The public debate on democracy is often constrained within an alienating and disenfranchising
narrative of opinion polls campaign platforms personalities and formal structures that
generate legislation all of which surreptitiously seems to trickle down to the classroom. Paul
R. Carr asserts that democracy must be cultivated in a vigorous conscientious meaningful and
critical way in and through education in order for it to have salience in society especially
within a neoliberal conjuncture that promotes limited space for epistemological interrogation
of how we understand and are engaged in maintaining and or transforming our societies. Building
on the critical pedagogical work of Paulo Freire Joe L. Kincheloe and others this book
develops a framework for understanding how a thicker democratic education can be conceptualized
and implemented in schools. The book aims to move the focus on democracy away from voting and
place it more properly on the importance of social justice and political literacy as a way of
understanding what democracy is and importantly how to make it more relevant for all of
society. The book concludes that another democracy is possible as well as being desirable and
that education is the fundamental intersection in which it must be developed.
