From Education to Democracy?

摘要

The conventional wisdom, since at least the writings of John Dewey (1916), views high levels of educational attainment as a prerequisite for democracy. Education is argued to promote democracy both because it enables a "culture of democracy" to develop and because it leads to greater prosperity, which is also thought to cause political development. The most celebrated version of this argument is the modernization theory, popularized by Seymour Martin Lipset (1959), which emphasizes the role of education as well as economic growth in promoting political development in general and democracy in particular. For example, Lipset (1959 p. 79) argues that Education presumably broadens men's outlooks, enables them to understand the need for norms of tolerance, restrains them from adhering to extremist and monistic doctrines, and increases their capacity to make rational electoral choices and he concludes (p. 80) that If we cannot say that a "high" level of education is a sufficient condition for democracy, the available evidence does suggest that it comes close to being a necessary condition.