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Democracy is increasingly being challenged, by disengagement and by anti-pluralist movements (Levitsky and Ziblatt in How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future, Viking, New York, 2018; Wikforss in "Därför demokrati. Om kunskapen och folkstyret" [Because of this, democracy. On knowledge and people's rule] Fri Tanke, 2021; Svolik et al. in J Democr 34(1):5-20, 2023). This article draws upon a theoretical discussion about democracy, pluralism, and threats to democracy. Departing from Dewey, Laclau, Mouffe, Young and Allen, we address democracy as an ideology that centers around pluralism, or an ever-increasing inclusion of voices from the margins as its goal. We argue that perceiving democracy pedagogically as a pluralistic ideology would support students' democratic citizenship and equip them for a world where threats to democracy are being reported. Employing a case study on Finnish social studies textbooks, we analyze how democracy as well as threats to democracy are discursively portrayed. Our study shows that the textbooks present democracy as predominantly institutional and static. We also find that while disengagement is portrayed as a problem for democracy, anti-pluralist movements are generally not referred to as a threat. Additionally, we examine a discourse in the textbooks that connects freedom of speech with democracy in a way that favors a multitude of opinions, even antidemocratic ones, over creating space for marginalized voices. Drawing on the theoretical discussion and the results of the analysis, we argue that a focus on pluralism as the core of democracy makes the opposition between restricting hate speech and advocating for democracy redundant.

Political knowledge and democratic attitudes are recognized in contemporary studies as important dimensions of democratic political culture. Furthermore, knowledge and attitudes can be seen as integral parts of political competence. Unlike other dimensions of political culture such as, for example, political participation, political interest, etc., research on political knowledge and democratic attitudes are more an exception than a rule. This assessment is especially true for Croatia. In this paper, we attempt to address some of these gaps by focusing on the exploration of political competences of Croatian final-year secondary school students. The paper is divided into two major sections. In the first part, we discuss the meaning and importance of political competence for the functioning of democratic political systems. The second part consists of a presentation and discussion of the research results on political knowledge and democratic attitudes of Croatian final-year secondary school students conducted in three time points - 2010, 2015 and 2021. By doing so, we want to detect the levels of political knowledge and democratic attitudes, as well as the possible changes that occurred in these levels during the research period. Finally, we are also interested in the relationship between these two dimensions of political competence.

The paper is based on the concept of political culture, which is particularly important for the maintenance and functioning of a democratic political system and is closely linked with the political literacy of young people. In this paper research focus is on the two dimensions of political culture -- political values and trust. Specifically, the main research question is: what are the determinants of accepting constitutional values and the trust in political institutions of final year secondary school pupils? The paper use the data provided by research on political literacy of final year secondary school pupils. In order to provide answer to the research question the hierarchical multiple regression is used. In the first step, particular socio-demographic variables (sex, education of mother and education of father) were introduced. In the second step, the type of secondary school education was added. The third group of predictors encompassed the level of religiosity, generalized prejudices and authoritarianism. In the final step political knowledge was included. The introduced model provides certain explanation regarding constitutional values, but fails to explain distrust in political institutions. The phenomenon of low trust in political institutions is discussed in paper.

This article considers how to approach the task of developing a curriculum for social justice at a time of planetary and systemic crisis, on the basis that both 'human capital development' and passing on 'the best that has been thought and said' from the past are inadequate responses. If our aim is to create the conditions for human survival and greater social justice, we need to radically commit to values of care, solidarity, equality and democracy, and the development of a broad set of critical literacies. Rather than simply hoping and waiting for better policies and systems, can we usefully find purpose and joy and start to prefigure a more socially just world in the here and now?

One of the challenges in substantiating deliberative democracy as a normative theory is the educational challenge of how to cultivate civic virtue, especially mutual respect and civility, in children. The cultivation of civic virtue is not limited to school education, but is also an activity related to family education. However, liberal theorists who advocate the theory of deliberative democracy, based on the dualism of public and private, have limited their discussions to the issue of civic development in the field of public education. This article proposes to understand and compare the many competing theories on public-private dualism, particularly in liberal and feminist spaces. Beginning with an analysis of the work of liberal theorists such as David Archard as well as Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift, and moving on to that of feminist theorists such as Susan Okin, this article examines competing theories on education in school and in the family, to whom the responsibility of education belongs, and where feminist and liberal thought enlighten these debates. This article will clarify the theoretical tendencies and principles of liberal arguments aimed at overcoming the public-private dualism in education, and present a strategy for overcoming the challenges that this theory encompasses by seeking reference points in feminist thought, especially with attention to conception of relational autonomy.

