Education and the Challenges for Democracy

This introductory essay for the special issue, "Education and the Challenges for Democracy," proposes challenges to democracy call for a reexamination of the relationship of democracy to democratic education. The essay describes the challenges to democracy, how those challenges impact democratic education, and how education can address those challenges, followed by a summary of six peer reviewed papers that examine the relationship of education to democracy in Japan, Singapore, South Africa, and the United States. The essay concludes with a discussion of the significance of these papers to understand the dialectical relationship between education and democracy, and their implications for research, policy, and practice.