Fuentes, J. L., Fernández-Salinero, C., & Ahedo, J. (Eds.) (2022). Democracy and tradition in educational theory and practice in the 21st century. Narcea. 180 pp.

Abstract

Democracia y tradición en la teoría y práctica educativa del siglo XXI, the book edited by Juan Luis Fuentes, Carolina Fernández-Salinero, and Josu Ahedo, tackles the unavoidable debate about the role of education in establishing a democratic society in the current century, starting from a broad understanding of the concept of democracy: in the words of Dewey, cited in the prologue by Gonzalo Jover, as a form of moral and spiritual association first and then a form of government. Thematically, the text is arranged around three complex concepts: democracy, tradition, and education. The eight chapters into which it is divided, written by seventeen authors from the field of the theory and history of education from nine different universities, consider questions such as “what goals should a democratic education set itself at present?”; ¿what can be provided to the education of people in the plural setting typical of a democratic society by, on the one hand, religion and tradition, and, on the other, by emerging proposals such as character education, service-learning, or maker culture?”; “what can we learn nowadays from the law of 70, enacted under Franco’s dictatorship, or how can we turn technology into a source of pedagogical opportunities instead of resigning ourselves to seeing it as a threat to democratic coexistence?”.