This article is the first of four articles exploring democratic schools co-founded by teenage students in Norway and Sweden. Our larger project explores the relationship between democracy in education and educational dialogism. Both democracy in education and educational dialogism are partially rooted in the idea that education should be a personal meaning-making practice where the participants can create and organize their lives in ways that make sense to them and explore their interests, values, and desires. We describe the processes of founding two schools--one in Oslo, Norway, and the other in Gothenburg, Sweden--in which students practiced the right to democratic governance. We describe the process of the founding of these schools against the background of the students' movements in the late 1960s and the 1970s and the social and political conditions in Norway and Sweden at that time. We explore the students' perspectives on the possibility, desirability, and legitimacy of the students' voices in ethical-ontological dialogues in which the participants jointly examine their relationships with the world, with others, and with themselves. Further, we explore the forms of democratic school governance that Norwegian and Swedish students created and identified tensions that appeared between the legitimacy of individual students' rights to ownership of their learning, teachers' ownership of teaching, and the conventional normative educational policies in Norway and Sweden.

Purpose: The Samuel Paty murder has generated a great response from the professional community and the world of education and schools in Europe and worldwide. In a unique way, civic educators expressed horror, sorrow, and solidarity with the family and with their French colleagues. The article is dedicated to Samuel Paty and the question of whether and how we as a community of international civic educators can learn from this terrible event. Design/methodology/approach: The article presents a case reconstruction using press and public documents attempting to disentangle the actors' positions, their stated intentions and contexts, and the following political intricacies of the case. Findings: The murder of Samuel Paty provoked a series of educational policy reactions that have paradoxical effects on civic education in schools, seen its intentions of political-social inclusion into a citizenship model. The case analysis documents the pitfalls of the instrumentalization of civic education for the securitization of societies.

This article explores the causes of the epistemological crisis that gave rise to conspiracy theories which culminated in large swathes of the U.S. population refusing to accept the outcome of a democratic election. An epistemological crisis is defined by a blurring of facts and falsehoods to the degree that blatant and obvious propaganda holds sway over large segments of the population, resulting in truth decay. We provide an analysis of the propaganda themes collected and identified by the Computational Propaganda Project from April through July of 2020 that demonstrate their prevalence in American social media platforms. We then show how education may limit propaganda's deleterious effects. We approach our research in an interdisciplinary way from the fields of education and cultural anthropology and so contribute an angle to the current conversations about education in a democratic society that has not been the primary focus of educational thought.

Student governments can play an important part of the habit development of participating in democracy. A study in 2012, however, illustrated just how few students actually voted in their own student government elections. With a changing world of national politics, there is a need to understand student voting as a possible reflection of participation after college. This study compared student voting in their own government elections between 2012 and 2020, finding several, yet no significant, differences in voter turnout. The study used a sample of doctoral and comprehensive institutions, finding under one-in-five students voted in their own government elections.

One of the critical issues facing Historians today has been the emergence of Strong State regimes and the politicized pseudo history they produce in countries claiming to adhere to democratic norms. The attack on the Capital of the United States was based on a series of lies about voter fraud supported by President Donald Trump and members of Congress. Countering ideology based on a complete disregard for truth is now of paramount importance in the United States. This paper studies Trump's promise to Make America Great Again (MAGA) as a further evolution of Lost Cause mythos that began after the Civil War. The original story casts the enfranchisement of African Americans as a failure touting white supremacy and the righteousness of Jim Crow laws. How can History teachers counter these highly politicized myths? I suggest that the methodology of our profession may provide us with some important tools. John Dewey underscored the importance of critical inquiry to the preservation and advancement of democracy. Teaching students how to think historically goes a long way in the process of producing citizenry who are ready to participate in civil society. To that end I conclude this essay with a course that I teach entitled "Witches, Aliens, and Other Enemies." The course is designed to set moments of mass hysteria and paranoia in the American narrative against the background of reason and rational legal law utilizing the Salem witch hunt at the end of the seventeenth century and the "red scare" following World War II as case studies to stimulate student exploration.

