(Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath)
I. The Purpose of Education
What is education for? In a moment when curricula are contested, and civic life is shot through with conflict, the question presses with urgency. Too often, the answers on offer are narrowly instrumental—education exists to prepare workers for the economy, or to transmit a fixed canon of knowledge, or to sort young people into tiers of credential and opportunity. Each of these framings captures something real, yet none is sufficient.
The conversation about education’s purpose should not be about whether education has a public purpose—of course it does—but whether it has a rationale beyond the economic. I argue that it does. Education supports human development, along all the axes of development involved in positive growth. Philosophers of education from Plato to the present have divided those axes of growth into the economic, the civic, and the existential or cultural. Human beings must grow into people who can materially sustain their livelihood—that is the economic dimension. They necessarily are part of a society and should play their role as citizens—the civic dimension. Lastly, human beings need proximate communities of meaning—the existential. This is reflected in the need for romantic love, cultural belonging, and spiritual nourishment.
The neoliberal era flattened our humanness by asking us to limit our attention to economic concerns. This is what so many are now trying to break free from. Artificial intelligence is reinforcing the urgency: It is not clear that we should continue to train people for economic tasks that machines can do, but we need to strengthen human judgment so that we fully govern the machines as they contribute to shaping our economic, civic, and cultural worlds. This requires recovering all three dimensions of human development.
The question before us is one of prioritization. If we have good reason to invest new energies in the civic and existential purposes of education, what are the implications for how we structure those investments? Must they pass through public schools? Or can a voucher-based system deliver the public goods we have in our sights? A powerful way to answer these questions is to begin by asking what is necessary for democracy education—for to start from the civic in education is to encompass the whole. Although the three aspects of human development are distinguishable, civic capacity itself depends on secure material foundations and strong connections to community. While one can forget about the civic when focusing on the economic or social, one cannot forget about the economic and social when focusing on the civic.
II. Three Challenges for Democracy Education
Democracy education is a central purpose of education because democracy is necessary to human flourishing. As I wrote in my book, Justice by Means of Democracy, human beings are purposeful creatures. We thrive when we are able to advance our own purposes, within the bounds of not dominating others’ ability to pursue their own purposes. Sustaining this freedom requires more than the protection of private rights. It requires the active exercise of public agency. Negative liberties—freedom from interference—cannot be maintained without positive liberties—the freedom to participate in shaping the rules under which one lives. W.E.B. DuBois made the point starkly when he argued for the necessity of the ballot: You do not get to keep your private freedoms unless you have a hand in the public decisions that structure them. If that is right, then education cannot concern itself only with private development. It must also equip people for the shared work of self-governance.
Educating for American democracy will mean grappling with three challenges. First, democratic life demands a form of multi-tasking that other political arrangements do not. Under a monarchy, oligarchy, or autocracy, most people need to attend only to their private affairs; political direction is someone else’s job. Democracy, by contrast, asks each of us to be simultaneously a private person—pursuing a livelihood, raising a family, cultivating friendships and interests—and a public agent, participating in the collective steering of the community. Plato thought this was a fatal flaw. He believed that human excellence required specialization: each person should do the one thing for which they are best suited and no more. A society of multi-taskers would be, in his vision, a garment embroidered with too many colors—busy, incoherent, mediocre.
The Athenians saw things differently. When Pericles delivered his celebrated funeral oration, he praised his fellow citizens precisely for their versatility—their ability to bring excellence to private industry and public judgment at the same time. The democratic wager is that people can, in fact, manage both dimensions of life, and that the effort of doing so is ennobling, not diminishing.
Education, in this view, must prepare people to navigate the dual demands of private and public life. This does not mean turning every classroom into a civics seminar. It means helping young people develop a sense of their own purposes—what they care about, what kind of life they want to build—and then helping them see that those private purposes are never fully separable from the public conditions that make them possible. The student who wants to become a nurse needs a healthcare system shaped by democratic decisions. The student who wants to start a business needs infrastructure, rule of law, and a marketplace structured by public policy. Education begins the work of making these connections visible, so that civic participation is recognized as an extension of daily life, not an imposition on it.
The second challenge is intellectual. Among all regime types, democracy places the greatest cognitive demands on its citizens. “Democracy” means the power of the people, but the people is an abstraction. To understand democratic governance, citizens must grasp how a dispersed, diverse population can act as a collective agent through institutions, procedures, and norms. They must understand what it means for power to be depersonalized—vested not in any individual but in offices, constitutions, and processes. This requires abstract thinking that must be taught.
Beyond this foundational conceptual work, democratic citizens face ongoing demands of judgment. They are asked to evaluate candidates, weigh policy proposals, serve on juries, and decide when and how to raise their voices. Citizens must be able to diagnose social problems, reason about which principles should guide collective responses, assess proposed courses of action, and evaluate the consequences of decisions already taken. They need frameworks for making sense of political life, and they need practice in the habits of mind that democratic judgment requires: the ability to hold complexity, to reason about tradeoffs, to distinguish reliable evidence from noise, and to attend to others, considering how the world looks from their perspectives. The classroom is where these habits of attention are formed—habits that support all the acts of judgment we want to preserve as a human responsibility and not cede to machines.
