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Political knowledge and democratic attitudes are recognized in contemporary studies as important dimensions of democratic political culture. Furthermore, knowledge and attitudes can be seen as integral parts of political competence. Unlike other dimensions of political culture such as, for example, political participation, political interest, etc., research on political knowledge and democratic attitudes are more an exception than a rule. This assessment is especially true for Croatia. In this paper, we attempt to address some of these gaps by focusing on the exploration of political competences of Croatian final-year secondary school students. The paper is divided into two major sections. In the first part, we discuss the meaning and importance of political competence for the functioning of democratic political systems. The second part consists of a presentation and discussion of the research results on political knowledge and democratic attitudes of Croatian final-year secondary school students conducted in three time points - 2010, 2015 and 2021. By doing so, we want to detect the levels of political knowledge and democratic attitudes, as well as the possible changes that occurred in these levels during the research period. Finally, we are also interested in the relationship between these two dimensions of political competence.

This paper examines three questions: (1) (How) Is democracy promoted in secondary schools in England? (2) How is the promotion of democracy understood in education and teacher education policy? and (3) To what extent does existing education policy benefit the promotion of democracy in schools in England? To explore these questions, we first discuss the policy landscape surrounding democratic education in England. We then outline our data collection and analysis methods, which comprised (a) the coding of ten different policy documents, including curriculum specifications, teaching standards and inspection frameworks, and (b) the utilisation of an original survey of more than 3000 teachers working in approximately 50% of all secondary schools in England. Together, our data allow us to raise three important points. First, education and teacher education policy neglects to specify 'how' democracy should be promoted and by 'whom'. Second, schools are offering scant provision of democratic education. Third, the majority of teachers feel fundamentally underprepared to teach democracy. We conclude this paper by arguing that, if policymakers do wish to promote democracy, there is a need for a cohesive policy and teacher education approach that guarantees democratic education for all.

The paper is based on the concept of political culture, which is particularly important for the maintenance and functioning of a democratic political system and is closely linked with the political literacy of young people. In this paper research focus is on the two dimensions of political culture -- political values and trust. Specifically, the main research question is: what are the determinants of accepting constitutional values and the trust in political institutions of final year secondary school pupils? The paper use the data provided by research on political literacy of final year secondary school pupils. In order to provide answer to the research question the hierarchical multiple regression is used. In the first step, particular socio-demographic variables (sex, education of mother and education of father) were introduced. In the second step, the type of secondary school education was added. The third group of predictors encompassed the level of religiosity, generalized prejudices and authoritarianism. In the final step political knowledge was included. The introduced model provides certain explanation regarding constitutional values, but fails to explain distrust in political institutions. The phenomenon of low trust in political institutions is discussed in paper.

In this article we (de)construct radical humanist discourses in South Africa's recently published White Paper on Special Needs Education. In particular, we (de)construct objects, agents, actions and binaries constituted by democracy, human rights and social justice discourses as well as the voices these discourses marginalise. We discuss the implications that democracy, human rights and social justice discourses have for inclusion/exclusion, as we deconstruct them in White Paper 6: Special Needs Education (hereafter White Paper 6).

I narrate a historical sociology of extension work undertaken at Queen's University, McMaster University, and the University of Toronto from the late 1800s through the early 1960s. University administrators positioned extension work as dedicated to the democratization of higher education. However, a critical analysis of archival data reveals that the rise and fall of extension reflected these universities' material interests and organizational goals relating to public relations, government relations, and enrollment growth. Further, extension programs at these universities were primarily oriented to providing alternative credential pathways to those seeking professional status as schoolteachers, accountants, bankers, and business managers. Indeed, extension leaders demonstrated substantial agency in the professionalization of these fields. Contributing to the historical sociology of higher education and the professions, I argue that the extension era in Ontario resulted in partial democratization of higher education whilst helping to construct mechanisms of social closure rooted in credentialism and professionalization., (© 2023 The Authors. Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Canadian Sociological Association/La Société canadienne de sociologie.)

With the rapid increase in information freely and easily accessible on the web to those who have access to a computer and the internet, there seems to be a corresponding decrease in critical evaluation of the sources of this information. All sources are taken to be sources of information and seem to be uncritically considered to contain reliable, credible, and authoritative information, which is relevant to any topic. However, many sources contain disputed and disputable information slanted to support one ideological belief over another. People use sources in their research bibliographies that are concurrently used to support claims in their research papers that are not in fact plausible. Students, as citizens, need to be critically informed to make good decisions in a democratic society that depends on their reliable, credible and authoritative sources of information used in decision making. In this article, the author offers a set of testing conditions to determine how to critically separate the acceptable sources from the implausible ones.

South Asian region is extremely vulnerable to climate change which hampers its attainment of the sustainable development goals (SDGs). This study explores how sustainable development of South Asian nations is affected by the clean or renewable energy consumption, globalization, population growth and deliberative democracy. To tackle the effects of shocks within the cross-sectional units as well as to account for endogeneity, this study utilizes Common Correlated Effects Mean Group-Generalized Method of Moments (CCE-GMM) estimation technique proposed by Neal (2015). Common Correlated Effects Mean Group (CCE-MG) of Pesaran 2006 and Augmented Mean Group (AMG) by Eberhardt and Teal (2010) and Eberhardt and Bond (2009) techniques are also utilized as robustness checks. The empirical results reveal that the consumption of renewable or clean energy can significantly and positively affect sustainable development, implying that deploying clean energy technologies is helpful to achieve SDG agenda in South Asia. Population growth is found to be hampering sustainable development while deliberative democracy ensures this development. The impact of globalization on sustainable development was found to be negative yet insignificant. Bidirectional causal relationship was discovered between sustainable development and renewable energy, between population and sustainable development, between deliberative democracy and sustainable development and between deliberative democracy and globalization. Finally, the study provides policy directions to achieve sustainable development in South Asia via enhanced integration of renewable energy in the region's energy mix., (© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