Recent legislation restricting the topics teachers may discuss with students raises the issue of what role the teacher should play in society. We argue that this legislative scrutiny of teachers is symptomatic of an aversion to defining what a teacher is. We argue that, though a reluctance to provide an explicit definition of "teacher" may be warranted for reasons of democracy, academic freedom, and diversity, it also leaves open the possibility of political appropriations of the teacher, some of which may be the antithesis of democracy, academic freedom, and diversity. The role of the teacher thus remains subject to perpetual interrogation and change. A well-theorized and stable definition of the teacher, then, would preclude appropriations of the teacher for political purposes such as cultural assimilation, religious indoctrination, or economic gain. Such a definition would need to be sufficiently broad to be applicable to all teachers in all places, while remaining narrow enough to ward off undemocratic impositions. In other words, the definition must be ontological, structural. We employ the work of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida to evaluate the meaning of "teacher." We first give an example of a legally binding document that provides only negative definitions of the teacher. We then provide an overview of Derrida's theory of iterability and Heidegger's philosophy of language, while utilizing and critiquing an alternative conception of the Derridean teacher offered by Charles Bingham. We argue that the teacher, properly construed, ought to engage in an explicit, intersubjective inquiry into the ontological foundations of existence.

According to Thomas Falk, an authoritarian insurgency against the institutions of liberal democracy operates along both political-economic and phenomenological axes. By corrupting language and stimulating vigilance, this insurgency endeavors to diminish the perceptual and communicative capacities that allow us to articulate a shared reality and exercise agency within it. In this article, he argues that education is a political and economic enterprise concerned with attention-formation. He considers public schools present a site battle in which to defend and promote the conditions and practices of a free and democratic society.

Critics suggest that youth lack basic civic knowledge and are disengaging from civic action, particularly political action. The validity of these criticisms depends on how civic knowledge and civic engagement are defined. The results of four studies of civic education, conducted by the IEA over a period of almost 50 years, are examined in terms of the definition of these concepts. Five questions are addressed: (1) What are the goals of civic education? (2) What is civic knowledge? (3) What is civic engagement? (4) What are civic attitudes and values? (5) What do we know about teaching civics in schools? The results suggest that (1) there is disagreement on the goals of civic education; (2) civic knowledge is often equated with the memorization of facts about government and politics; (3) civic engagement is different from political engagement, with today's youth more interested in civic engagement; (4) civic attitudes and values may be more important than civic knowledge or engagement for preparing informed, productive citizens; and (5) there is limited time for teaching civics in schools, and the ways in which civics is currently taught are inconsistent with the kind of teaching needed.

I draw on Dewey's concept of democratically constituted society to investigate whether Japanese schools are organized in a way that students can experience democratic living, by examining diversity and interaction within schools. I also rely on Reimer's notion of citizenship education to explore whether schools in Japan foster the competencies necessary to understand, care about, and act upon global challenges, by examining the teaching of relevance and development of sense of purpose. Based on the analyses of PISA data, I find the following characteristics of Japanese education compared to OECD countries: (1) the high school system sorts students not only by their academic achievement but simultaneously by their family background, creating the least diversified schools; (2) interaction, measured by student participation and debate in class, is low; (3) teaching relevance and application of scientific concepts in class are limited; and (4) students have a low sense of purpose at the end of compulsory education. The lack of opportunity to practice and internalize democratic values in the school, to connect what is being taught to real-world issues, and to develop one's sense of purpose may partly explain the current youths' political apathy and why there is little youth-led collective activism in Japan.

Purpose: The Basque Country has been suffering political conflict and human rights´ violation for decades, tearing the social fabric. Human rights and peace education carried out through the testimony of the victims and their memory about this recent violent past can play an essential role in reestablishing the social understanding. This article aims to make known the experience of Adi-Adian initiative developed with the victims of the politic violence in the Teacher Training School of the University of Basque Country and asses its effectiveness in terms of critical thinking and empathy. Design/methodology/approach: This research is based on group discussion and personal surveys focused on students' feedback as a suitable method to analyze the way of thinking of students, their feelings and opinions about the violence. Findings: The results indicate that these initiatives implemented at school might be suitable to achieve the goals of human rights and peace education and deepen on democratic citizenship.

Conversations about controversial political issues within the public-school classroom are necessary for the whole development of students as they prepare to participate fully in democracy, part of their role as conscious social reproducers of the American political regime. Effective educators train students to critically understand and analyze political conflicts pluralistically through contemporary and historical lenses. However, teachers are caught amid a conflict within the public discourse about the appropriateness of engaging in political and controversial classroom discussions. As a result, state legislatures and local school districts are defining their stances on such issues, sometimes leading to barriers in the path of educators having productive political discussions within their classrooms. This paper provides a rationale for engaging in political conversations within U.S. classrooms by understanding the legal structure and how to use state standards to examine such issues philosophically. Finally, this article provides several perspectives and methods teachers can use to have productive political dialogue within their classrooms aligned to the identified legal structure.

