Journal of Culture and Values in Education 

 Volume 2 Issue 3, 2019  Krynski, A. (2019). In a State of Fragility: The Compromised Dignity 
of Communities, Indignation, and the Incapacitation of Public 
Education 

 

1 

 
In a State of Fragility: The Compromised Dignity of Communities, Indignation, and the 
Incapacitation of Public Education 
 
Agnes Krynski* 
Eastern Michigan University 
 
*Corresponding Author: akrynski@emich.edu 
Received : 2019-10-01 
Accepted : 2019-11-01 
 

 
How to cite this paper: Krynski, A. (2019). In a state of fragility: The compromised dignity of communities, indignation, and the incapacitation 
of public education. Journal of Culture and Values in Education, 2(3), 1-24. 
 

 
Abstract 
 
The dominant ideological and material framing of the work of public school communities in the 
United States prevents schools from contesting the indignities they themselves or their 
neighbors suffer. Leaving this frame intact means permitting exclusionary policies and violent 
practices to incapacitate learning communities to work toward the attainment of inclusive 
democracy. Inclusive communities understand themselves to be in connection with other 
historically delineated groups in a web of affiliation and care. Communities that flourish as 
other communities wither compromise their own self-respect when they do not call out such 
injustice. Learning communities can redefine the work they do through an institutionally-grown 
advocacy of connection that actively nurtures intercommunity solidarity. I situate this 
reorientation within a tradition of thinking about civic agency, dissent, and indignation. I then 
suggest that public institutions carve out an ethos of connection as a source of self-
understanding to take on the task of informal ethical oversight. Such a community ethos 
encourages schools to respond to economic, environmental, and social realities and to 
recognize, respect, and work through past and present civic grievances relationally.  
 
Keywords: Inequality, Indignation, Dignity, Advocacy 
 
Introduction 
 
We have learned to respond to manifestations of extreme inequality such as homelessness the 
way communities have, during certain eras, been directed to respond to leprosy. Persons of 
health and wealth mobilize to contain, to exclude, to marginalize. The affected are relegated 
to modern-day lepers’ colonies, left to fend for themselves while managing to create needs-
based communities spun with the sturdy fabric of mutual aid and sewn with the needle of 
solidarity. Yet, all the wealthy see, while shielding themselves with handkerchiefs, are 
vagabonds and trespassers. The exiled wanderers are tolerated outside the gates of the city as 
long as they keep moving when the wealthy come to reclaim their land for those deemed to be 
worthier residents. Until one day, in the advent of a whole system collapse, the healthy are 
caught off guard when what they are faced with is no longer manageable leprosy, but the 



 
 Journal of Culture and Values in Education 

 Volume 2 Issue 3, 2019  Krynski, A. (2019). In a State of Fragility: The Compromised Dignity 
of Communities, Indignation, and the Incapacitation of Public 
Education 

 

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plague. And there is no escaping the plague. It cannot be contained. The affected cannot be 
excluded. The death the plague brings spills over the margins. Joining the caravan heading into 
unknown lands, the wealthy succumb in equal measure. In a state of delirium, they realize that 
the fortress they thought would afford them total immunity is a fragile sand castle indeed.  
 
We all live in a world defined by states of fragility with a variety of plague-like crises on our 
collective horizon. The fragility of the state of democracy is never more evident than in folding 
times. Intermittent watershed events increase in number and magnitude and cause us to 
reconsider the path we are taking. This inquiry takes a variety of forms. Many ask if the state is 
doing enough with our ample financial contributions. We judge whether these funds are 
applied justly to our collective societal project. We weigh how well our representatives 
advocate for our communities. At our civic best, we inquire about the well-being of those 
communities in which we do not put our children to bed. We care about the viability of those 
times in which we personally will not have to breathe and drink. Finding clarity about what 
matters to us now and concern about the legacy we will leave for kin and non-kin alike leads us 
to evaluate the quality of state responsiveness to the crises of our times as a criterion of 
legitimacy. It is through this evaluation that we enact our civic agency. For in the absence of an 
established civic practice of contestation, even if a degree of meaningful structural change 
occurs, diminished public participation contributes to unbalanced political representation.  
 
Protest emerges as an attempt to redress this imbalance. Youth-led social movements draw 
everyone’s attention to future impacts of current decision-making. We are confronted with the 
question of who is most affected by the indifference and inaction of representatives. For we 
know that legal and political equality alone does not prevent blight from being suffered 
disproportionately. Acknowledging the precariousness of representative democracy leads us 
to ask what the consequences are if successive administrations governing a country fail to 
attend to systemic suffering and display no desire to alleviate it. Such a society needs to 
confront a growing cascade of critical questions. Why is such a tradition of governance, and the 
society of apparent indifference upholding it, not discredited in the mind of every citizen? What 
prospects does a democratic society hold if it, in turn, delegitimizes the raising of this question 
by its citizens? And what if the dominant framing of public education undermines the very 
nature of democratic citizenship and prevents schools from contesting inequality? Within such 
a narrow field of action, how are schools to promote just ways of being and working in 
community with others?  
 
In the following, from my place as an educator in the United States working within a public 
education system steeped in residential segregation and exclusivity of access to educational 
opportunities, I argue that thinking about the value of dignity, public outcries motivated by 
indignation, and institutional incapacitation is necessary to make sense of how learning 
communities can respond to wider exclusionary developments. A public education of shared 
aims and easily mitigated vulnerabilities is based in a sense of association that confers an 
obligation to strive for equal respect for and value of all who partake of it.  
 



 
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 Volume 2 Issue 3, 2019  Krynski, A. (2019). In a State of Fragility: The Compromised Dignity 
of Communities, Indignation, and the Incapacitation of Public 
Education 

 

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My concerns translate into two related objectives for this article. First, I want to contextualize 
my argument in a discussion of larger cultural conditions as they come to bear on public 
education. Second, I want to propose the outlines of a theoretical model of the work of learning 
communities and wider communities as advocatory, relational, and responsive to an era’s given 
cultural conditions. The need for such a commitment rests on the pedagogical value of teaching 
about and through democratic civic contestation of unequal economic and social living 
conditions anywhere in the web of affiliation. It also depends on a refutation of the often 
dangerously concomitant exclusionary and authoritarian voices presenting themselves as 
solutions to unjust and inhumane conditions affecting parts of the polity. These attempts at 
group appeasement hearken back to the spirit of segregation. They rely on fragmentation of 
the demos as both method and desired outcome and legitimize indifference to the fate of 
oppressed communities. As they coalesce into an explanatory framework, these efforts deny 
the effects of specific historical trajectories and their colonizing, enslaving, and segregating 
initiators and promulgators. Yet, it is these histories that predict and constrain group 
attainment of highly coveted community characteristics such as relative personal safety and 
readily available material resources. 
 
