19
subgroups oppressed by the social circumstances of war, and allow students, teachers and
the wider public to envision a different political future.
V. Expansive Education
How do we bring the normative ideal to bear on what the school and state do?
Walzer asserts in regard to Israel that “…perhaps a unified ‘civics’ curriculum, which
would teach the values of democracy, pluralism, and toleration and be imposed on all the
different state-run schools—Arab and Jewish, secular and religious.”
39
But he reserves
this option to the time when the international conflict would be over, and it might be (just
a little) more realistic. Assuming that it may still take a while before lasting peace is
achieved in the region, as well as in other parts of the world, schools should find ways to
grapples with the needs generated by a protracted conflict.
How should the aims of democratic education be interpreted in the context of
war? How is the education system to foster and promote democratic values, attitudes and
skills in the face not of diversity or even intolerance, but of paralyzing, patriotic unity of
opinion, which is widely regarded as essential to national survival? It is hard to assume
that recognition and tolerance will be readily cultivated in the classroom in times of war.
They still remain desirable, even urgently needed attitudes; but to promote them, along
with other democratic values and attitudes, educators may need to act in ways more
radical than deliberating and teaching an inclusive curriculum.
As Giroux reminds us, it is the role of educators to “provide spaces of resistance within
the public schools… while simultaneously providing the knowledge and skills that
enlarge their sense of the social and their possibilities as viable agents capable of
expanding and deepening democratic public life.”
40
To fulfill the liberal demand for civic
equality, educators should create spaces of resistance in public schools. Actively
supporting the expression of a variety of standpoints, rather than plainly responding to
38
Gutmann, Democratic Education, 309.
39
Michael Walzer, On Toleration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 43.
Convention