Oracle Online

The societal understanding of the nature of democracy is indeed interesting and important, but I wish to push on just what role democracy actually plays in our lives. Why, if democracy is so vital, don’t we have any in our institutions? It was said irony died when Henry Kissinger received a Nobel Peace Prize. Well, irony came back from the dead to sit in classrooms. In these peculiar places, students are told repeatedly about the virtues of democracy. Meanwhile, they have almost no rights until they graduate high school. Students lack freedom of speech, cannot choose not to attend school, often cannot even choose what to wear, and most certainly lack the ability to participate in decisions that affect what happens to them in school. How can students learn about democracy if we prevent them from practicing it?

Certainly there is a large body of rationalizations about how this is necessary because until they turn 18 students are only children. But this is a fear-driven, self-fulfilling prophecy, in which we assume (or are terrified) that “children” are unable to make decisions that affect themselves and therefore construct a structure that prevents them from learning this essential skill; but it is also dependent on a culturally specific creation of the idea of “childhood” as opposed to “adulthood.” These are not universal, inviolable categories, but rather cultural constructions with limited, if any, usefulness.

And it just gets worse from there. We do not allow students to make any but the most absurd and meaningless of decisions, and even then often under circumstances that are manipulative or coercive. Then, as “adults,” those students find themselves in contexts which repeat these same anti-democratic structures. Companies of any size are almost always structured in a way that cannot be described as anything but fascist: there is a leader who makes all the decisions, with a hierarchy underneath that person of successively less decision-making ability. And at the bottom we find our poor graduates, who have no more freedoms than they did in school and whose only hope of attaining any level of autonomy is to slowly work their way up the hierarchy. And this same pattern is repeated throughout our social institutions, especially in our religious organizations.

I suspect there are links between these institutions that explain the refusal to allow democratic participation in decisions. In particular, work and school are inseparable. Work is central to American society and to our individual lives. “What do you do for a living,” anyone? I do not believe it is a coincidence that mandatory primary education and the industrial revolution arose at the same time. Accounts from this period emphasize that it was difficult to make workers stay at tedious or laborious jobs; education was seen as a way to remedy this. The values we are taught in school mirror those which make good workers. In either context, we must be able to sit still and focus on tasks for hours at a time, we must obey authority figures, and our time is strictly regimented.

And even the way we value people reflects this centrality of work (and school as preparation for work) in our lives. Industrious, productive, efficient, and hard-working are all accolades, while lazy, inefficient, and unproductive are all insults strong enough to drive national policy. After all, politicians have worked hard to “reform” welfare to ensure that we are not encouraging people to be “lazy,” and instead are giving them “job skills” necessary to get back into the “workforce” so they can again be “productive members of society.”

We need to decide if these terms and ideas are really so holy. Making such decisions will be a first step toward practicing democracy.