Introduction to Research Handbook on Education and Democracy

Abstract

This timely Handbook reviews the state of the art of research on how education, in all its many facets, can foster democratic competences. It identifies a number of unresolved questions and issues of growing concern that inspire the Handbook’s main objectives and form the basis of its structure. These are: (1) what are democratic competences; (2) what is education’s impact on such competences; (3) can education reduce inequalities in democratic competences; and (4) how can educational research address the issue of causality? The contributions to this Handbook have addressed these questions through systematic reviews of the literature or through primary research.