The impetus for my analysis is Zygmunt Bauman’s interrogation of the dilemmas that 
continually pose a challenge to the ideal of a just society and that, I believe, public schools 
should help students understand and take to heart: moral indifference (Bauman, 2013; Bauman 
& Donskis, 2013, 2016) and the fragile creation of community at the nexus of freedom and 
security with security often winning the upper hand (Bauman, 2001). Through Ulrich Beck’s 
identification of shared vulnerabilities as inherent in a “(world) risk society” (Beck, 1992, 1999, 
2009) and his delineation of “metamorphosis” (Beck, 2016) as a construct denoting the 
destabilization of epistemological certainty about the world in which we live, I think about 
schools as institutions affected by and embedded within an ever-changing and often elusive 
cultural, material, and emotional landscape, often clearer in retrospect than in real time. I turn 
to James Jasper’s (2018) work around political emotions and his conception of emotions as 
essential to understanding civic protest and political action in order to arrive at a clearer 
understanding of this landscape as it relates to education. Of illustrative value and of particular 
interest to me in tracing the need for a public school ethos of intercommunity connection and 
solidarity is a converging line of inquiry about the causes of worldwide indignation as indicators 
and catalysts of a variety of ethical crises of our times (Appadurai, 2017; Fraser, 2017; 
Hochschild, 2016; Kimmel, 2017). As these ethical crises often mask as mere political upsets, 
revisiting how civic actors have successfully unmasked injustices before is a worthwhile 
pedagogical endeavor.  
 
In the second part of this essay, I consider how educational practice and institutionally-grown 
advocacy can repudiate proposed solutions that do harm to a vision of democratic political 
community. I ask how we can incorporate ethical responsiveness and awareness of structural 
group inequality (Anderson, 2010; Tilly, 1998) and the emotions driving collective agency 
(Jasper, 2018) into a meaningful public school ethos. Following Nick Couldry’s (2010) 
articulation of a contemporary “crisis of voice” (p. 1) and the need for the renewal of “public 
voices” (p. 140), such an ethos requires and enables educators to call out the disproportionate 



 
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 Volume 2 Issue 3, 2019  Krynski, A. (2019). In a State of Fragility: The Compromised Dignity 
of Communities, Indignation, and the Incapacitation of Public 
Education 

 

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impact under which impoverished communities endure violence of various sorts, ranging from 
conceded bodily well-being due to targeted environmental degradation (Taylor, 2014) to 
impeded community meaning-making through eliminating schools as community support hubs 
(Ewing, 2018). Such an ethos also requires educators to repudiate a dehumanizing economic 
system that betrays working class communities and fuels resentment that divides (Williams, 
2017). I argue that well-off communities that do not acknowledge those sources of suffering 
that suppress their neighbors’ flourishing compromise their own dignity in the process. True 
communities of excellence—an image that affluent communities work tirelessly to project—do 
not cultivate the success of their own at the expense of the thriving of other historically 
delineated groups. Instead, dignified communities refuse to benefit from what Eddie Glaude 
(2017) calls a “value gap” (p. 34), which he understands to be a pernicious organizing principle 
of white people mattering the most by design. This principle of competition by way of exclusion 
and segregation sustains what Elizabeth Anderson (2010) terms a “racialized social hierarchy” 
(p. 187). We can trace this hierarchy to powerful historical processes, exemplified in, just to 
cite one prominent example, Noel Ignatiev’s (2009) classic study of the phenomenon of Irish 
identity and caste transformation and his key observation that for the Irish “to enter the white 
race was a strategy to secure an advantage in a competitive society” (p. 3). Securing such an 
advantage persists as an objective for communities with various degrees of economic power 
and political clout. Competition as a motivating force is an impediment to inclusive democracy. 
Schools, however, have been made to compete for resources and students. As this competitive 
thinking takes hold of educational institutions, it becomes naturalized in school curricula and a 
community’s self-understanding. Seeking a pedagogical response to such realities, I want to 
think of school districts as epistemic centers of community knowledge and understanding. 
Schools sustain a community’s beliefs and opinions about itself and guide how its members 
learn to relate to other communities. Schools can be places in which we nurture a responsive 
public school ethos that centers mutuality and relationality to other communities as central to 
a learning community’s mission.  
 
Democracy, Dissent, and an Ever More Fragile Public Education  
 
Carving out a responsive public school ethos requires an understanding of the nature of dissent 
and the role it plays in creating relationships that sustain the democratic project. What schools 
need to address is this core phenomenon: A world of ever-increasing vulnerability and 
continuous inequality causes us to grow skeptical about the legitimacy of our representatives’ 
decision-making. Whatever their entry point, many people engage in some form of 
spontaneous critique of such realities. Whether raw or more deliberate, this evaluation 
manifests itself in a variety of attitudes toward our larger societal endeavor. The nature of our 
critique depends on how we understand our positionality within this project. Our beliefs about 
belonging to a greater political community affect the stance we take in the face of injustice. A 
public education that does not help students articulate these critiques is becoming ever more 
brittle.  
 
We know that endeavors that aim to contest the legitimacy of influential policies and practices 
do not take root in all soils. Whereas a totalitarian government’s source of legitimacy, once 



 
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of Communities, Indignation, and the Incapacitation of Public 
Education 

 

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obtained through violence, remains the threat of renewed retributive violence at the hand of 
the state, a democratically elected government has to ensure it stays legitimate in the eyes of 
its citizens through much less forceful means. It is a totalitarian government’s prime objective 
to rule with an iron fist to build a tower of legitimacy that cannot be reached, budged, or 
questioned. An uncritical support of repressive nation-state policies contributes to the building 
of ever higher towers. In contrast to such authoritarianism, a democratic project needs to 
support dissent because the state must not be so fragile as to break, but not so solid that it fails 
to yield to widely desired change. As an integral part of the democratic process, the inherent 
fragility of legitimacy necessitates continuous oversight by the people. Hence, in a 
democratically-oriented society, governance is held in balance through democratic acts of 
legitimization and contestation. As the people bestow initial legitimacy on government, so is 
maintaining that legitimacy predicated upon government establishing conditions of trust and 
well-being. A vote of no confidence is never far off after the initial stamp of approval the people 
may have given. Constituting a regulatory democratic tension, such unease contributes to the 
state of fragility characteristic of a state born or reimagined under the aegis of democratic 
ideals. Schools that pay attention to these processes understand themselves to be at the heart 
of this regulatory impulse.  
 
These ideals are at stake if this already fragile legitimacy is slowly but surely eroded as a result 
of government inaction, and by extension inaction on the part of institutions of public 
education, in the face of moral and material matters such as systemic poverty and 
environmental degradation. Ever weary of being at the peril of losing a broad mandate because 
of its potential inability to foster well-being for all, a democratically elected government has to 
chart a course that reconciles measured authority with democratic freedoms. For it is up to the 
art of democratic governance that the tension between holding power and the uncertainty of 
governing with a temporary mandate not be cause for opting for authoritarian and totalitarian 
methods. The stronger the state feels it needs to be and the more afraid it is about being 
delicately nested, the more likely it is to resort to principles and procedures of strict orderliness, 
perpetual fabrication of crises, and desperate attempts at internal and external fortification. 
Many school districts, currently upheld by hierarchical structures, share similar characteristics 
and motivations.  
 
The Pedagogical Value of Teaching about Civic Contestation Efforts 
 
Learning about the phenomenon of democratic dissent and the democratic undercurrents of 
legitimacy of governance means understanding that there have been many times in the past in 
which it was vital for those who reside within communities of various scales to strengthen their 
standing in the eyes of their government through actions that preserved democratic structures 
and modes of being. The question at the heart of this continuing process is: Which principles, 
procedures, relationships, practices, and outcomes inherent in governance are legitimate and 
which are not? This is in essence also a pedagogical question that alludes to the constant 
negotiation and renegotiation of trust and distrust, voice and silencing, as well as autonomy 
and coercion that is on many communities’ daily agenda.  



