Student Participation & Democratic Education

MODERN life means democracy, democracy means freeing intelligence for independent effectiveness-the emancipation of mind as an individual organ to do its own work. We naturally associate democracy with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of thought behind it is only chaos. (Dewey, 1903, p. 193). 

Democracy for Dewey means freedom of mind in discovering and proof; it is a free capacity to think for one’s self. For Dewey, democracy entails finding conditions to “the development of individual mental power and to adequate responsibility for its use” (p. 194). Students’ meaningful participation in their learning sets up the conditions for freedom of thought. Dewey argued that the growth of freedom of thought entails that students participate in determining the conditions and the aims of their own work; Dewey explained:

Until the emphasis changes to the conditions which make it necessary for the [student] to take an active share in the personal building up of his own problems and to participate in methods of solving them […] mind is not really freed. (1903, p. 201) 

Accordingly, students’ meaningful participation in their learning is another fundamental principle of democracy (Dewey, 1903; 1938). When it came to democratic education, Dewey (1938) was clear about students’ active participation in their learning. Dewey emphasized participation as the point at which democracy and learning meet in the classroom. For Dewey, participation is democratic when students construct purposes and meaning, carry out plans, and evaluate results. For Dewey, learning material supplied by others is a denial of democracy. He argued, “To subject mind to an outside and ready-made material is a denial of the ideal of democracy, which roots itself ultimately in the principle of moral, self-directing individuality” (Dewey, 1903, p. 199). From Dewey’s perspective, the external and ready-made material “tends automatically to perpetuate the very conditions of inefficiency, lack of interest, inability to assume positions of self-determination” (p. 198). In other words, by creating the environment and learning experiences that bring student to actively participate in making decisions in the learning process, faculty can develop the skills needed to make democracy a reality with their students. Dewey (1903) asserts that the process for reaching democratic education principles should be participatory and inclusive; the student has “a share in determining the conditions and the aims of his own work” (p. 179).