Populism and critical social science teaching

Abstract

The advance of populism around the world has led to questions about the role of education. Inevitably, the answers are conditioned by the understanding of this phenomenon. It is often presented as a pathology of democracy. With this diagnosis, education emerges as the therapy par excellence against the symptoms of the disease (Manichean narratives, hate speeches, disinformation, etc.). It will be argued that existing democratic regimes are not the finished prototype of the democratic ideal, and that populism is not a virus attacking them from outside, but a political project that springs from their acute internal contradictions. It follows that education is only one vector of an overwhelmingly larger problem; and that a critical teaching of the social sciences should not only deal with the unacceptable symptoms of populism, but also with the policies, institutional arrangements and social fractures that are at the causal origin of its current emergence.