 
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of Communities, Indignation, and the Incapacitation of Public 
Education 

 

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Animated by this question, distrust of centralized government and of public schools has been 
a long-time reality for many marginalized groups. This marginalization prevented those 
engaged in opposition efforts from seriously threatening the stability, maintained at any cost, 
of the Western nation-state and the schools that sustained its guiding images. In this political 
context, successive administrations, designated and legitimized by the electorate, failed to 
extend the curtesy of codified agency to groups with interests different from those of the 
democratic majority. Yet, Stephen Pimpare (2008) describes historical cases in which “indignity 
is rightly met with rebellion, resistance, insolence, and indignation” (p. 205): food riots in times 
of economic depression, petitions for the implementation of public works, protest marches in 
response to pervasive unemployment. People were able to rediscover common causes. 
Processes of contestation have taken many forms, ranging from dissent to various forms of 
group activism and social advocacy. Such precedents point toward a long civic tradition of 
thoughtful and impassioned critique regarding the validity of state policy and of ways of 
organizing community life that serve plutocratic factions.  
 
Democratic contestation is a democratic skill that schools can foster because, as a form of 
dissent in a democracy, it is an expression of voice. Couldry (2010) discusses political 
deliberation and the need for “wider acts of retelling” (p. 147) and “acts of contention” (p. 148), 
while calling for democratic political exchanges that can transpire under conditions of vital 
disagreement with the forces of domination. As a form of political voice, engaging in civic 
contestation is part of learning to be on guard. As Sheldon Wolin (1994) explains, “democracy 
was born in transgressive acts, for the demos could not participate in power without shattering 
the class, status, and value systems by which it was excluded” (p. 17). Engaging in such 
intellectual disobedience exposes the injustices of various systems of oppression. Wolin’s 
observation points toward the need for the constant telling of stories about how things could 
be otherwise and how unjust policies shape everyday lived experience.  
 
Contestation efforts are actions that embody voice and enable autonomy. They involve 
questioning behavioral norms and evaluating the appropriateness of a variety of practices. 
When such autonomous practices thrive, the injustice of an established ideology and the 
system of justification upholding it become evident. Castoriadis (1997) conceives of autonomy 
in both an individual and collective sense as freedom; this freedom, as the basis of a democratic 
way of life, is based on when the public sphere “is effectively open to the participation of all” 
(p. 7). It follows that being autonomous does not mean being independent of the consideration 
of others, for it is in dialogue with others that we come to shared insights about the legitimacy 
of governmental authority. Being autonomous and being dialogic are entwined. Dissent and 
dialogue are interlocking processes. Engaging in autonomous thinking means freeing our 
thought processes from the yoke of unchecked authority.  
 
Questioning the Legitimacy of Unequal Community Flourishing 
 
Contesting the legitimacy of policies and modes of being in the world that fall out of the realm 
of what can be considered humane and just is at the core of what it means to educate and to 
become educated. Learning to challenge injustice is a vital aspect of supporting a democratic 



 
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of Communities, Indignation, and the Incapacitation of Public 
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mode of living. Public institutions of learning can take on true relevance as they induce 
communities to challenge their self-perception as independent bastions only marginally related 
to a larger polity of communities that ought to flourish. Instead of tending appeasingly to their 
meadows of complacency and complicity, such a shift in orientation means breaking down the 
fences holding in decades of privately felt moral indignation. Dissenting voices arise when a 
variety of views collide as they do every day in schools. Educators and students deserve to be 
able to express indignation publically without fear of being chastised and as a matter of 
educational routine and civic obligation. Understanding democratic contestation efforts is 
therefore vital to educational thought and practice.  
 
Visceral Indignation and an Epistemology of Emotions  
 
As communicative beings, silent indignation is not in our nature, and yet toned-down 
resentment has been a recurring societal tendency in Western industrialized nations. We 
cannot understand contestation efforts and how protest relates to public education without 
understanding the role emotions play in meaning-making. James Jasper (2018) offers a 
typology of emotions relevant to politics (p. 35) spanning reflex emotions, urges, moods, 
affective loyalties, and moral commitments. Jasper challenges conventional and well-
entrenched notions that construct feeling and thinking as separate processes. Instead, he 
replaces this false dichotomy with the amalgamated term “feeling-thinking processes” (p. xi). 
This reconceptualization contests our understanding of emotions in political life as inevitably 
leading to turmoil and uncertainty, an understanding deliberately fostered since the dawn of 
democracy to malign and thwart people’s collective agency. What emerges out of his project 
is, in effect, an epistemology of emotional energy that follows the regularity of the tides, is 
everything but impetuous, and is informative and comforting in the potential it offers to upset 
unjust living conditions.  
 
No matter the general spirit of the times, be the seas turbulent or calm, all educators face the 
small child that displays deep-seated wonder in the face of distress and the adolescent slowly 
growing accustomed to the consequences of state-sanctioned and state-promulgated 
inequality. Tugging at our shirt, and expressed through their budding lexicon, small children ask 
visceral questions at the sight of a person living in a state of homelessness. Growing into 
adolescence, many such children become outraged at the societal acceptance of such a reality. 
In contrast, encountering similar scenes of suffering, fully-formed and vote-holding citizens 
might not register, and eventually actively avoid, the misery staring them in the face. Hurt and 
anguish, too painful to witness and not do anything about, diminish agency. Children learn to 
avert their gaze as they learn from our example. What they learn is skillful avoidance and expert 
unresponsiveness. A default mode of intergenerationally transmitted fatigued indifference sets 
in. It is this indifference, as Bauman (1989) explains, that as part cause, part symptom, and part 
outcome sets the stage for moral catastrophes.  
 
Democracy cannot be sustained without respecting the child’s tentative inquiry into the causes 
of suffering and the adolescent’s growing indignation in the face of resigned complacency of 
an electorate they are soon to join. Whereas undemocratic forces will do everything in their 



 
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 Volume 2 Issue 3, 2019  Krynski, A. (2019). In a State of Fragility: The Compromised Dignity 
of Communities, Indignation, and the Incapacitation of Public 
Education 

 

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power to suppress signs of such sensitivity, a democratic society must value these moral 
intuitions. It is a danger to the ideal of democracy if a society does not. As Bauman (2000) notes, 
taking a “morally neutral stance” (p. 89) is equal to being complicit in the perpetuation of 
inequality. A supposedly democratically-minded government’s paradoxical undermining of the 
very democratic public sphere which justifies its existence (a public sphere that it itself is 
appointed to guard) leads to the creation of a vacuum to be filled by a recurring set of shallow 
characters. Corporate activists and populist agitators seize the remnants of democratic public 
institution and public trust in elected government and deploy these societal and cognitive 
infrastructures for their own ends. Equipped with such fodder, politically ambitious persons 
may initiate movements that channel visceral indignation into expressions of violence through 
hateful rhetoric. This outcome is not inevitable. Writing about the Brexit vote in Great Britain, 
Paul Mason (2017) observes, “only by understanding the source of anger can you defuse it” (p. 
96). Whoever shall be perceived to respect the people’s indignation shall gain their trust, 
goodwill, and vote.  
 
Indeed, rather belatedly, it has become clear that a formidable storm of indignation has already 
been forming across the world. A plurality of voices and motivations are enmeshed. Educators 
need to recognize that these ideas affect their students in their families and in their wider 
communities. Judging from current bestseller lists, political commentators and former 
statespersons are rushing to make sense of this ominous climate. Many are foreseeing the 
advance of a fascist deluge of Western democracies. Cultural critics observe that the decline in 
democratic commitment has been decades in the making. Arjun Appadurai (2017) posits a 
“democracy fatigue” (p. 7) setting in among citizens, a phenomenon he attributes to a modern 
culture of acceleration that no longer accommodates the “slow temporalities of democracy” 
(p. 8). When many people perceive democratic processes as inconvenient and statesperson 
politeness as out of step with our efficiently blunt times, why would citizens contest 
undemocratic rhetoric if its originators offer easy assurances and swift measures to erase what 
ails them?  
 
