A Book Review of Education and Democracy in the 21st Century

In her new book, Education and Democracy in the 21st Century, Nel Noddings (2013) provides a vision of education as a multi- aim enterprise in which schools are responsible for all three domains of life: personal (home and family), occupational, and civic (domestic and global). She draws on Dewey’s foundational work on education, in particular, Democracy and Education (1916). The book is a necessary interven-tion, especially in an era when educational discourse, in the United States and around the world, is saturated with talks about standard-ization, accountability, common core, and test scores, etc. Noddings’s thesis is that we should replace some 20th- century thinking, such as about competition, bureaucracy, overspecializa-tion, and standardization, with habits of cooperation, connection, and critical and creative thinking. As a philosopher and professor of education who had 15 years of public school experiences, Noddings argues that we must find ways in our educational aims and school curricula to preserve our commitment to democrati