NCSS International Assembly 2006 Washington DC
Roundtable Discussion with 9 Members from
Canada, USA, Japan, Israel, China
Sponsored by the Rouge Forum

We debated whether or not it is possible or desirable to teach for democracy today.

We reached consensus on the following three items:

        Democracy and capitalism have nothing in common.
        We need to struggle inside schools to construct reason, inside a system that is designed and structured against reason
        While we all agree that democracy and equality together are key goals, we disagreed on whether or not we can reason our way out of capitalismwhich is directly related to how any why we do school.

One member of our group, Steve Fleury, asked that we differentiate between reflective and critical forms of reason, referencing Hofstadter, suggesting a difference between trained intelligence and intellectualism.