Nancy Fraser (2017), evoking “electoral mutinies” (p. 40), lays out the equally unsatisfactory 
options available to voters as they wish to demonstrate their grievances. Fraser (2017) 
identifies a “progressive neoliberalism” (p. 41) characterized by a “faux understanding of 
emancipation” (p. 48) and a “reactionary populism” (p. 47) that seduces many but offers “no 
resolution to the present crisis” (p. 48). Fraser takes issue with progressive efforts that, in their 
quest for culture change, have left on the side of the road the dream and necessity of working 
toward economic equality and the attendant dignity due to all people. Chantal Mouffe (2019) 
proposes a populism of the left as a political strategy for Western Europe when she calls for a 
“mobilization of common affects in defence of equality and social justice” (p. 6). Both Fraser 
and Mouffe observe that there is potential in this political moment and in people’s indignation 
for democratic reinvigoration.  
 
In a similar vein, ethnographic studies reveal a variety of groups expressing widespread 
indignation at their diminished life chances and the particular ways in which they make sense 
of the causes they attribute as leading to such setbacks. Michael Kimmel (2017) paints a picture 



 
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of Communities, Indignation, and the Incapacitation of Public 
Education 

 

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of indignation that defines and permeates the lifeworlds of his participants. In particular, 
Kimmel (2017) focuses on how nostalgia, fading guiding images of reassuring masculinity and 
fulfilling motherhood, and white men’s perception of “dispossession” (p. 9) of their partially 
lost entitlements contribute to a political identity that arises out of a visceral reaction to overall 
downward mobility. Through his conversations with participants, Kimmel (2017) identifies a 
conflation in their minds of greater social equality, perceived through distant and mediatized 
images, with increased class inequality, their lived reality. This perception is also evident in Arlie 
Hochschild’s (2016) research when participants speak about feeling left behind, their lived 
reality, as they conclude that others “cut in line” (p. 137), a conclusion likely drawn based on 
repeated claims made by distant authorities they respect. In both research contexts, we see 
the merging of the pain of people’s deeply felt reality with the comfort-inducing storytelling 
that distant meaning-making apparatuses such as people’s preferred media outlets provide. 
 
This line of inquiry takes seriously the real economic plight that affects people. As a response 
to the disdain coming out of the mouths of and shining through the policies of real or imagined 
elites, these difficulties lie at the heart of indignation. Appadurai (2017) sees an “accidental and 
partial overlap” (p. 2) in voters’ apprehensions and populist leaders’ promises. Fraser (2017) 
sees “mal-directed” (p. 46) rage where the root issues are so buried under a heap that the first 
person to be seen in its vicinity with a shovel appears as the hero who saves the day by 
appearing to do something, anything at all. Hochschild (2016), rejecting a simplistic hypothesis 
of gullibility (p. 14), suggests that “deep stories” (p. 16) of people’s anguish reveal the complex 
constellations of factors contributing to the architecture of their beliefs. Kimmel (2017), 
identifying a pernicious process of “manufacturing rage” (p. 31), examines a concerted media 
effort to channel people’s moral indignation into politicized anger. What emerges from this line 
of inquiry is the unearthing of deliberate efforts at camouflage and manipulation that lead to 
misattributions of the real causes of people’s suffering. Kimmel (2017) stresses that people’s 
grievances are “real” but not “true” (p. 9), in that their experiences are sincerely felt but 
inaccurately assessed.  
 
Writing about social movements that express a variety of affective and moral commitments 
(Jasper, 2018, p. 4), Donatella della Porta (2017) explains how “anti-austerity movements” (p. 
31) are in their protest and contestation inclusive and committed to democratic ideals. These 
groups differ from those who make up “regressive movements” (p. 37) that are in their protest 
and contestation exclusive, xenophobic, and committed to authoritarian models. Most 
importantly, della Porta (2017) emphasizes that upon probing, we find “the same discontent” 
(p. 37) fueling both factions’ fires. There are then still options in terms of which protest 
movement someone might join or with which party’s vision a voter might sympathize. Can 
those who perceive a vital need for sustained political action and who stand for inclusion and 
respect sway the cultural mood and the votes toward their side? As these various scholarly 
perspectives reveal, people’s diverse perspectives on what is and is not being done to help 
them thrive is relevant to how learning communities understand their work as epistemic hubs 
that serve the needs of their communities and the larger web that makes up the polity.  
 
 



 
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Silencing Indignation  
 
Learning communities that realize the importance of the political moment and their responses 
to it need to consider past institutional responses to indignation. Ideally, communication flows 
in both directions as confident democratic governance seeks out critique in order to bring 
about societal advancement. Just governments do not quell the expression of indignation. A 
society that fears dissent recasts principled ethical acts as impulsive unstructured incidents. 
These acts of civil disobedience are downgraded to the lowly and dubious status of 
unsophisticated outrage and threatening anger. Jasper (2018) points out that protestors have 
traditionally been portrayed as displaying fear and anger in a “panic model of emotions, the 
dark flip side of the exaggerated calculating-brain model of thought and rationality” (p. xi). 
Privileged groups, feeling threatened in the integrity of their social and economic vision, act 
swiftly to delegitimize efforts that might expose their decision-making as based in profiteering 
self-interest. When disenfranchised minorities fight to have their voices heard, these actions 
are cast as subversive; hence, the systematic civil disobedience of the Civil Rights movement in 
the United States is portrayed as individual riotous dissent (Kurashige, 2017; Robinson, 1987) 
and women’s resistance to patriarchal oppression and structural and personal violence is 
attributed to supposed hysteria and surreptitious pledges to sorcery (Merchant, 1989).  
 
In more recent times in the United States, we witness how indignation can also be silenced 
when group resistance efforts are portrayed as traitorous, disrespectful, and disloyal. Myths of 
moral superiority, propagated in schools, can serve to deflect questions about the legitimacy 
of policies and the adequacy and sustainability of prevalent oppressive and alienating modes 
of being-in-the-world. Through such discursive and material practices, powerful interests 
attempt to suppress visceral indignation through erasing its spontaneous (that is, democratic, 
in Wolin’s sense) impulse by cruelly cutting short its potential “self-institution” (Castoriadis, 
1997, p. 10) into a concrete lived democratic mode of existence. In essence, these instances of 
silencing indignation are examples of not honoring voice and of actively suppressing political 
participation, which Dalton (2017) sees as hurting the polity when “the loud voice of some 
drowns out the weaker voices of others” (p. 18) and, as a result, the government is ignorant of 
people’s needs (p. 5). This means that absent an awareness of people’s grievances, government 
is illiterate when it comes to reading the prevalent zeitgeist. As a result, government makes 
“suboptimal” (p. 5) decisions. In addition, whose voice is “weak” and whose voice is “loud” does 
not rest solely on numerical strength.  
  
