Education and Democracy Home

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g, men become builders by building and lyre players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics

...in large measure, the race question involves the saving of black America's body and white America's soul. James Weldon Johnson

Welcome to my website!

Are you interested in promoting democracy?
Have you lost influence over educational policy?
Need help in fending off the high-stakes testing agenda?

This web site provides analysis and curriculum materials that can help community-based movements implement democratic goals in our public schools.

The Freedom School Curriculum is one of the best examples of an effective progressive curriculum whose goal was to give students academic as well as democratic citizenship skills. This site includes the original curriculum with supporting primary source materials, a brief historical context (editor’s introduction) and suggestions for how to use the FSC as curriculum today. Among those that we hope will find this material helpful are people starting modern freedom schools, high school and middle school teachers as well as progressive historians and teacher educators.

"Books and Articles" includes material devoted to understanding the origins and effects of high-stakes testing. I believe that the “new standards movement” represents the third major transformation of the U.S. public school system. This current fundamental change is designed to serve the interests of corporations—to create and legitimize new means of social control and train workers for the New Economy. These materials are part of an effort to understand the political and historical forces behind modern systemic reform in order to more effectively combat it.

Last updated July 2016