ABSTRACT
There is an intimate relationship between a given society and the schools and educational institutions it designs. As children bear society’s hope and fears concerning the future, so schools bear the demands to prepare children for the future. But what kind of future? Or, whose future is at stake if children represent the potential for change? Do children become the battleground, the contested space, with schools as the instruments of war? In order to think this through, a distinction can be made between schools and research designed under the key principles of democracy and those that are designed for non-democratic political orders. Appropriate schooling in, say, a ‘leadership democracy’ (see Chapter 1) would involve celebrating elite forms of organization, with a pedagogy instilling respect for and obedience to hierarchies of management and control. On the other hand, a democracy based upon principles of equality and freedom for all would require all institutions, particularly schools, to employ such principles for preparing young people in the values, principles, procedures and practices of voicing viewpoints in public spaces as fundamental to engaging with others in the creation of community. The pedagogy underlying ‘leadership democracy’ has to do with compliance, the manufacture of consent and the moulding and fashioning of the public mind; the second has to do with having a voice that counts in all public matters. In each case the notion of the ‘public’ is fundamental to who has access to public space and thus who is rendered visible and audible or invisible and inaudible. In each case, power is organized differently for different purposes, whether it is organized as a force by one person or group to ensure compliance by others or whether it is about the use of powers as a force for freedom for all. If children are the bearers of contested futures, when does force become enabling or constraining? When is it violence?