When majorities fight to have their voices heard, their indignation is similarly inconvenient to 
the authorities. But majorities in contrast to minorities are much harder to ignore and more 
difficult to silence outright. Both groups experience indignation, but numbers spell an 
advantage in terms of whose demands get acknowledged, even if not genuinely heard. This 
gives rise to the unfortunate conflation on the part of majorities suffering from economic 
hardship of their own lived experiences with those of historically violently oppressed groups. 
The self-perceptions of those understanding themselves to constitute a majority that has 
heretofore remained “silent” and that suffers from estrangement (Hochschild, 2016) from a 
changing country that has the potential to transform established voting power dynamics via 



 
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reforms can be fed by those wishing to appear to attend to people’s concerns while 
downplaying the true sources of their suffering. Being encouraged to dub oneself a silent 
majority communicates clear undercurrents of threat and reminders of dormant potency, while 
reaffirming one’s right and entitlement (see Kimmel, 2017) to and the legitimacy of a renewed, 
because clearly threatened (Krastev, 2017), “tyranny of the majority.” This concept is worth 
revisiting per Lani Guinier’s (1994) analysis of the original Madisonian skepticism about the 
beneficial effects of universal suffrage, as she herself has also done to demonstrate its 
relevance to questioning the ideal of meritocracy in higher education (Guinier, 2015).  
 
Dalton (2017) sees this concern about the end of self-disfranchisement as resurfacing in 
contemporary debates when he states that “elite pessimism about democracy continues” (p. 
213). This is a pessimism and a silencing mechanism that Jasper (2018) terms “democracy’s 
shadow” (p. 171). On the one hand, we wish to empower everyone, but at the same time, we 
fear the supposed irrationality of the masses and how they will influence the group’s vision of 
progressive politics. Dalton (2017) explains how unequal participation in democratic processes 
has allowed governments to ignore the needs of various groups making up the polity. Once 
these fears are sown, unequal participation does not strike us as quite as dire a state as it is. 
The affluent minority establishes its own tyranny as its prominence eclipses the reality that all 
of us have become victims of its cultural dominance and political agenda-setting. Speaking 
about dominant majorities within democratic systems, Kathleen Sullivan (2009) notes that a 
pluralizing feminist philosophy can chip away at what she calls the “gentle democratic tyranny 
of public opinion that arises from the sameness of democracy” (p. 201). Natalie Masuoka and 
Jane Juhn (2013) understand this public opinion to be “the product of group interactions and 
historical memory structured by the person’s position in the American racial order” (p. 3). 
Whoever wishes to silence indignation in a democratic society will have to shape public opinion 
as a factor that also has the potential to mitigate the relatively weak position in which minority 
groups find themselves in a democratic political system. All of this points toward the 
importance of asking how the work of learning communities shapes public opinion. This 
beckons the question to what extent schools can mitigate some of the issues scholars raise 
about the problematic nature of public opinion in a democracy.  
 
The Work of Communities and a Responsive Public School Ethos  
 
Given these concerning cultural conditions, one would expect schools to be places in which we 
can attempt to make sense of the political currents of our times. This is not so in a politicized 
school climate where the official goals of public education appear petty when they should never 
be. Theodor Adorno (2005) articulated this most pointedly: “every debate about the ideals of 
education is trivial and inconsequential compared to this single ideal: never again Auschwitz” 
(p. 191). This “never again” is the essence of moral indignation and should strike a chord with 
a subjugated citizenry. Instead, we find widespread acceptance of schools that suppress 
indignation, avoid difficult questions, and do not dare critique openly and with confidence 
unethical state policy and associated modes of being-in-the-world. This makes difficult the 
articulation of a public ethos that allows schools to advocate for a citizenship ideal that is rooted 



 
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in ethics, a tradition of successful civil disobedience, nonconformity, and depth of thought 
conducive to autonomous ways of being.  
 
Such an ideal of ethical responsiveness requires, at a minimum, a form of democratic education 
that gives schools shared authority with parents to decide what is important for students to 
learn (Gutmann, 1987). However, ethical responsiveness involves deep critique of harmful 
cultural trends that are sure to challenge some parents’ sensibilities. As our emergent political 
realities paint a picture of deeply felt injustice, how do educators weave discussions about this 
“orientation toward the world” (Jasper, 2018, p. 120) into the institutional fabric? A public 
school ethos that captures the motivation behind moral indignation and sees it for the common 
denominator it can be is true to the sense of “public” as connecting all members of the polity. 
To achieve this aim, public schools must honor voice and cultivate dialogue to counter a 
pervasive divide-and-conquer ethos that denies commonalities and disregards our political 
level of existence. Such an orientation requires a sense of advocacy that is based in intergroup 
connection. One of the essential questions citizens should ask themselves is to what degree 
their felt indignation corresponds to the felt indignation of their fellow citizens. Educators need 
to pose this solidarity-sparking question to students to encourage the development of ethical 
solidarity as a democratic mode of being. 
 
Political beings are aware of the role of assent and dissent in a democratic system and learn 
how to express both in everyday life and in moments of concerted public effort at political 
communication. Just as social movements provide such venues, public education also holds the 
promise of allowing us to communicate our grievances and search for democratic solutions 
together. As settings in which we can enact democracy, schools have the potential to be sites 
of democratic contestation. Despite his often disillusioning account of democratic governance, 
Wolin (1994) posits a definition of democracy that is well suited to theorizing democratic 
modes of being in public education. According to Wolin (1994), “democracy is a project 
concerned with the political potentialities of ordinary citizens, that is with their possibilities for 
becoming political beings through the self-discovery of common concerns and of modes of 
action for realizing them” (p. 11). A responsive public school ethos encourages such necessary 
protest and ensuing dialogue.  
 
The complexity of the political emotional landscape as it shapes civic identity requires of us 
dialogic inquiry anchored in careful ethical deliberation. This includes countering indifference 
about public issues with an ardent commitment toward the world (Bourdieu, 2000). It also 
includes engaging students in conversations to examine the degree to which a world of 
consumption attempts to erase visceral indignation. If we wish to be ethically responsive, we 
cannot rely exclusively on the cultivation of personal virtues. Van Hooft (2006) insists that any 
ethical project must strive to reconcile virtue and justice (p. 110). Justice, in Jasper’s (2018) 
conceptualization, is “how people are treated when they interact” (p. 130). According to Paul 
Ricoeur (1994), justice “extends further than face-to-face encounters” (p. 194). Dialogic inquiry 
is essential to an education that enables children to learn how to interact with those they love 
and with those to whom they commit morally (Jasper, 2018, p. 128). Dialogue based in moral 
commitment fosters a sense of being-in-community with others. Dedication to a public ethos 



 
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suggests an obligation to the common good as an extension of the care we usually reserve for 
those within the city gates. An impassioned public school ethos can provide the fertile ground 
needed to nurture ethical advocates who will redefine what the gates mean. As Bauman (2001) 
writes poignantly, “security sacrificed in the name of freedom tends to be other people’s 
security; and freedom sacrificed in the name of security tends to be other people’s freedom” 
(p. 20). In contrast, an ethically responsive ethos takes everyone’s needs into consideration.  
 
Because indignation and teaching are affective and relational processes at their core, educators 
can work to expose government and community apathy toward injustice as part of their 
educational practice. This is a possible outcome of appealing to students’ sense of what is just, 
our conscience Thoreau (1992) saw as being able to guide us toward more just decisions than 
the amalgamated opinions of the political majority ever could. The development of such a 
public conscience requires, as Castoriadis (1997) maintains, a “political educational process” (p. 
11) that strives to develop “corresponding abilities” (p. 11) in emerging citizens as they 
participate in the democratic process. These abilities do not simply inform a democratic modus 
operandi, Castoriadis explains, but go deeper as they shape citizens’ conceptions of political 
equality. We can draw parallels here to Anderson’s (2010) insistence on engaging in political 
philosophy through problem-oriented and empirically informed “non-ideal theory” (p. 3). 
Anderson (2010) points to the importance of starting with “a diagnosis of injustices in our actual 
world, rather than from a picture of an ideal world” (p. 3) and sees this process as consisting of 
explanations of causes and mechanisms and identifications of “the responsibility of different 
agents to alter these mechanisms” (p. 22) and, lastly, undo them. Taking cues from the realm 
of political philosophy and Anderson’s (2010) methodological approach, we can begin to 
imagine a non-ideal approach to teaching about how communities ought to relate to one 
another. Such an approach is rooted in contestation, advocacy, and democratic institutional 
agency that defies rationalizing storytelling.  
 
