Democratic Education between Empowered Skepticism and Partisan Dogmatism Available to Purchase

What sort of education does democracy require? How can we balance the ideals of openness to others and assertion of our own ideas to disagreeing others that democracy demands? This article explores the tempting solutions to the paradoxical charges of democracy—skepticism and partisan dogmatism—and finds them lacking. Using insights from William James and John Dewey, this study argues that there are two habits or senses of charity needed in pluralistic democracies. These habits of imagination open us to the complexities of other agents and to moral situations in general. Democratic education thereby seeks these habits as a way to maintain the tentative balances required by living among agreeing and disagreeing others.