ABSTRACT
The willingness of educational professionals to move toward democratizing education comes in fits and starts, encumbered, in part, by conflicting values of teacher professionalism and democracy. Amy Guttmann describes the conflict as a tension between the professional autonomy of teachers and the perceived erosion of their competence when students influence the form or content of their own education (1987, p. 88). Thus professional autonomy/authority impedes the democratizing of education. Dewey warned that if schools do not change, do not progress toward democratization, they risk taking refuge in an ark that ‘is not the ark of safety in a deluge. It is being carried by the deluge of outside forces, varying, shifting, turning aimlessly with every current in the tides of modern life’ (Dewey, 1946, p. 48). The ‘deluge of outside forces’ that Dewey described decades ago are pressuring the schools of today. The ‘changing current of modern life’ is affecting human rights legislation in most developed nations. As an example, I will be discussing the recent legislative changes that came into effect when Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the Charter) became a part of Canada’s Constitution in 1982.
