The War on Public Education: Agonist Democracy and the Fight for Schools as Public Things

Abstract

Agonistic critiques of democratic theory conceptualize democracy as a site of conflict and struggle; as the fight against privatization escalates, these critiques become more relevant for educational governance. Public education governance has, in addition, increasingly been the site of growing conflicts between federal, states and local levels, as populist and other types of dissent are now emerging in educational politics. These conflicts reached a new nexus with the nomination of Betsy DeVos as U.S. Secretary of Education. This nomination represents a vivid battle over public school as a “public thing,” a material object, space, institution or place of symbolic and embodied civic importance (Honig 2017). DeVos’ nomination stirred up, in popular imagination, the idea of public schools as “public things” of meaning and value for many citizens who participated in unprecedented ways to (unsuccessfully) block her appointment. It was with this threat to public education that the value of school as a “public thing” became crystalized among a diverse network of citizens. This political moment reveals 1) the nature of schools as public things, 2) the importance of agonist critiques of democracy, and public work, as a means for citizens to help safe-guard the future of schools as public things. I conclude by explaining the limits of agonism as a comprehensive approach to the democratic governance of schooling, advocating for its use as a critique and expansion of current models of public engagement with educational politics.

Agonism in education: a systematic scoping review and discussion of its educational potential

“…Schmitt was a German political theorist and prominent member of the Nazi Party and Mouffe's association with his philosophy -especially her "hope to employ the Schmittian conception of the political in a way that is compatible with plurality" (Schaap, 2007, p. 64) -is often discussed as problematic (e.g. Knight Abowitz, 2018). Schaap (2007) also questions how an us/them dichotomy can be useful in addressing pluralism that is envisaged to involve multiple perspectives.…”

“…Schaap, 2007). Examples of associative approaches include an exploration of schools as sites where shared identities are (re)constructed (Knight Abowitz, 2018); and Andersson and Olson's (2014) notion of public pedagogy, that is an opportunity to become public, traced to Arendt's concept of natality.…”

Preliminary Material

“…Moreover, proponents of radical democratic education, for instance, have maintained that liberal democratic theories ultimately seek to erase conflict, and as such, miss out on opportunities to appreciate the advantages of political agonism and the productivity of dissent (e.g. Ruitenberg, 2009;Todd, 2010;Tryggvason, 2017;Knight-Abowitz, 2018).…”