Knowledge and Democracy: The Strife of the Dialectic

Abstract

The curricula of public education systems provide the symbolic resources for modern democratic societies. Anthropologist Benedict Anderson (1991), writing in the last two decades of the twentieth century, called curricula the ‘basic substantive content thought to be necessary for society as it is, and for society as it is to become in a future imagined community’ (cited in McEneaney and Meyer, 2000, p. 189). This realisation, that modern societies have new ways of producing meaning and new collective representations of the world, has its origins in the work of an earlier anthropologist, Emile Durkheim. Durkheim, writing at the beginning of that century, described the purpose of national education systems as socialising young people into new ways of representing the world that enable modern society to be rationalised and secularised. The access to the mass schooling of the period was an important contributor to democratic politics. Scientific ways of thinking were the intellectual means to reject the tyranny of traditional culture and ascribed status for an identity that recognises the individual as the bearer of human rights in a new relationship to society. These new ways of thinking represent the ‘powerful knowledge’ that Michael Young and Johan Muller detail in Chapter 3 of this volume. This is the knowledge created in the disciplines of the arts, sciences, and humanities and used to understand experience and to take us beyond experience.