Does Your Vote Count?: Critical Pedagogy and Democracy (Counterpoints)

The public debate on democracy is often constrained within an alienating and disenfranchisingnarrative of opinion polls, campaign platforms, personalities and formal structuresthat generate legislation, all of which surreptitiously seems to trickle down to the classroom.Paul R. Carr asserts that democracy must be cultivated in a vigorous, conscientious, meaningfuland critical way in and through education in order for it to have salience in society,especially within a neoliberal conjuncture that promotes limited space for epistemologicalinterrogation of how we understand and are engaged in maintaining and/or transformingour societies. Building on the critical pedagogical work of Paulo Freire, Joe L. Kincheloe, andothers, this book develops a framework for understanding how a thicker democratic educationcan be conceptualized and implemented in schools. The book aims to move the focuson democracy away from voting, and place it more properly on the importance of socialjustice and political literacy as a way of understanding what democracy is and, importantly,how to make it more relevant for all of society. The book concludes that another democracyis possible, as well as being desirable, and that education is the fundamental intersectionin which it must be developed........"Paul R. Carr has produced a rich and impressive examination of the multiplicity of relationshipsamong notions of democratic formation, critical pedagogy, human rights, anti-racism,and feminist, anti-colonial, political and cultural studies. Drawing from a deep well of intriguingand eclectic sources..., he moves with clarity and élan between the broad and thenarrow, the general and the specific to capture the power of theory without sacrificing thenitty-gritty of concrete practice. A balance of possibilities rather than false dualisms will befound here. Does Your Vote Count? has become an essential contribution to my own workand teaching."--Tom Wilson, Chapman University