A lot of my work recently has been on the idea of adjectivizing education--making education more aligned with a particular set of values and principles, such as those related to sustainability, democracy, social justice, and so on. In doing this, I've found it necessary to elaborate on the idea of intentionality.

The basic premise for a lot of my work is that if we want to go beyond educating *about* a certain subject, and actually educate in a way that will create some social movement towards the related ideal, then we need to go beyond talking about the content of instruction, and look at the actual educational experience of students. This frames education as a formative act, rather than an informative one. It is concerned with the deep development of students, not just head stuffing.

This book is a classic, and as famous as it is, and as old, I wish it were more widely read today. I found a link here where the full text is available online. The book has raises some good questions around what education is and could be, which are still very current. The second chapter is particularly worth reading - the medium is the

With the understanding that democratic citizenship is cultivated through experience, the operational question becomes one of how to create this experience. To embrace democracy in this manner is not to subjugate adult authority in the school to the masses of children surrounding them. Rather, it is to provide students, each passing year, with incrementally more sophisticated opportunities to apply their knowledge and skills and cultivate their character and dispositions, through appropriate activities, with adult supervision and guidance. 

With reflection, it is possible to see opportunities for mainstreaming democratic principles into students' daily experiences in school. This section provides a number of potentially high impact entry points for infusing democracy into school life. Other possibilities abound, as almost all contextual factors affecting students' experiences--

Education's role in democracy is simple to understand, but the mechanism for fulfilling this role is harder to conceptualize. On the one hand, we recognize that citizens need a sound education to participate effectively in democratic life. But on the other hand, the specific learning required cannot be fully elaborated in terms of knowledge and skills in the existing subject disciplines. How, within our current curricula, are we expected to cultivate the requisite civic virtues, things like autonomy, justice, and civic respect? Where, within the framework of our current subject disciplines, do we acknowledge the importance of students becoming engaged critically with issues of democratic importance?

Most contemporary approaches to education mask the political concern over how we are cultivating our citizens, with a technical concern over efficiency in teaching content.