Ethical Advocacy as an Affirmative Practice 
 
A responsive public school ethos carves out space in schools for the cultivation of both 
contestation and advocacy. As a grassroots ethical and political practice, advocacy is an 
affirmative practice because advocacy honors voice. When we teach for advocacy rather than 
categorically treating everyone’s voice as equally valid, we treat everyone’s voice as equally 
worthy of being ethically probed. We tell our intertwined stories and engage in processes of 
“retelling” (Couldry, 2010, p. 147) to develop and amplify our civic voices. We can encourage 
such habits through educational practices that respect moral indignation as integral to our 
ethical development. We pay attention to moral emotions because, as Jasper (2018) puts it in 
clear terms, “it feels good to do the right thing” (p. 5). At the risk of sounding politically naïve, 
we should not discount that what we feel and think in reaction to injustice takes on a public 
dimension and public relevance. As community challenges increasingly coalesce with global 
concerns, a commitment to the public dimension of community life brings with it planetary 
commitment. Engaging in a sustained and collaborative thought process in our educational 
institutions allows us to cultivate an ethic with which to approach such boundary-crossing 
challenges. Such an ethic is rooted in place and gives rise to local responses to the crises of our 



 
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times. Yet, it examines the cosmopolitan condition (Beck, 2016) of identifying “‘world problems” 
(Beck, 1999, p. 15) as reverberating in our local places without hiding their global scale.  
 
Educational Practice as Advocatory Work 
 
A teacher identity that encourages critical thought rests on the willingness of educators to 
probe deeply within to identify their own sources of indignation and how these motivate their 
work. Becoming a teacher requires a commitment to initiate conversations about the 
legitimacy of policies and unjust ways of being-in-the-world. Teachers who examine the role 
moral emotions play in past and present protest and political action (Jasper, 2018) do important 
work to help their students develop such understanding. Such educators challenge a culture of 
apparent indifference and outward half-heartedness. As a case in point, Paul Gorski (2018) 
distinguishes between spheres of influence (p. 177) in teachers’ work; teachers have control 
over certain material aspects of their practice, but “another commitment is developing deep 
understandings of the barriers outside our spheres that impact students within them” (p. 178). 
With such understanding of obstacles comes a commitment to “not replicate them unwillingly” 
(p. 178). This is an example of ethical responsiveness through an advocatory process Gorski 
(2018) calls “expanding our spheres of influence” (p. 177). This process serves to support a 
variety of equity and justice commitments. 
 
What teachers need to engage in advocacy work is the support and protection of the 
institutions in which they work. No matter their age, many students look to their teachers to 
see if they are as affronted by the state of things as they are. Many educators are but are not 
free to show it lest they raise topics deemed controversial (see Hess, 2009), or rather, when 
they upset the worldviews (especially the economic and social visions) of members of the 
communities in which they teach. This not only infantilizes the teaching force, it constitutes 
one of the challenges of reimagining public schools as community schools. Public school 
teachers are committed to being facilitators of dialogue, but they may worry that their 
commitment to justice has no place in their teaching practice. This practical concern of a figure 
invested with authority wishing to provide a safe classroom atmosphere is not the same as 
requiring public school teachers to be, as is often ambiguously termed, “neutral.” For educators, 
disclosing political affiliations can be counterproductive. Disclosing one’s identity as an ethical 
thinker is vital. Demonstrating ethical neutrality is out of the question. It is often precisely those 
people who profess distaste for moral relativism who are the first to call for educators and 
schools to remain neutral in times of moral upheaval. As teachers model and encourage ethical 
citizenship, they advocate for just living conditions precisely because they respect students’ 
various backgrounds.  
 
Incapacitating Public Schools 
 
Such a view of education and teacher identity goes against commonly accepted educational 
paradigms. Many adhere to the view that it is not up to public institutions to invite students to 
contest the legitimacy of state policy, market-based modes of being, and a world of economic 
and political inequality. David Archard (2015) identifies a fear in a liberal society of “a single 



 
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collectivist ideology” (p. 240) driving public education. It is not up to schools, the well-known 
argument goes, to evaluate the adequacy of state responses to a variety of contemporary 
issues and to offer opportunities for critique lest schools inculcate particular perspectives. Any 
mention of politics evokes not ethical and civic concerns but party-political doctrines. This, 
according to Archard (2015), means that any attempt to tailor teaching to bring out 
cooperation, group well-being, and striving for equality is conflated with indoctrination into 
one demonized ideology. As a result, educators are categorically not to challenge inequality, 
among a long list of other taboo subjects, and to stay off the prohibited terrain of encouraging 
protest of those suffering indignities, in particular if they happen to live in the vicinity. 
Educators are not to ask students to probe too deeply into this rarely clearly delineated terrain. 
Instead, they are to transmit a certified body of information only thinly disguised as state-
approved standards. Such prohibitions cut deeply into how teachers working in particular 
learning communities understand the nature of their work.  
 
Teaching in such a state is like navigating a minefield. What pervades the field is an overall lack 
of political vision for the institutions into whose care we entrust our young people. A shared 
political identity might lead us to ask who planted the mines and for what reason and how we 
can work together to remove them. It would involve understanding motivations, emotional 
undercurrents, and why people avoid unpleasant emotions (Jasper, 2018, p. 95). Barring public 
education from doing this is an educational arrangement that is anathema to democratic ideals 
and equals inconsequence. It is a short step from here to arguing away the relevance of funding 
public schools altogether if all they are supposed to do is prop up individual students. 
 
Public schools remain incapacitated to foster nuanced understanding in the citizenry of the 
persistence of pervasive inequality and calamitous decision-making on the part of successive 
political administrations. In people’s minds, such administrative incompetence equals 
government inadequacy. In Charles Tilly’s (1998) analysis, in a democracy the ruling classes 
comprise a significant number of high-status groups. This phenomenon of the thriving of oases 
of well-being in a desert of unmet needs discourages the raising of questions about inclusion 
and exclusion in our public schools. Educational policy reroutes public funds toward the 
maintenance of the country’s artificial oases and feeds what Tilly (1998) refers to as the 
“exploitative side” (p. 193) of democratic government. This translates into, as David Labaree 
(1997) explains, discourse about public education in the United States being dominated by 
what he calls a “social mobility goal” (p. 50), a paradigm that works against the “ideal of civic 
virtue” (p. 65). Labaree (1997) details how public education is increasingly posited as a private 
good rather than a public good. Bauman (2013), considering why there is little resistance to the 
worldview that ultimately feeds these ideas about the purpose of education, identifies three 
responses in the face of injustice—resistance, submission, and collaboration—and comes to 
the conclusion that the promise of mobility and the “precious currency of social acceptance, 
position and prestige” (p. 26) overshadows the option of resistance. Market ideologies, when 
invoked in schools, lure people into a system that makes no room for critique. In times of 
rampant economic inequality and downward mobility and the presence of widespread moral 
indignation, public education for “democratic equality” (Labaree, 1997, p. 43) takes on 
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Education in a Fractured Polity: Fragmentation, Fortified Communities, Ownership 
 
Larger intercommunity dynamics play an important role in understanding civic dissent efforts. 
When we search for ways to support democratic contestation efforts in public schools, we 
engage in what Maria Lugones (2000) has described as a “process of reconsidering the place 
and meaning of community and home within a politics of resistance and liberation” (p. 467). 
Living in a community indicates demarcation whereas living in community points toward 
connection. Even if we engage students in conversations about the necessity of just governance, 
we may not ask them to look inward and examine their own thinking about being-in-community 
with others. Yet, it can be argued, as Adorno (2005) maintained, that “the only education that 
has any sense at all is an education toward critical self-reflection” (p. 193). If we were to engage 
in such self-reflection, would we find the old community image of a cordoned-off, fortified town 
in our supposedly democratically-oriented minds?  
 
