Rethinking democracy and education: Alternatives to capitalist reproductionorwriting the poetry of the future?

What stands between individuals and their freedom to build futures where no one is enslaved, subjected or exploited by powerful individuals, groups, forms of organisation, elites, class divisions, faiths or states? Is there hope for educational strategies in a contemporary scene pervaded by discourses where truth, the stock-in-trade of education, is replaced by ‘post-truth’, which deals in undermining knowledge and reason? A century after the publication of Democracy and Education, in which Dewey argued for the mutually dependent relationship linking a legitimate education system and a thriving democracy, many would argue that democracy and education have been decoupled, and that both have been diminished and devalued as a result (Labaree, 2011; Schostak and Goodson, 2012). If, as some have argued, we are living in a ‘post-democratic’ society (Crouch, 2004), where expertise is deployed to address social and economic problems, and where governance is a matter of rational-technical management, then the political, as a choice to be made between visions of society, is no more. As Fukuyama (2006) argued, following the fall of the Berlin Wall (9 November 1989), we have seen the ‘end of history’ – that is, the end of the great battles between political ideologies. All that remains, the