Democracia y Enseñanza..
SUMMARIES

Democracy as ideology
GUSTAVO BUENO

This paper deals with democracy understood as a system of ideologies surrounding the functioning of the actually existing democratic political systems. Its own definition as the «government of all» is plainly ideological, because it considers the higher legitimity of the majority to represent the whole of society proven. The arguments supporting that conception are feeble, and the definition of majority is based on arbitrary arithmetical criteria. The author proposes a clasificaton of democratic ideologies and warns about the dangerous trend to turn the idea of democracy into a Hegelian metaphysical concept, as the ultimate goal of human destiny and the culmination of history.

Democracy as a procedure
RAMÓN COTARELO

The main line of this paper deals with the two great theoretical conceptions of democracy. The substantive conception considers democracy as a means to achieve a specific ideal of social justice or another higher goal of a different kind. But, as long as there are no objective procedures to solve a situation of conflicting values, the only possible way is what the author describes as procedural democracy. Defined as a function of its minimalism and pirronism, the procedural conception postulates a global understanding of democracy as a set of rules that must be accepted, including the result of their application and a special rule, defining methods to change all other rules.

About the difficult relations between the intelligentsia and politicians
ELÍAS DÍAZ

As the author recalls, the gap between members of intelligentsia and politicians is growing wider. The intellectual associates himself to the ethics of conviction and principles, while the politicians are aligned with the ethics of responsability, of pragmatism without principles or conviction. But that polarity is false. The contrast shall be understood as a function of different ideological positions of both groups, modulated around three great models: the neoliberal, the libertarian and that of democratic socialism. From this last standpoint, the necessity is to increase the mediations between the sphere of the intelligentsia and that of the politicians, without the abandonment of convictions and principles or the entrenchment in apolitical positions.

Democratic values at the crossroads
JOSÉ MARÍA LASO

The analysis of the crisis of democracy at the end of the century requires a meditation about the historical meanings of the word «democracy». The dychotomy burgeois democracy/socialist democracy has polarized the debate about the validity, limitations and contradictions of the democratic model. So, as the century approaches its end, the difficulties to compatibilize either capitalist or socialist system with democracy become increasingly obvious, and this means that the «formal» political liberties must be enriched with economic and social freedom. In the paper, proposals headed in that way are enunciated, beginning with the role that the school must play to consolidate full grown democracy.

Education for Democracy in Europe
ANTONIO BOLÍVAR

The various alternatives used in different European countries to include in the primary and secondary school curricula the subject of Education for Democracy are reviewed in this paper. France, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom are the countries chosen to place theSpanish experiences in the European context. The author claims the irrelevance of including selected chapters of this subject in the curriculum of other disciplines, and advocates the assignment of adequate space and time in secondary school, taking into accout that learning civic values is not only a passive socialization but a systematical and critical reflection basedon conceptual instruments and philosophical tradition.

The construction of democracy in secondary school. Three conceptualfallacies
ALBERTO HIDALGO TUÑÓN

The author remaks that, paradoxically, the same political system that encourages participation and legitimates itself on it, denies the access to a formal specific knowledge about its own functioning, stealing from the citizen the possibility of understanding the ways to direct his own participation. To overcome this situation, the paper proposes, first, to take apart the arguments used to justify the fallacies involved, and second, to include in the secondary school curriculum a subject called «Bases for a democratic life», with specific contents about organizative models, institutions and ways to participate, main problems of democratic functioning, etc.