Raising Doubts about Liberal Approaches to Democratic Education

Abstract

Liberal conceptions of democratic education abound. Most notably, the seminal thoughts of Seyla Benhabib (1996, 2011), Eamonn Callan (1997), Iris Marion Young (2000), Martha Nussbaum (2000, 2001), Amy Gutmann (2003) and Alasdair MacIntyre (1999) will be re-considered and challenged to foreground the thinness associated with a liberal understanding of democratic education. It might seem rather odd to highlight some of the weaknesses in the aforementioned theorists’ conceptions of liberal understandings of democratic education, as in many ways they have actually stretched the concept beyond new bounds.