The reduction in local control and oversight of schooling represented by the growth of Multi Academy Trusts (MATs) in England raises critical issues for public policy. These include the articulation and exercise of power in the governance of MATs, the future of democratic governance of local services and accountability. Applying Foucault's genealogical framework, the paper analyses the antecedents of current governance arrangements and highlights and reinvigorates suppressed, delegitimised and belittled knowledges. The authors argue that the threads of representation, community engagement and local control in school governance are important components of democratic renewal. The paper examines the play of historical and contemporary factors which have fostered a discourse that enables the subjugation of agency, self-governance and autonomy of MAT constituent schools and their communities. This discourse has wider significance for the centralisation of decision making and control away from communities, and the erosion of the polity.

Purpose: This paper aims to trace how Asian American girls engaged with civic learning in a virtual out-of-school literacy community featuring a curriculum of diverse literary texts. Design/methodology/approach: The researcher used practitioner inquiry to construct a virtual literacy education community dedicated to the civic learning of Asian American girls. Findings: The paper explores how participants mobilized critical practices of textual consumption and production rooted in their intersectional identities and embodied experiences to make meaning of the civic constraints and affordances of marginalized identities and to read and (re)design author choices for civic purposes. These findings -- examples of youths' critical civic meaning-making -- indicate how they claimed space for Asian American civic girlhoods in literacy education. Originality/value: This paper foregrounds how Asian American girls mobilize critical processes of text consumption and production to assert civic identities in literacy education -- a significantly under-examined topic in literacy studies. This work has implications for how literacy practitioners and scholars can prioritize Asian American civic girlhoods through pedagogy and research.

Events of recent years both in the United States and around the globe have highlighted the fragility of democracy. The invasion of Ukraine by Russia has prompted educators to seek evidence-based civic engagement methods for helping students understand the invasion and its implications. This paper offers a set of recommendations on how to teach the war in Ukraine through the lens of civic engagement education. Over the years, a sizeable body of scholarship has developed addressing the critical role civic education plays in safeguarding democracy and producing effective pedagogical approaches for instilling democratic knowledge, skills, and dispositions. Using this scholarship as a starting point, this paper offers recommendations on how educators in a variety of settings and across disciplines might modify these civic learning models to address the war in Ukraine. Based on my experience as a scholar-practitioner-educator at an institute of politics focused primarily on American democracy, I also offer suggestions on how to integrate teaching the war in Ukraine using these practices to enhance appreciation of civic engagement and the role of the citizen.

This paper is a written dialogue among four activists from the Emancipa Popular Education Movement in Brazil, following the principles of Freirean pedagogy as a "circle of culture." It delves into how "popular knowledge can be experienced as popular power," narrating the history, struggles, and strategies employed by the Emancipa movement in their pursuit of democratizing Brazilian universities. The discussion is set within the context of Latin American structural inequalities and the issue of educational exclusion in Brazil. It emphasizes the vital role of contesting culture and knowledge as part of the movement's fight against social injustices perpetuated by peripheral capitalism, including racist violence and gender oppression. The paper adopts emancipatory pedagogy as the method to empower and mobilize grassroots efforts in this transformative endeavour.

Inequality and injustice in education have been viewed from the perspective of social justice. Since the emergence of John Rawls's "A Theory of Justice," social justice issues have attracted the attention of social and political philosophers. Theoretical consequences of social and political philosophy have been actively incorporated into the field of education. However, the issue of educational justice remains controversial and requires further philosophical consideration. To further philosophical consideration, this paper explores how the class or the classroom can generate space and time for democracy, by focusing on the educational specificity of the classroom community, which is called 'Gakkyu' in Japanese. Social justice in education is not only a policy issue, but also a practical issue which should be tackled in the classroom. Rethinking the ways of democracy to face conflicts arising due to differences and equality of children in the classroom is an important method of bridging social justice and education. In this paper, the following question will be explored: how classroom democracy can be nurtured and the classroom community transformed into a democratic place where children from various background and experiences gather and learn from each other.

This paper seeks to address the wider questions of populism and its seeming contemporary rise within the specific context of the Philippines, regarding education. Starting from the assumption that neither politics nor education sits above cultures or spaces autonomously acting upon them but instead emerges with/because/against particularities; after a brief overview of populism, I explore the conceptual characteristics in context. This is informed from my own experiences of living and researching in the Philippines, including experience of the Mindanao conflict but also the failure of liberalism in the Philippines more generally, the failure of western education to 'develop' the nation and the reactions that led to the populists rise of Duterte. The paper offers an understanding of the complexities of populism and offers some hope to how education can meet the challenge through a specific example of critical participatory community education.

At a time when there are renewed expressions of concern about how our societies are organised and the health of our democracies, this paper focuses on the role of education in a democracy. Informed by John Dewey's and Martin Buber's accounts of what it is to be educated, and Homi Bhabha's concept of third space work, the paper presents the case for a progressive education for democratic citizenship. Adopting an ethnologically-informed approach, the paper provides an in-depth look at two Catalan and two English schools, focussing on the ways in which they look to provide a democracy enabling education. The findings reveal how and why mutual cooperation, collaboration and dialogue in relationships are key elements in the modelling of an education for democratic citizenship.