Democracy and education: ‘In spite of it all’

This chapter delves into the complex relationships between the subjective and the political, social and economic environment. In particular, it draws on psychoanalytic theory to reconsider democracy, education and their relationship. Just over 100 years ago, with the publication of Democracy and Education, Dewey made a case for the mutually dependent relationship linking a legitimate education system and a thriving democracy. Ideology, involves forms of misrecognition of the Real, reflected in attempts to incorporate it into, and reconcile it with, the intelligible structures of reality. As both a concept and a practice, democracy has clearly enjoyed a long life, reaching back at least to Ancient Greece. The intensified form of neoliberalism known as ‘austerity’ represents not just a fiscal but also an intellectual form of discipline – one that stultifies the individual and collective imagination with its insistence that there is no alternative to the stratifying and competitive logics of the market.