Freedom, Responsibility and Democratic Schools

Kurt Meredith is co-director of the Orava project in Slovakia and is a coauthor and co-director of the Reading and Writing for Critical Thinking program. He is currently a faculty member in the Curriculum and Instruction Department at the University of Northern Iowa.

Two words - freedom and responsibility - must be kept in mind as we think about the relationship between schooling and democracy. These two ideas are key to our consideration of educational objectives in a democratic society and ought to be remembered while reading this article. At the Slovak Reading Association conference held in Bratislava in July 2000, the main theme centered on the relations between democracy, education and critical literacy. The links are powerful and have enormous consequence for how we think about teaching, learning and the results of schooling. Democracy, education, and Critical Literacy are fundamentally related in the following way. Democracy is about the peaceful mediation of two powerful entities - self and community. The tensions between these two have dominated political thought for centuries. Critical Literacy is in essence about community; a community of thought or understanding, albeit between an author and a reader or between a task (technology) and the capacity to do the task, as in computer literacy. Critical Literacy is about the capacity to engage in community as a capable individual. So, like democracy; Critical Literacy embraces both self and community while seeking to mediate the gaps in between.

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