Humanizing Democracy: Matthew Arnold’s Nineteenth-Century Call for a Common,Higher,Educative Pursuit of Happiness and Its Relevance to Twenty-first-Century Democratic Life

Abstract

Editor’s Note: This article continues the focus of our special issue theme of Summer 2002—Education and Democracy.

Democratic educational reform should promote full-bodied democratic life. To help address the limited vision of humanity prevailing in the current wave of educational reforms—reforms that are being undertaken in the name of democracy while they promote undemocratic and pusillanimous forms of human life—this essay examines a nineteenth-century recommendation for democratic educational reform calling for a broadly accessible liberal education to cultivate a magnanimous and civic-minded democratic populace. This old vision might begin to provide us with a new road map for the reforms being undertaken in our own time, encouraging us to seek—far beyond mechanical measurements of mechanical performances—the standards of cultural, civic, and spiritual enlargement that we must collectively understand and strive toward if we wish to use democratic educational reform to help constitute a bona fide democracy.