The role of conversation in a democratic education

Abstract

In this paper we reflect on the importance of conversation in a democratic education. Indeed, a democratic education not only educates for democracy but also includes democracy in school practice on a daily basis. Taking as a starting point the notion of the banalisation of words as conceived by the anthropologist Lluís Duch, and John Dewey’s analysis in Democracy and Education (1916), we provide some arguments in defence of conversation as an educational experience and we cast a critical eye on the current curriculum of linguistic competences in Catalonia. We consider that conversation, understood as a modality of relation with others, can never be understood as a strategy of the skill-related type or as a resource to be evaluated by levels. We need to think of it in terms of comprehension, drawing inspiration from the approach of the programs of the Catalan school groups in the 1930s, which advocated a “simple conversation” between the teacher and the pupil. The anthropological basis of every conversation in education is otherness, the reciprocity between teacher and students, which proposes a series of more dignified and human forms of association and communication in order to improve society in terms of what Dewey called “common understanding”.

Keywords: Philosophy of education, education and democracy, conversation and education, education in Catalonia, school system, curriculum and orality.