Alongside the Disney theme park, miles of beaches along both the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, Florida's long southern peninsula is filled with political, social, and cultural differences. The state's diversity comes as close to any geographic location in the world characterised by the term 'internationalism,' racially, ethnically, and culturally. Yet, not so long ago, this once bastion of liberal welcoming of others has now become firmly entrenched in the Republican Party's extreme brand of `Make America Great Again' (MAGA). This transition, however, did not happen accidently as the authors hope to make clear in this article. There are deep historical and philosophical antecedents to the Florida story which are meant to change how the US is governed, illiberally, and how it relates to the world. It is, therefore, a professional responsibility for internationally-minded educational leadership researchers to reclaim the purposes of education.

A diverse democracy brings together people whose differences include partisan leanings, life experiences, histories, religious beliefs, racial identities, and sexual orientations to address common problems and build a shared future. Social studies educators can help prepare youth to pursue this goal by advancing core commitments to respectful and evidence-based dialog, informed inquiry, robust civil liberties, and the dignity of fellow participants. The authors briefly explore the broad political context that makes this work both challenging and important. The authors then consider three priorities for social studies educators to consider as they work to advance partnerships as a means of protecting and promoting the democratic aims of education that are so vital today. Framing and communicating the purpose of education for the broader community, advocating for professional learning, and expanding extracurricular opportunities for students to practice participation in a diverse democracy will require partnerships with a range of stakeholders.

In this article I discuss an approach to teaching about the Russian war in Ukraine that uses the war as a focal point for teaching about topics in comparative politics and international relations. I discuss the pedagogical advantages for political science teaching, including meeting the interests of students, introducing students to theories in political science, and re-centering courses on the region away from Russia. I then discuss how the various political science topics and research questions are related to the war, and I conclude with a section on assignments and methods for student engagement that work well with this type of course.

Recent years have witnessed signs of increasing political instability in democratic countries as well as growing alienation from civic institutions and processes among citizens, especially among young people. Within the context of civic and citizenship education, it is important to review such phenomena and study their extent among young people as well as the factors that have the potential of promoting different forms of citizenship engagement. Using data from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2016 and 2009, this article provides insights into the expectations of young people to actively engage as citizens in the future and what influences these expectations, with a primary focus on the role of civic knowledge and trust in civic institutions. Results from ICCS 2009 and 2016 show that while large majorities among young people expected to vote in elections, only relatively few found it likely to be more actively involved in political action. Except for engagement in illegal protest, young people's expected participation in general appeared to be positively related to trust. However, associations with civic knowledge were more differentiated. Trust and civic knowledge tended to have negative correlations in countries with higher levels of perceived corruption, while a different association became apparent in democracies with more transparent institutions. Civic knowledge was consistently positively related to anticipated voting while it was negatively related to expected illegal protest. More knowledgeable students were also less inclined to consider active (conventional) forms of political participation in the future.

This paper initiates a novel discourse advocating for the anti-colonization of religious education (RE) in Africa South of the Sahara (ASoS). It illustrates how anti-colonial critiques can not only offer more precise theoretical perspectives but also generate a practical imperative for a paradigm shift in a school subject "still" influenced by what I have labeled as the neocoloniality of power. In some countries, attempts to decolonize RE through multi-faithism are being forsaken, reverting the subject to the Christonormativity of the colonial era. The paper contends that the process of reconceptualizing RE with an anti-colonial mindset should inspire innovative ideas for an anti-colonized RE aligned with the educational goals in an African postcolonial environment.

In the countries that receive aid from donor agencies, the educational policymaking process is not straightforward because the power and interest of donors contradict with national contexts. This qualitative study aims to investigate how educational policy decisions in Nepal, a country that receives foreign aid for its educational projects, are made. Drawing on the Habermasian conceptualisation of deliberative democracy, I theorise that educational policy decisions are made either through deliberation or decisionism. An analysis of interviews conducted with educational policymakers of Nepal found that policymaking in Nepal follows decisionism in which the representatives of foreign aid agencies are more dominant than national bureaucrats. Even though Nepali bureaucrats and political leaders are involved in the decision-making process, rational interactions do not happen because they want to fulfil their personal interests by endorsing the decisions determined by the donors. This study concludes that because of decisionism, neocolonialism, and dysfunctional policy sphere, teachers, students, parents, and community people are excluded in the decision-making process. The findings are significant not only for understanding the lack of deliberation in the policymaking process but also for improving the educational praxis of aid-recipient countries like Nepal.

