ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on economic justice, a belief that all humans should be able to provide for themselves and their families, through their labor, basic needs – including housing, food, health care, and education – as well as opportunities for the establishment of positive relationship with others of all races and creeds and the more-than-human. The Institute for Democratic Education in America characterizes democratic education as “participatory,” “empowering,” and “democratic,” that includes student choice in the curriculum, student-led reform movements, and shared decision-making. An important component in moral education was “education of the heart.” In heart education children’s hearts would be educated in social situations when they learned to be kind, just, magnanimous, and deny themselves for the sake of others. The chapter concludes that their ideas represent different views as to the social purposes of education, including different visions of the “good life” and a just society, as well as what should be taught in the early childhood classroom.
