Hegemonic representations of democracy as a straitjacket for social studies education

In a time where democracy is threatened, and authoritarianism spreading into different sectors of society, we find there to be an urgent need to disentangle education about society from a narrow discourse of democracy. Departing from research on Finnish social studies textbooks, we argue in this conceptual article that hegemonic representations of democracy restrict citizenship education and hinder social and political imagination – and thereby learning about society – by naturalising a narrow view of democracy. Having studied textbooks from the perspective of the construction of agency as a democratic citizen, our aim in this article is to further discuss how the meanings given to the concept of democracy restrain education about society. We approach this topic through an examination of four interconnected nodes that embody the hegemonic way of talking about democracy: detaching the labour market sphere from the democratic sphere; seeing democracy as a constellation of particular institutions; the idea that passivity is the main threat to democracy, and portraying democracy as a Western value. We argue that this analysis has consequences for democracy education, encouraging teachers to allow for challenging common conceptions of democracy.