Without working together to confront this lingering guiding image, we will likely not arrive at a 
concrete resolution of unequal living conditions in and among our communities. In a system in 
which communities have varied degrees of political clout, turning inward contributes to the 
fragmentation of the greater political community. As each community sustains its own schools, 
it risks losing a sense of embeddedness within a greater polity. When schools do not develop 
an ethos for a greater whole, then we cannot expect young people to carry in them an ethos 
that will cause them to identify with this greater whole as adults. Bauman (2013) notes the 
faulty view of people being understood as having “different abilities by nature rather than 
having different capacities to develop their potential because they are cast in different social 
conditions” (p. 22.). If we accept that there will be communities that are prevented from 
offering a particular baseline quality of life for their residents by way of their geographic 
location and historical trajectory, we have acquiesced to unlink from the polity as a web of 
affiliation and attachment. 
 
This is the opposite of democratic contestation of injustice and a tendency Bauman (2000) 
warned about when he spoke about the “departure from politics and withdrawal behind the 
fortified walls of the private” (p. 88). Bauman’s admonition critiques a frame of thinking that, if 
left unchecked, by way of justifying a withdrawal from a shared project, contributes to the 
weakening of democracy. When the affluent few retreat to an ultra-private sphere of gated 
communities, exclusive neighborhoods, and affiliated—in effect, privately sponsored—schools, 
they continue to benefit from the relative safety and freedom democratic systems provide. But 
as supra-citizens with blank checks and no obligations, they do not concern themselves with 
the difficult work of preserving these democratic privileges. The rest of us are tasked with 
carrying the democratic torch through the storm.  
 
The fragmentation of the larger polity is predicated on foregrounding ownership as a mode of 
being in the world. Ownership rests on separating a former whole into parts. Bauman (2013) 
notes that the gap between the rich and the poor has transformed into “a picture of two worlds, 
with few if any interfaces or meeting points between them, and so also with their inter-



 
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communication all but broken” (p. 14). This hyper-separation fosters a way of being-in-the-
world that is based on recasting selfishness as a virtue. It also assures the continuity of 
hereditary wealth as a guarantor of having the illusion of a better life than others and, thus, the 
persistence of a pernicious social determinism that allows some greater power to legitimize 
policies that ensure their own continued thriving.  
 
Fragmentation permeates all aspects of public education. The very idea of school districts and 
their ensuing attendance boundaries precludes such a community ethos. In demarcating 
boundaries, we set to protect what is ours. We fortify the private and unlink from the polity. It 
is this process that we must continue to critique. This is particularly the case in a school system 
partially funded by local property taxes, in which residents might develop a sense of purchasing 
educational services as they have come to think of purchasing other commodities. An 
ownership framework reinforces schools as firmly planted on service industry terrain and 
teachers as service providers. The ensuing unequal customer and client relationship does not 
allow for teachers to subvert their own role as already minimal agents of the state. This 
ownership model can also be superimposed on the parent-child relationship (Archard, 2006, 
2015). But if we posit that children are not the automatic extensions of their parents and their 
values, schools ought to have the right to challenge the community and introduce children to 
a variety of points of view. For when children enter our public schools, they encounter a 
different sphere of influence, using Gorski’s (2018) shade of the expression. If children do not 
learn to respect other points of view in a public space, they become voters who get to decide 
for all of us without knowing about all of us. Public schools cannot be trapped in a loyalty to 
their community that precludes the intellectual space necessary for supporting a democratic 
public ethos. Teachers need to respect the communities in which they teach without being 
completely beholden to them.  
 
Establishing Connections: Dialogue, Vulnerability, Intercommunity Solidarity 
 
“This notion of dialogue and common consciousness suggests that there is some way out of 
our collective difficulties. And we have to begin at the grass roots, as it were, not to begin at 
the top of the heap with the United Nations and the President” (Bohm, 1996, p. 41). 
 
To counter a system of inequality and its manifestation in unequal communities, public schools 
as institutions need to be actively in community—and thus outwardly communicative and in 
dialogue—with one another. This requires overcoming decades of competitive thinking, for 
communities and schools that are hermetic are incapacitated to keep the fire of the democratic 
spirit burning. It is in a horizontal embrace, not in vertical tower building, that public education 
can cradle the fragile state of democracy. It is this kindness and respect we want to model for 
young people as they learn to establish respectful interpersonal and intergroup relationships 
and develop mutuality in an integrating (Anderson, 2010) political community.  
 
Here is the potential for those elusive and spontaneously arising moments that Wolin considers 
to be constitutive of a vibrant democracy. They can be found when people come together and, 
as Wolin (1994) puts it, “through public deliberations, collective power is used to promote or 



 
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protect the well-being of the collectivity” (p. 11). Establishing connections within and among 
communities is necessary to create a political spirit of solidarity to counteract destructive 
cultural tendencies that further fracture the polity. In the absence of a sense of 
interconnectedness, we harm our chances to strive for justice, but a call for social cohesion can 
be a reminder to many marginalized groups of the imposition of a dominant culture. To 
distinguish between such an ideology and an intercommunity solidarity anchored in autonomy 
that acknowledges interdependence, Teena Gabrielson (2016) proposes a conception of 
agency as “relational, socially distributed, and embodied” (pp. 399-400). In this 
conceptualization, communities ultimately decide to what degree they would like to join any 
wider effort to work together.  
 
Establishing connections to achieve intercommunity solidarity goes hand in hand with an 
awareness of shared vulnerabilities (Beck, 2016). More a necessity than a choice, Beck (2016) 
sees the intensification of global risks leading to what he calls “moments of shared fate” (p. 59). 
These moments allow us to establish meaningful connections. A sense of urgency compels us 
toward collective agency as the interests of one community intersect with the interests of other 
communities when it comes to access to water, for example. As Patricia Hill Collins (2013) notes, 
such intercommunity solidarity might lead to “coalitions of conscience” (p. 242), which she 
describes as rooted in ethical frameworks. As communities work together in coalitions to 
counter common threats in reaction to and anticipation of boundary-crossing crises, being in 
community with others has the potential to become a genuinely supportive mode of existence.  
 
The Collective Agency of Public Schools: Shared Aims, Authorship, Freedom 
 
Such a vision for being-in-community is predicated on fostering relational modes of being in 
and through public institutions of learning. We can conceive of autonomy and agency as 
individual and collective endeavors. It follows that autonomy and agency are just as much 
personal projects as they are institutional potentials and vital characteristics of a democratic 
polity. Public education is in need of a conceptualization of such collective institutional agency 
because such an orientation allows us to address shared goals and a common vision of justice 
for all communities while also respecting our different needs. How can public schools generate 
such agency?  
 
