Over the years we have seen what education becomes in the context of rapid industrialization, postwar state investment and Cold War rivalries, and neoliberal marketization. But we have caught only brief glimpses of what education might become under a more fully democratic system. Under more robust conditions of economic democracy — where jobs are not scarce but guaranteed, work hours radically diminished, or a universal basic income provided — learning could be decoupled from career pressure and remade as a lifelong endeavor instead of something aimed at a terminal degree. (Primary and elementary schools, then, could also be released from strict adherence to the eight-hour day of the. modern workweek, and the necessity of keeping children occupied for long hours while parents labor.) Expanding spaces of learning for people of all ages would foster social equality and cultivate the liberty inherent in the liberal arts, enabling the continual pursuit of knowledge self-rule requires. Only when schools are freed from the structural constraints that compel them to track and sort students (while telling them they deserve what they get) will the promise of universal education cease to be a lie, for only then could educators truly prioritize cultivating curiosity over imposing social control, firing up students instead of cooling them out. Until such a day the observation of one of the outspoken girls from the youth center in Overtown remains true: "Democracy's not really real, to be honest... If we have to constrain our opinions because we have people over us, that's not democracy. Because democracy is run by the people, for the people." That's not how people live, she concluded, and certainly not how her country or her school is run.
