The DEMOS Project
Embedded Files
What is democracy? What can the ancient world teach us about the nature and character of the democracies we live in today? Students in Mr. Pitblado's grade 10 World History class tackled these questions by exploring how ancient civilizations – from Classical Greece to Republican Rome – thought about and developed conceptions of democracy. The word democracy comes to us from ancient Greece, and it conveys a seemingly simple idea: the people (demos) rule or hold power (kratos). Over centuries our ideas of democracy have expanded and evolved, with democracy becoming more inclusive and robust in many ways, yet who counts as the people, how they rule, and where they do so remain eternally up for debate.
What is democracy? What can the ancient world teach us about the nature and character of the democracies we live in today? Students in Mr. Pitblado's grade 10 World History class tackled these questions by exploring how ancient civilizations – from Classical Greece to Republican Rome – thought about and developed conceptions of democracy. The word democracy comes to us from ancient Greece, and it conveys a seemingly simple idea: the people (demos) rule or hold power (kratos). Over centuries our ideas of democracy have expanded and evolved, with democracy becoming more inclusive and robust in many ways, yet who counts as the people, how they rule, and where they do so remain eternally up for debate.
To help us engage with those debates and to connect the past to the present, we used writer and activist Astra Taylor’s Democracy Might Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It's Gone as a guide. Taylor explains that “the history of democracy is one of oppression, exploitation, demagoguery, dispossession, domination, horror, and abuse. But it is also a history of cooperation, solidarity, deliberation, emancipation, justice, and empathy.” To better understand this dichotomy, Taylor invites us to think about democracy as a balance of paradoxes or opposites: between freedom and equality, conflict and consensus, inclusion and exclusion, coercion and choice, spontaneity and structure, expertise and mass opinion, the local and the global, and the present and the future.
To help us engage with those debates and to connect the past to the present, we used writer and activist Astra Taylor’s Democracy Might Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It's Gone as a guide. Taylor explains that “the history of democracy is one of oppression, exploitation, demagoguery, dispossession, domination, horror, and abuse. But it is also a history of cooperation, solidarity, deliberation, emancipation, justice, and empathy.” To better understand this dichotomy, Taylor invites us to think about democracy as a balance of paradoxes or opposites: between freedom and equality, conflict and consensus, inclusion and exclusion, coercion and choice, spontaneity and structure, expertise and mass opinion, the local and the global, and the present and the future.
Each student group was assigned one of these paradoxes – or tensions – to explore in depth and to find examples from the modern world that illustrate them. This online exhibition presents their research and ideas, asking us to think about democracy in new ways, to consider how the past can inform the present, and to challenge us all to answer our central historical and philosophical question: what is democracy?
Each student group was assigned one of these paradoxes – or tensions – to explore in depth and to find examples from the modern world that illustrate them. This online exhibition presents their research and ideas, asking us to think about democracy in new ways, to consider how the past can inform the present, and to challenge us all to answer our central historical and philosophical question: what is democracy?
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