This paper seeks to address the wider questions of populism and its seeming contemporary rise within the specific context of the Philippines, regarding education. Starting from the assumption that neither politics nor education sits above cultures or spaces autonomously acting upon them but instead emerges with/because/against particularities; after a brief overview of populism, I explore the conceptual characteristics in context. This is informed from my own experiences of living and researching in the Philippines, including experience of the Mindanao conflict but also the failure of liberalism in the Philippines more generally, the failure of western education to 'develop' the nation and the reactions that led to the populists rise of Duterte. The paper offers an understanding of the complexities of populism and offers some hope to how education can meet the challenge through a specific example of critical participatory community education.

Since the 1940s research has suggested that higher education has a liberalizing influence on sociopolitical orientation, although none has demonstrated how this might occur. In the U.S. there is an increasing trend among conservative politicians and media to depreciate the value of a college education, by alleging that college turns people into liberals. To examine the charge that 'college turns people into liberals', I conducted biographical narrative interviews with 24 American college-educated young adults who changed their sociopolitical orientation from conservative to liberal. Utilizing Bourdieu's concepts of "habitus" and "habitus clivé," and grounded theory methods of analysis, I developed a processual model of such transformation. Findings from this study refute narratives of professorial or institutional indoctrination. Instead, the model indicates a more complex process of habitus transformation, that in most cases begins before college students arrive on campus. This study is important because a successful democracy requires an educated populace.

This phenomenological research examines democracy education and the conditions contributing to young students' democratic agency. The dataset includes interview and observation data from a school and educational decision-makers. The findings from the iterative analysis highlight the contradictions between democracy education as an ideal and opportunities for democratic agency. One significant contradiction was the expectation that young pupils should be competent democratic agents before being offered opportunities to act democratically. Young students deemed to possess the greatest competencies were offered opportunities to learn about democracy in action, whereas most students were expected to focus on their individual labour. Within these conditions, teachers remained in charge of sharing important information, deciding the contents of education and the organisation of the public, socio-political life in school. This study highlights the need to go beyond espoused ideals of democracy education and to re-consider the conditions for developing democratic agency in Finnish primary-school education.

This article draws on the philosophical work on dialogic rationality offered by Charles Taylor as well as qualitative studies of dialogues between politically opposed college students to argue that these conversations succeed as tools of democracy precisely because they fail as interventions. That is, the democratic strength of such dialogue is the way in which it is unreliable as a means of producing particular outcomes. Students whose political views eventually shifted partly in response to dialogue understood this not as a process of changing their commitments, but rather of finding a better expression for the commitments they already held. But the interviews show, too, just how rare it is for such shifts to occur at all, at least for these students in a period of political polarization and mutual distrust. The interviews suggest as well that the appeal to already shared ground is not the whole story of what prompts people to change their minds in these kinds of conversations. Rather the asking of direct but respectful questions was a crucial ingredient. Finally, dialogue did not independently cause the most profound changes in political views. Instead, it was the direction of students' lives that over time shifted their outlook. Their dialogue experience then gained meaning in retrospect, as the beginning of a process of self-questioning that was brought to fruition only later, as a first time that they had heard alternative possibilities for how value commitments can be expressed through politics.

In two different occasions in the twentieth century John Dewey and Maxine Greene stressed the point that educators should attend to 'what the known demands of us'. Following this dictum, from a critical perspective and with a constructive pedagogical spirit, in this paper we portray a new paradigm for values education that addresses the major challenges to the sustainable futures of young people in the third decade of the twenty first century as well as proposing transformative and empowering educational strategies. Employing the terminology of sustainability in its wider sense, we begin with a widely acknowledged diagnosis of the five major global risks -- interconnected and interdependent -- that endanger the sustainable future of humanity and nature: environmental, political, social, health, and cultural. We then move to suggest a constructive solution, proposing three conceptual pillars for repairing the world and laying foundation for a thriving sustainable future: (a) Ecohumanism as the paradigm for values education -- merging the humanist concern for human dignity, social justice and democracy with the ecological concern for climate stability, biodiversity and environmental sustainability; (b) education of democratic personality and for democratic culture that is holistic and transformative; and (c) a threefold notion of activist pedagogy that addresses the element of cultivating personal agency, empowering political literacy and agency, and engaging students in experiential, holistic, and active teaching-learning experiences.

