Education for participatory democracy and social justice

Author relies on the basic sociological concepts and uses them in his sociology courses for democracy education at his institution. The framework defines main social actors and their relations (as social structures) in main sectors of society (economy, politics and education). These relations are a basis for social inequality. This inequality may be justified by social effectiveness. Social actors evaluate their relations from their understanding of social justice. Author uses this framework for an analysis of democracy in Estonia and EU, too.

In Estonia, the representative democracy is complemented with the model of participative democracy. Unfortunately, it enables to manipulate with participation and ignore the reasonable proposals by active citizens and experts. Author has proposed to complement the model of manipulated participation with a model of deliberative democracy. It means that all rejected proposals should be checked by independent experts to find out all reasonable ideas. These ideas would be re-directed to the respective institutions to reconsider their first rejection. If the respective institutions and experts retain their different opinions, then these cases should be made public. As a result, they will influence political processes. If this system becomes institutionalized, then all or almost all good ideas of all citizens and experts will be implemented. This is a system of improvement. This means a real civic society, as all active citizens can participate in national improvement. This system diminishes opportunities for social ineffectiveness and misuse of power by authorities. As a result, also social justice increases.

Such a model of deliberative democracy and social justice is theoretically possible. Unfortunately, many social groups, esp. power groups, both in politics and education, resist to this system. It is vital, to disseminate these ideas among students of social sciences in higher education on both, national and European levels.