We must search for a conceptualization of agency that is appropriate to educational contexts 
and their potentialities and constraints as well as the developmental readiness of children and 
their safety. Ruth Lister (2004) proposes a definition of agency as individual and collective 
“authorship” (p. 126) that brings with it a “capacity to act” (p. 124). Authorship implies a search 
for meaning, an orientation different from consumptive modes of being in the world. As people 
mutually engage when they gather together in schools, they work in community to generate 
and sustain authentic modes of being-in-the-world. This is authorship that defies conventions 
reminiscent of Bauman’s (2004) understanding of agency in terms of making choices about “the 
way we live” (p. 31), particularly what kinds of modes of being we as social actors privilege. 
Bauman focuses on freeing ourselves from market-based ideologies, on not letting our lives 
become scripted as a result of passive consumption. To Lister (2004), agency consists of taking 



 
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strategic actions to fulfill social objectives. At these intersections, Bauman and Lister are both 
concerned with the particularity of life designs, as these open up what Castoriadis (1997) 
theorizes to constitute a break with “a closure of meaning” (p. 4). Castoriadis sees such shutting 
down of creative thought as preventing questions to arise that are, in effect, “mentally and 
psychically impossible for the members of that society” (p. 4). A democratic revolution is a 
break with this closure through which “any source of meaning other than the living activity of 
human beings” (p. 4) is rejected. Such collective agency is authorship. It is also dissent. As 
Castoriadis (1997) further maintains, “it therefore implies the rejection of all ‘authority’ that 
would fail to render an account and provide reasons, that would not offer de jure justifications 
for the validity of its pronouncements” (p. 4). This requirement points to authorship as a form 
of voice (Couldry, 2010) that breaks the molds in which we encase our educational aims.  
 
Public schools can provide the literal and metaphorical pen and paper that enables such 
authorship if a child’s parents or guardians can’t currently afford pen and paper, or if they are 
in effect dictating what their children are to write. As democratic institutions, schools have a 
capacity to act if they have the freedom to animate just ways of being-in-community. Schools 
require autonomy to make choices that nurture a democratic spirit. This requires a degree of 
independence from local communities. Schools ought to have the right to challenge the 
communities in which they are located, even if those communities partially fund them, just as 
children have the right to challenge the parents who clothe and feed them. Institutional agency 
in schools consists of the ability to contest wider societal phenomena and continuously carve 
out a public ethos rooted in ethical interactions. Schools display agency when they encourage 
educational practices that dispute the legitimacy of unethical modes of being in the world and 
expose associated practices, discourses, and relationships. Schools also exhibit agency when 
they become spaces in which calling out unethical policies becomes the order of the day.  
 
Ethical Oversight and the Work of Public Schools 
 
In times of widespread moral insensitivity and “adiaphorization” (Bauman & Donskis, 2013, p. 
40), a process that Bauman and Donskis understand as a form of rationalization resulting in the 
boycotting of ethical concerns and the positing of a judgement-free consumer zone, it is to 
schools that we need to look to forge ethical paths for the polity. In an era of weakened unions 
and a polarized media landscape at war with itself, public schools remain standing as one of 
the few lines of defense. In a deliberate attempt to help young people channel indignation into 
a commitment to justice, through an ethical advocatory conception of public education, we can 
cultivate habits in emerging citizens so that they may take up advocacy for just communities 
everywhere.  
 
In so far as schools engage students in contestation efforts, they can be said to take on an 
informal oversight function. As neoliberal governance superimposes market exchange behavior 
on interpersonal interactions (Harvey, 2005), it distracts from the necessity of engaging in 
ethical inquiry and attempts to eliminate those spaces in which such questioning can occur. 
Neoliberal ideology rewards undignified policies and practices. The core democratic skill of 
being willing to question and to raise questions, as Castoriadis (1997) explained, is essential to 



 
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learning to be individually and collectively autonomous. Public schools are threatened in part 
because they provide such space. Walter Parker (2010) maintains that by engaging with other 
people in dialogue in schools, we “reclaim and reconstitute the democratic public sphere as a 
fertile site for political critique and action” (p. 2831). When the work of communities includes 
a commitment to connection, schools become places in which we can find and learn to 
appreciate democratic community.  
 
In this essay, I argue that public education is incapacitated to fulfill its vital role as a democratic 
institution. First, I maintain that public education presently does not provide a space that allows 
for critical inquiry into the legitimacy of what are unethical, unjust, and unsustainable modes 
of being in the world. This type of critical inquiry would support civic dissent at the grassroots 
school-yard level. Dissent as a form of inquiry is only one part of the larger advocacy puzzle. I 
also see the need for an institutionally-grown advocacy of connection that nurtures 
intercommunity solidarity. Second, I propose that public education cultivate ways-of-being that 
are based in a conceptualization of distinct communities as being in connection with others and 
forming a greater polity. This type of orientation respects self-determination of communities 
while also embedding community identity within a larger web of affiliation and care. Finally, I 
suggest that public education take on an informal function of ethical oversight rooted in a 
strong sense of collective institutional agency. Through such agency, schools can recognize and 
respect and help us work through past and present civic grievances.  
 
Teachers can foster this commitment to advocacy in those they encounter daily through their 
professional practice. Besides advocating for structural change, learning communities can take 
concrete steps to construct a public school ethos conducive to democratic life that enables 
teachers to do the following: 
 

1. Extend social-emotional teaching and learning to include analysis of the political 
dimension of emotions. Teach children to be aware of the larger role emotions play 
in civic life. Jasper (2018) offers a typology for conceptual clarity, clearly 
distinguishing between affective and moral commitments while also presenting a 
historical overview of how emotions have been portrayed negatively for the 
purpose of political manipulation. Scholarship in the tradition of the sociology of 
emotions (see Harris, 2015) can inform educational thought as to the nature of 
social-emotional processes at the political level of our existence.  

2. Teach about the ethical significance of events that arise in the political moment. The 
experience of living in fragile times can evoke a variety of civic responses to 
undemocratic governance. It can legitimize surveillance. Whereas surveillance 
implies monitoring and supervision indicates distraction, vigilance rests on careful 
observation and attentiveness. Cultivating an attitude of attentiveness to issues of 
justice and inequality can counter a culture of negligence.  

3. Build intercommunity solidarity. Love of place is an affective commitment (Jasper, 
2018), giving rise to questions of how to live together in one’s local community. But 
public education must also consider larger moral commitments as they reverberate 
throughout the polity (Ricoeur, 1994; van Hooft, 2006). This includes fostering an 



 
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ecological sensibility that supports a sense of common vulnerability, care, and cross-
boundary connection. This sensibility includes an awareness of the unequal 
distribution of risks (Beck, 2009, 2016; Taylor, 2014) that affect impoverished 
communities.  
 

A public school ethos influences how learning communities conceive of their work. Although 
public schools are frequently incapacitated to take on ethical advocacy aims, this incapacitation 
does not equate with an incapacity to act. Public schools can provide needed spaces for 
cultivation of connection and solidarity. As an ethical response to injustice, boundary-crossing 
conceptualizations of community encourage discourses and practices of connectedness as one 
way in which we can work to overcome relational inequality (Anderson, 2010; Tilly, 1998). 
Public schools can help cultivate in children a sense of ethical advocacy through a public school 
ethos of intercommunity solidarity so that visceral indignation does not fade and become 
subdued indifference or transform into expressions of hatred as it has many times, with tragic 
consequences, in our shared history.  
  



 
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