Democratic education and popular culture

Educational refonn has fallen on hard times. The traditional assumption that schooling is fundamentally tied to the imperatives of citizenship designed to educate students to exercise leadership and public service has been eclipsed. Schooling is now the key institution for producing professional, technically trained, credentialized workers for whom the demands of citizenship are subject to the vicissitudes of the marketplace and the commercial public sphere. During the Reagan and Bush era in the United States, the deeper issues that framed the meaning, purpose, and use to which education might aspire were displaced by more vocational and narrowly ideological considerations.