The third and most demanding challenge is relational. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his 1962 address “The Ethical Demands of Integration,” drew a crucial distinction between desegregation and integration. Desegregation removes legal barriers. Integration, by contrast, is positive and creative: it is the welcomed participation of all people in the full range of human activities. King insisted that real freedom—what he called “life-quality freedom”—requires the chance to fulfill one’s total capacity without artificial hindrance, and that chance depends on genuine inclusion in the processes through which a community shapes its shared life.
These relational demands are not peripheral to education; they are at its core. If democratic life requires that we hold the full spectrum of others’ humanity in our hearts, then education must cultivate the dispositions that make this possible. Students need opportunities to encounter perspectives radically different from their own, to practice disagreeing without demonizing, and to build bridging relationships—connections across lines of difference sturdy enough to sustain the friction of genuine political life. They need to learn that listening to strangers is not a concession but a requirement for effective citizenship.
Education oriented toward authenticity and equitability … would give substantial attention to helping students explore their own purposes and values—not in the thin sense of career planning but in the deeper sense of understanding what kind of life feels worth living and why.
III. The Authentic, Equitable Citizen
What kind of citizen, then, should education aim to cultivate? Not merely the informed voter, though information matters. Not merely the loyal partisan or the deliberative rationalist, though solidarity and reason both have their place. The model that emerges from these challenges is what we might call the authentic, equitable citizen. This is a person who begins from a clear sense of personal purpose—who understands what they care about, where their commitments come from, and how those commitments connect to the broader life of their community. Authenticity, here, is not self-absorption. It is the foundation from which meaningful civic engagement becomes possible, because only when we are clear about our own purposes can we honestly negotiate their relationship to the purposes of other people.
Equitability is the complement to authenticity. Equitable citizens do not merely pursue their own ends. They pursue them in a way that takes seriously the participation of others and that folds a concern for the ongoing health of the community into their understanding of their own good. Equitability emerges when citizens listen before they advocate, when they test their proposals against the well-being of those who will be affected, and when they commit to fair fighting—the practice of contesting rivals within agreed-upon rules, without seeking to obliterate opposition or rig the game.
Education oriented toward authenticity and equitability would look quite different from what most schools currently provide. It would give substantial attention to helping students explore their own purposes and values—not in the thin sense of career planning but in the deeper sense of understanding what kind of life feels worth living and why. It would treat civic knowledge not as facts to be memorized for a test but as living tools—knowledge about how political institutions work, how change happens, and how means must be connected to ends by ethical reasoning. It would prioritize relational skills: perspective-taking, civil disagreement, the capacity to collaborate across difference—habits of attention that no machine can replace. And it would be honest about the ethics of democratic life, teaching students that the pursuit of justice sometimes requires sacrifice, that burdens are not always equally distributed, and that the discipline of nonviolence is demanding precisely because it refuses the satisfactions of retaliation.
IV. Does Such Education Require Public Schools?
Ultimately, the purpose of education in a democracy is to prepare people to share power. This is at once a simpler and a more radical claim than it may first appear. Sharing power means more than voting. It means developing the capacity to deliberate with others toward consensus, to advocate passionately for one’s convictions within a framework of mutual respect, and even to engage in prophecy—the public speech and action that shifts a society’s values and reframes the terms of collective life.
An education worthy of democracy would not try to produce a single type of citizen. It would equip learners with a repertoire of civic capacities—deliberative, adversarial, prophetic—and then trust them to compose their own multi-tasking civic identity from that repertoire. Some will become activists; others will serve on local boards or run for office; others will exercise their citizenship primarily through the quality of attention they bring to their work, their neighborhoods, and their families. What matters is that each person has had the chance to develop the intellectual, relational, and ethical resources needed to participate meaningfully—and that they understand that the community’s health is inseparable from their own.
The test of such an education will not be found in test scores or graduation rates, though these have their place. It will be found in whether more people feel that democratic life belongs to them—that they have genuine standing, genuine voice, genuine power to shape the conditions under which they live. It will be found in whether we become better at calling each other in rather than calling each other out.
Does an education with these goals require public schools? It certainly requires public investment in schooling, as it has since the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 17th century, when the colonial assembly required towns to invest in education so that all children, not only those from families with means, could learn the laws. It also requires that the flow of public funds be tied to these democracy education goals. Must public funds also flow into publicly governed schools, or can we achieve our goals through a network of publicly funded but privately governed offerings?
The answer comes from the fact that learning how to share power in a democracy is about living with others even when we would prefer not to invite them into our gated community. This gives us a continued basis for maintaining publicly-governed schools that people participate in via geographical affiliation, a loose tie that provides an opportunity for communities to cultivate bridging social capital. Keeping the public purpose of education front and center—through publicly governed schools—is the path most likely to avoid the flattening out of education to its merely private purposes of the previous era.
Read more stories by Danielle Allen.