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Democracy and schooling: The paradox of co‐operative schools in a neoliberal age?
Author(s) -
Woodin Tom,
Gristy Cath
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
journal of philosophy of education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.501
H-Index - 41
eISSN - 1467-9752
pISSN - 0309-8249
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9752.12690
Subject(s) - democracy , transformative learning , vision , witness , mainstream , sociology , democratic education , pedagogy , political science , politics , law , anthropology
From the first co‐operative trust school at Reddish Vale in Manchester in 2006, the following decade would witness a remarkable growth of ‘co‐operative schools’ in England, which at one point numbered over 850. This paper outlines the key development of democratic education by the co‐operative schools network. It explains the approach to democracy and explores the way values were put into practice. At the heart of co‐operativism lay a tension between engaging with technical everyday reforms and utopian transformative visions of an educational future. A new arena of debate and practice was established with considerable importance for our understanding of democratic education within the mainstream.