Teachers' implementation of and attitudes to school reforms and overriding pedagogical ideals have long been a topic of debate and research. In this article, we centre on teachers' descriptions of how progressive teaching was conducted as well as on the teachers' reasons for implementing such teaching in the 1940s. This study is based on written material consisting of 360 elementary school teachers' accounts of their teaching collected in 1946. The material was collected by a government investigation of how progressive teaching was conducted in Sweden. The accounts offer detailed descriptions of how pupils were activated and how elementary teachers at the time could use the community as a teaching resource. The article is inspired by a prosopography approach, in which the basic assumption is that it is possible to extend knowledge of social processes and societal development by studying the group profile of members of various institutions such as political or professional organisations. The analysis is based on John Dewey's and Larry Cuban's perspectives on progressivism. We found that, according to teaching the theme of pupils participation was frequently reported in 59% of the accounts, while student interaction (35%) and extended classroom (16%) were less reported. The teachers motivated their teaching on the basis of general ideals, as democracy. Also important were practical circumstances such as available teaching resources as well as physiological aspects as student's interest and development.

This study investigates how American and Iraqi writers utilize the evaluative resources in newspaper opinion articles (henceforth, op-eds) from a critical discourse analysis perspective. It explores how American and Iraqi writers of op-ed pieces draw on the evaluative resources to establish their attitudes, create rhetorical effects, and serve their ideologies in influencing readers' and addressees' feelings and attitudes towards certain subject matters. This study hopes to enhance the critical thinking of readers of an increasingly important journalistic genre in democratic societies. The main questions this study raises are: On which categories of attitude markers do American and Iraqi op-ed writers base their evaluation? Which types of referencing external voices are the most recurrent? And why? The researcher adopts Martin and White's (2005) appraisal theory and Van Dijk's (2006) ideology perspective to achieve the study's goals. After applying qualitative and quantitative analysis methods, the study finds that the significant ideological strategy of positive-self presentation and negative other-presentation significantly motivates the evaluative resources used by American and Iraqi op-ed writers. Both American and Iraqi op-ed writers use similar evaluative techniques in terms of distribution. The analysis also finds that there are variations concerning the overall frequencies and the frequencies of the sub-types of evaluative resources under examination across the corpus.

Student leadership is often misconceptualized as merely a pedagogical exercise revolving around simulated political arenas with little to no immediate real political consequence. Other scholarship normalizes students as political outsiders who have to resort to dangerous, exhausting activism tactics for even minute advocacy victories due to their lack of structural representation in education decision-making. An analysis of student leadership in research and practice is presented according to an identified spectrum of low to high student power. This article argues that student leadership has great potential for real political action. The best structure for student leadership is argued to be democratic student government, as well as students having standing roles within education leadership structures. Furthermore, effective conceptions of student leadership must not only acknowledge its developmental aspects, but also account for the real politics inherent in student leadership activities. To conclude, a more political conception of student leadership and student government is advocated for so student leaders' real political activities can be recognized and studied as such in education leadership discourse to prevent student exploitation and tokenism.

Democracy is based on individuals' ability to give their opinions freely. To do this, they must have access to a multitude of reliable information sources (Dahl, 1998), and this greatly depends on the characteristics of their media environments. Today, one of the main issues individuals face is the significant amount of disinformation circulating through social networks. This study focuses on parliamentary disinformation. It examines how parliamentarians contribute to generating information disorder (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017) in the digital public space. Through an exploratory content analysis--a descriptive content analysis of 2,307 messages posted on Twitter accounts of parliamentary spokespeople and representatives of the main list of each political party in the Spanish Lower House of Parliament--we explore disinformation rhetoric. The results allow us to conclude that, while the volume of messages shared by parliamentarians on issues susceptible to disinformation is relatively low (14% of tweets), both the themes of the tweets (COVID-19, sex-based violence, migrants or LGBTI), as well as their tone and argumentative and discursive lines, contribute to generating distrust through institutional criticism or their peers. The study deepens current knowledge of the disinformation generated by political elites, key agents of the construction of polarising narratives.

The authors' 2019 book, "A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy," is their effort to make sense of the startling appearance of conspiracy charges enveloping American politics. In this article, they expand on that discussion of the ways conspiracy allegations threaten democracy, and describe the essential role of educators in helping students learn to critically evaluate such claims.

