Classical (direct) democracy | Contemporary (representative) democracy | |
View of democracy | Grounded in a way of life in which all can develop their qualities and capacities. It envisages a society that itself is intrinsically educative and in which political socialization is a distinctively educative process. Democracy is a moral ideal requiring expanding opportunities for direct participation. | Results from, and reflects, the political requirements of a modern market economy. Democracy is a way of choosing political leaders involving, for example, regular elections, representative government and an independent judiciary. |
The primary aim of education | To initiate individuals into the values, attitudes and modes of behaviour appropriate to active participation in democratic institutions. | To offer a minority an education appropriate to future political leaders; the majority an education fitted to their primary social role as producers, workers and consumers. |
Curriculum content | There is a focus on liberal education, a curriculum which fosters forms of critical and explanatory knowledge that allow people to interrogate social norms and to reflect critically on dominant institutions and practices. | Mass education will focus on the world of work and upon those attitudes and skills, and that knowledge that have some market value. |
Typical educational processes | Participatory practices that cultivate the skills and attitudes that democratic deliberation require. | Pedagogical relationships will tend to be authoritarian and competition will, as in society generally, play an essential role. |
School organization | Schools are viewed as communities in which the problems of communal life are resolved through collective deliberation and a shared concern for the common good. | Schools are organized around a pyramidal structure with the head at its apex. |