Cambridge Handbook of Democratic Education by Julian Culp, Johannes Drerup, and Douglas Yacek, Cambridge, UK; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2023

Democracies around the world are facing significant challenges, from populist upheaval to growing preferences for authoritarian alternatives, and from struggles to deliberate about pressing policy issues to political tribalism that places the interests of some groups over others. The Cambridge Handbook of Democratic Education reminds us that healthy democracy requires good education and that any attempt to deal with challenges to democracy must also take up related matters in schools. In their introduction to the book, the editors begin by noting that democracy is both a social ideal and a political institution, but they add that we should care about democratic education without getting bogged down by exactly how that education is defined. Instead, they emphasize an education that broadly intends to improve the flourishing of democratic society as well as those who participate in that society. The editors seek to describe democratic education across the curriculum and to develop habits of democratic living. They are concerned with education for democracy, while also valuing education as democracy. The former, more widely known and celebrated, entails school-based instruction about democratic political systems, while the latter recognizes that the practices undertaken in schools should themselves embody democracy in significant ways. Though this does set up some unresolved tensions between the chapters when the individual authors operate with differing conceptions of democratic education, the broad definition enables the editors to traverse wide and important territory across the chapters. The editors, Julian Culp, Johannes Drerup, and Douglas Yacek, all live in Europe and each brings robust philosophical training to their study of education. The list of contributors to the volume reads as a bit of a “who’s who” of key figures in philosophy of education today, especially in North America and Western Europe, with a few newer scholars, including doctoral students, mixed in. While I respect the editors’ decision to highlight these philosophical voices, as those that are sometimes left out of conversations on citizenship education, I do worry about the lack of more practice-focused primary and secondary social studies education scholars and teachers who could have contributed significant insights from classroom experience and empirical research. Nonetheless, the editors should be commended for bringing together such a well-respected collection of scholars who employ sophisticated philosophical thinking about educational issues in largely accessible and useful ways. From the opening lines of the book, the editors position democratic education as something important, but increasingly under attack. It is no surprise, then, that the organization of the book follows suit, first grounding the reader in a historical understanding of and philosophical support for democratic education before turning to look at how it plays out today and at the array of challenges it faces. Broken up into four sections, the collection weaves together important historical thinkers who have championed democracy, key concepts essential to understanding and conducting democracy, and contemporary responses to problems unfolding in democracies today. The editors provide an overview of the four sections in their introduction to the collection, but as I read the book, I found myself wishing there were guides to each section and a conclusion at the end. Those would have helped me, as a reader, know what to focus on when reading and why the topics discussed are worthy of attention. Without these, shifting from one chapter to the next sometimes felt rather disjointed, and I struggled to see how the parts fit together cohesively. That said, I commend the authors for being inclusive in their approach, taking up a wide array of concepts and matters related to democratic education. At over 600 pages, it is difficult to succinctly summarize this …