Democracy and Inequality: Challenges and Possible Solutions

Introduction

One of the key lessons that I teach my sixth-grade students each year is the difference between denotation and connotation. It is so important that students understand that while words have very literal textbook definitions, reading increasingly rigorous texts requires a reader to recognize the shades of meaning that different word choices create. For my students, many of whom are either English Learners or Diverse Learners, this can be a particularly difficult concept. My school, Mark Twain Elementary, is a Chicago Public School with a student population that is roughly 79% low income and ranges from grades pre-K to 8th grade. Students that are diverse learners account for roughly 10% of the student population, and roughly 16% of the students in the school receive additional support as part of Twain’s bilingual program.¹ These students need explicit instruction to make connections. Instruction at the start of the year often starts out with me talking about the difference in feeling between the words house and home and evolves to getting students thinking about the tone of the author based on word choice and finding appropriate textual evidence to justify thinking. I have a clear understanding of how to move students along a continuum to get them thinking in deep ways through my language arts instruction.

As clear as my thinking and teaching is for language arts, it is not as clear as I would like it to be for my Social Studies instruction. Let's consider the word democracy for a moment. If this was my classroom and you were my student, the first question that I would ask is if the word has a positive or negative connotation. I think most students, and in general most people, would agree that it has a positive connotation. Shapiro argues that even authoritarian rulers do not often reject democracy outright; instead, they argue that their nations either aren’t ready for democracy or that their government is more democratic than they appear.²  Most political regimes today, including countries such as Russia and North Korea, fashion themselves as being democratic in some form.

The embrace of democracy is a relatively recent one in history; democracy was considered a “fool’s paradise” before the French Revolution with many critics considering the idea too radical and absurd, including some of America’s Founding Fathers.³ It was a slow historical progression for democracy to become a normative tradition, the aspirational ideal. The form of democracy that we have in the United States today, representative democracy, has grown in our country and other nations in response to the inequalities that many have experienced. The solution in the eyes of many citizens of the world when faced with inequalities such as restricted voting rights, limited access to healthcare, and needed wealth redistribution is demanding more democracy. In the United States, this has led to many different groups who claim to represent the will of the people, which is the pathos of democracy. It has created factions that have polarized many Americans into divergent political camps. Tracing citizenship within the evolution of democracy will help my students better under the influences of the ancient world, but it will also help my students to better understand America’s form of government and our current political state.

Rationale

The focus of the “Democracy and Inequality: Challenges and Possible Solutions” seminar, led by Ian Shapiro, is reading about, and reflecting on how inequality and democracy coexist. Superficially, logic would dictate that the more democratic a society is, the more likely that things would be equal. From our reading and discussions, it is apparent that even highly democratic societies experience inequalities among the populace that the government is intended to serve. The work of the seminar included reading case studies (such as the text we read about the evolution of Newark’s public schools and school reform), interpreting data, and reading infographics. Inequality in democracy will be briefly explored as one of the potential downfalls of democratic systems.   

In sixth grade, our Social Science focus is on the ancient world. This includes general studies of Egypt and the impact of the Nile River, citizenship in Athens and Rome, education in Sparta, the construction of the Great Wall of China, impacts of the Silk Road and introductions to the major religions of the world. I am working towards trying to connect these Social Science fragments into something more cohesive and connected to larger historical trends. I envision a three-week unit to be taught after I have taught about the systems of government in Ancient Athens and Ancient Rome. The purpose of this unit is to make explicit the connection between ancient democratic practices and modern American ones and extend student thinking further about democracy as a form of government and how generous America is with citizenship. By the end of the unit, students should be able to see parallels between ancient democratic and societal practices as well as speak to the conditions that both make possible and threaten democracy as an institution going forward. 

I am also still working to adopt and unpack the Social Studies standards in Illinois. The standards changed in 2017 to include standards that are just as rigorous as the Common Core State Standards are for English Language Arts. In my district, there has been a push to have students engage in more inquiry-based activities. This unit is designed for about 135 sixth grade general education students. Social Studies is an area that our entire school is focused on growing and improving practice. This unit takes all those factors into consideration.