing theory, which was originally a radical form of
democracy. The defect is in not understanding that the individual is something that
must constantly be struggled over through democratically associating—practicing
democracy—with others as a means of controlling liberty.
Many students view the current time as a time of full realization, such that one
can operate on democratic auto-pilot because the modern form of democracy is
the final triumph of human political reason. Our fear is that students who have
come to this conclusion have not done so in an intellectually honest manner, one
that involves interrogation of self and sources. It is a bit more honest to say that
this particular historical time and place in the United States has seen an ade-
quate job done in terms of instituting socially controlled checks and balances on
tendentiously liberty-usurping entities, particularly those in the economic sphere.
However, recent history in both politics and economics proves that there is still
room for improvement. Hearkening again to the words of Jefferson, a good democ-
racy is one in which its citizens are consciously vigilant of the ambitions of those
willing and desirous to pervert democracy for self-interest. Although democracy
should be exercised through many of the institutions previously listed, in terms
of a schooling context however, what the social studies teacher can aim toward is
exercising democracy through various classroom processes: processes by which
students’ minds become democratically discerning and discriminating; are capa-
ble of penetrating below the surface of social phenomenon and political rhetoric
to identify contouring and animating currents; and, processes that help students
realize democracy through politically institutional means, such as schooling. Per-
haps a constant question for the social studies teacher is “How, through content,
pedagogy, and lived experiences can I promote democracy by helping students

practice—know, identify, exercise—democracy?”
IV. CONCLUSION
The beginning of this article offered two anecdotes from social studies methods
courses that pointed to both the limited view of what a social studies educator might
do, the markers Empire and Multitude as terms of analysis, and the implications of
the influx of free-market fundamentalism into conceptions of democracy. These

stories were offered in the spirit of pointing to the need for this discussion.
However, we return to those stories to note that, in both cases, students reported
on evaluations that a significant (and surprising) point of learning in class was in
the role of citizenship education in the social studies. Cautiously, we offer this a
space of hope—or, as we say elsewhere, potential power—in this daring project
to teach democracy. There are, of course, no guarantees in any educative process,
but teacher education at its best always includes efforts at rethinking, theorizing,
and practice. It is our hope that those three efforts continue in the daring work to
know, identify, and practice democracy.
To conclude, we return to the questions that began this project. In what ways is
democracy itself challenged by the changing and fluid social order, and how are the
terms of engagement, education, and democracy changing as the world changes?
In what ways does this impact public schools and schooling? We suggest that
as contemporary theorists strive to understand the power of certain logics—free
market fundamentalism only being one example—in the current milieu, we can
embrace a social analysis that recognizes both the global and the local. Indeed, it
seems that the forces of Empire have beaten us to the punch in forming a global
political strategy that recognizes the changing nature and value of local identities
and such terms as democracy and sovereignty. In speaking of the possibilities for
poststructural theory, Patti Lather (2001) has suggested that we “work the ruins”.
Unfortunately, the forces of Empire—in this case, the United States—have already
embraced such a position in terms of a global strategy to reconstruct Iraq and, we
offer to you here, in terms of the educational reform of accountability. Foucault
(2003) and others have suggested that democracy and how it operates within
structures of power needs to be retheorized. Hardt and Negri (2000; 2004), building
on Foucault’s charge, have offered a conceptual framework for understanding how
democracy and global sociocultural relations have been reinvented. This being the
case, perhaps now it is time to reconstruct and reinvent conceptions of both
curriculum and social studies education that include the complexities of Empire
and the possibilities for countermovements within it; perhaps now is the time to
think of education and the multitude. We end with the admonition of Foucault,
who seems to amend Jefferson’s famous citation regarding freedom and eternal
vigilance, adding specificity to the warning.
We have to defend ourselves against our enemies because the State apparatuses, the
law, and the power structures not only do not defend us against our enemies; they are
the instruments our enemies are using to pursue and subjugate us. (Foucault 2003, 61)
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Education: From Context to Theory to

Philosophy’s aim is to offer a reconstruction of the conditions that make communi-

Correspondence should be addressed to Robert J. Helfenbein, Jr., Indiana University-Indianapolis,

A recent tension under exploration by education scholars is the deceptively

I. REIMAGINING: DEMOCRACY AS CONTEXT

discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power

studies in a certification-only program in hopes of acquiring a social studies teach-

At first glance, Mathew’s position espouses libertarian perspectives regarding

II. THEORIZING: REARTICULATING THE TERRAIN

a concept, Empire frames itself outside of the trajectory of history, “not as a

production. For example, the accountability movement in this country—now so

At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of

Although, without question, technological innovation plays a major role in the

III. PRACTICE: ISSUES TO CONSIDER WHEN

Thus far, we have identified democracy as a theoretical and organizational context.

coin of Empire and Multitude. Although intricately related, knowing, identifying,

Identifying institutional means for realizing democracy within the political

channels of schooling, credentialing, or licensing, something that cannot stand

slow, working mode of democratic change, as long, of course, as people are

pedagogy, and lived experiences can I promote democracy by helping students

the influx of free-market fundamentalism into conceptions of democracy. These

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