Higher Education for Democracy

This collection of essays describes recent experiments at Goddard College (Vermont), which for 60 years has been developing programs based on the ideals of democracy and the principles of progressive education. Higher Education for Democracy draws on that rich history as well as on the legacy of the progressive movement in the 1930s and 1940s (which held education for democracy as one of its central tenets), while exploring the principles and practices needed to confront the new challenges to democracy that society is now facing. Chapters describing experiments in both residential education and short-residency distance-learning programs include discussion of such topics as teaching as a reciprocal and emancipatory relationship, democratic organizational models, spirituality and forbidden knowledge, narrative and autobiography as a means to empowerment, experiential approaches to reading and writing, interdisciplinary study in the arts, dialogical uses of new technologies, and Freirian and feminist approaches to the pedagogy of the oppressed and the oppressor. A concluding chapter explains how the concept of education for democracy can once again bring together, in new ways, the progressive goals of fostering individual development within diverse democratic communities. This volume includes contributions by Eduardo Aquino, Ken Bergstrom, Katherine Jelly, Carl Glickman, Kathleen Kesson, Geraldine and Gus Lyn-Piluso, Nora Mitchell, Steven A. Schapiro, Richard Schramm, and Shelley Vermilya.