In this paper, we sought to analyze if the internet and social networks usage could be impacting the constitution of an assertive political culture among young people in South Brazil. We hypothesize that although these new socialized agents are widespread among the young, apathy and disinterest in politics remain. To test our hypothesis, we analyzed data from a survey conducted with secondary school students from Porto Alegre in 2015 and 2019 for values related to democracy, feelings about politics, responsiveness, and political efficacy. Results confirm that the political culture of the young remains apathetic, but those socialized by new agents seem to be closer to developing an assertive type of political culture.

The current political climate is characterized by an alarming pattern of global democratic regression driven by authoritarian populist leaders who deploy vast misinformation campaigns. These offensives are successful when the majority of the population lack skills that would allow them to think critically about information in the political sphere, to identify misinformation, and therefore to fully exercise democratic citizenship. Political science has theorized the link between information and power and information professionals understand the cognitive decision-making process involved in processing information, but these two literatures rarely intersect. This paper interrogates the links between information literacy (IL) and the rise of authoritarian populism in order to advance the development of a new transtheoretical model that links political science (which studies power), information science, and critical pedagogy to suggest new paths for teaching and research. We call for a collaborative research and teaching agenda, grounded in a holistic understanding of information as power, that will contribute to achieving a more informed citizenship and promoting a more inclusive democracy.

In bringing together the literature on post-democracy and theoretical work on the politics of affective societies, this article explores how democratic education might benefit from a sustained examination of negative emotions and affects associated with democratic disenchantment. In particular, the analysis highlights what is gained by introducing a more pedagogically and politically robust approach toward 'ugly' and 'negative' feelings in the context of democratic education in schools, namely, a pedagogical approach that recognizes the gloomy ramifications of post-democracy in the daily life of teachers and young people and inspires transformative action that contributes toward practical 'democratic innovations' in the sphere of civil society. This article contributes toward ongoing efforts for the renewal of democratic education in schools by urging teachers and researchers to rethink pedagogically how to navigate productively the ugly and negative feelings of democratic disenchantment.

The article highlights the history and features of parliamentarism development in the Latin America countries. In addition, the need for training on the subject and the effect of increasing students and educators' awareness in this field is examined. This process was lengthy, replete with the examples of various social groups, political trends and parties struggle intensity increase. Since the beginning of the 19th century, there have been almost no favorable conditions for the practical implementation of democratic government in the countries of Latin America, and the institutionalization of the party system has not taken place yet. However, there have been exceptions to the general rule in the history of Latin America. Chile and Argentina were such an example. The success of democratic transformations in the countries of the region depended on various reasons: (a) whether the country had a democratic experience in its past; (b) the conditions for the political and economic development of this country to develop representative institutions in the future; (c) the importance of the parties in the political course development and the adoption of state decisions. The results of democracy and parliamentarism development in the states of Latin America are rather complicated by the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. On the one hand, the last decades of the XX-th century and the beginning of this century was marked by the democratization of political life, reforms, and the replacement of military regimes with civilian governments. Since the beginning of the 60-ies, they started the process of democratization and formation of independent island states in the Caribbean and Central America. Despite the successful development of the economy, culture, education, the presence of a large middle class in Argentina, the military governments overcame civilian ones in the 30-70-ies. Therefore, it is needed to consider this aspect as a part of education system to improve the educators' level.

Primary education levels are called primary education, compulsory education, and public education. Nowadays, new research has shown that primary education plays an important role in the reduction of poverty and the realization of economic and social development programs. Therefore, the necessity of this research is to study the evolution of primary education and its influencing factors in Germany. Also, the primary organization and how to select the teacher education and primary curriculum will be examined. In this research, the research method is descriptive. The results showed that in the primary period of the German education system, politics, ideology, and ideas of educators have played an important role in the development of education and, as such, in primary education. As can be observed in the Weimar Republic, education was influenced by the political theories of democracy, and then, during the Nazis, was influenced by the ideology of Nazism and the superiority of the Nazi German race; during World War II and thereafter Was influenced by communist ideology and Marxist thoughts. In the new era, there have also been major reforms to eliminate the influence of these new educators' ideologies and educational ideas.

Supporting a sustainable world in a situation of war is the background to this study. Additionally, interdisciplinarity forms a part of the dialogical ecosystem of searching for suitable solutions in a complex reality. For such purposes, in this contribution, the co-authors reflect on an actual instance of war. The first author provides a theological, socio-political and philosophical framework for an understanding, based in realism, of the relationship between theology and politics. The second author provides a first-hand case description from Riga, Latvia, of a politically-linked ecumenical project to assist Ukrainian refugees from the Russian invasion.

