The Wire: A Paradigm for Public Education

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The Wire is enough to convince you to despair of any possibility of public education as it is currently constituted but we would like to do better. The way that we do science is a constant series of failures, right? Of making proposals, hypotheses, testing them, they were wrong, go back and forth. And that simple paradigm is very helpful even if you're not doing science,. It's a way of looking at the world that doesn't come across in education. Just like in the richest country in the world, we can do better.

“Democracy may not exist, but we’ll miss it when it’s gone” — or so suggests the title of Astra Taylor’s new book. We all know how democracy falls short, in practice, of its lofty ideals; but we can also appreciate how democratic values are crucial in the fight for a more just society. In this conversation, we dig into the nature of democracy, from its origins to the present day. We talk about who gets to participate, how economic inequality affects political inequality, and how democratic ideals manifest themselves in any number of real-world situations.

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Astra Taylor is a filmmaker, author, and activist. Her documentary films include Zizek!, The Examined Life, and most recently What Is Democracy? Her books include The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital age and the new Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone. She has taught sociology at the university level, and written for publications from n+1 to The London Review of Books. She was active in the Occupy movement, and is a co-founder of the Debt Collective.