A disquieting aspect of some contemporary public discourse is its seeming indifference to or abandonment of any pretense to truth. Among other things, unsubstantiated and misleading claims have been made about the efficacy of vaccines and other purported treatments for SARS-COVID, the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and the January 6, 2021, insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. In addition, a spate of legislation restricting classroom discussion and instruction related to race, bias, privilege, and discrimination has been or is pending passage in U.S. state legislatures. These restrictions are antithetical to core functions of education, which are to inculcate the values, virtues, and advanced literacy skills that support democratic deliberation about controversial issues. This article discusses the increasing political polarization and partisan attacks on the processes of education and the threats to liberal democracy posed by this disregard for the truth. In addition, it reviews the cultural and psychological factors that increase our susceptibility to misinformation and presents a perspective about the pursuit of truth that highlights the educational affordances of disciplinary inquiry, democratic deliberation, and reasonable argumentation. The contemporary challenges are manifestations of long-standing political and cultural divisions, and their mitigation will depend on developing communities of informed citizens that are committed to the values and virtues that are foundational to liberal democracy.

College experiences can contribute to teaching, learning, and instruction within higher education. The framework for this essay treats the college community as prototypic of the U.S. political society. Several aspects of the national political culture have been approximated within a collegiate culture. For example, every political problem within our society can be represented in a miniature fashion within a program of studies in a university. Much of students' political information can come from the interaction between teachers and students. However, a sizable portion of this learned information can extend through interaction among students. At that point, teachers would point students to information that expands their reservoir of collegiate information. Ultimately, students would refine their political information by exchanging valuable information with one another, as well as with their teachers. We have chosen to target higher education rather than pre-collegiate levels in emphasizing how higher education and our democratic system of government can be intertwined. We highlight the possibilities of college students' understanding and appreciating others' political views in working with one another rather than against one another in educational and political planning. Specifically, we include in this report the following issues: (a) political information resources routinely available in higher education, (b) college students' learning to participate in broader political conversation, (c) college students' examination of high profile U.S. constitutional declarations, (d) college students' deepened comprehension of their own political perspectives, and (e) college students' understanding that the knowledge derived from higher education can strengthen our democratic system of government.

The education process in school is organized by the curriculum. Curricula aim to raise citizens in accordance with the needs and political structure of the country. Among the curricula, social studies curriculum (SSC) be shown as a curriculum that can be most affected by political foundations. Because in social studies, issues such as democracy, human rights, government style, human rights, rights and responsibilities are directly related to politics. In this study, government programs (GP) and development plans (DP) in Turkey, which are one of the main political tools that affect social studies curriculum politically, have been analyzed. In this study, the 1998, 2005 and 2018 SSCs; the 55th, 59th and 65th GPs and 7th, 8th and 10th DPs in Turkey were analyzed using the document review method. This study was designed with a case study from qualitative research methods. Content analysis method was used in analyzing the data. As a result, it is concluded that GPs and DPs affect the social SSCs in some aspects.

In most schools everywhere, democracy and participation continue to be carried out through the usual channels based on representative democracy and the vote of elected representatives. However, this reality is not monolithic, and we do find centers committed to practise a full and more profound democracy. Based on a case study, the article analyzes the theoretical and practical approach of Germinal School. Despite some difficulties, this school has successfully implemented a project of radical democracy, both through micropolitics and daily pedagogical action. This article also examines why it is so difficult to democratize school and how to create a truly democratic institution. Finally, we address the possibility of extending the democratic model presented here to other schools.

The centring of Muslim women in Islam resides in an intertwining historico-politico-theological narrative of gender reform, first promulgated in a seventh century revelation of the Qur'an. Significantly, the gains derived by the women of Islam's first community, have become lost in the dominance of contemporary androcentric-patriarchal interpretations. The argument advanced by this paper is that Muslim educational institutions have a responsibility in (re)-scripting gender justice as an imperative of the scripture; and in establishing resonance between identities of faith and citizenship. I commence by looking at the disjuncture between what Islam says about gender equality, and how it unfolds under the predominant auspices of a patriarchal gaze. As an example of this disconnection, I focus on the trajectory of the 'women in mosques' campaigns in South Africa, spanning from an apartheid to a democratic context -- noting that despite, or perhaps, because of far-reaching political change, the resistance encountered by Muslim women has remained the same. Thereafter, I turn my attention to an intertwining consideration: the responsibility of Muslim education in (re)-scripting gender justice as an imperative of the scripture; and the obligation of Muslim education in establishing resonance between identities of faith and citizenship.