We interview Kei Nishiyama about his book, Children, Democracy and Education: A Deliberative Reconsideration
Our member, Dr. Kei Nishiyama (Kaichi International University, Japan), talks about his new book, Children, Democracy and Education: A Deliberative Reconsideration (SUNY Press, 2025).
Q: What is this book about?
The book begins with the following question: have politics and education truly been democratic? For many children, the answer is ‘no’—because their voices have largely been excluded. Democracy, at its core, means that anyone affected by collective decisions should have a say. Yet, children are rarely heard in ostensibly democratic processes. Similarly, education is essential for a healthy democracy, but children are seldom involved in shaping what and how they learn.
This book thus explores what democracy and education might look like if they were to genuinely include children’s perspectives. This vision isn’t about accepting all children’s views uncritically but, rather, about finding fairer ways to value both adult and child perspectives. Ultimately, the book asks how adults can share power with children to theorise and design democracy in ways that empower children as agents of democracy.
Therefore, the book calls for a shift from viewing children as future citizens within election-based democracy to recognising their active role in deliberative democracy (hence its subtitle— ‘a deliberative reconsideration’). Drawing on fieldwork in Japanese and Australian classrooms, schools, and social movements, it shows how children (re)construct and implement norms of deliberation differently from adults, offering unique insights that make democracy more reflective and inclusive.
These findings prompt a rethinking of the roles and meanings of democratic education—not as preparation for adulthood, but as a space where children co-create its meaning. I argue that the true value of democratic education lies in its revolutionary potential, where children help reconstruct democratic practices, challenging adult-dominated norms and expanding democratic possibilities.
Q: What made you write this book?
"Why do we have to protest for the future on behalf of adults who won’t listen to us?" asked a youth climate activist I’ve worked with for the past four years. This powerful question captures the very reason I wrote this book. Although the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has inspired numerous human-rights-based approaches to child participation, many initiatives still treat children as symbolic figures, using them to decorate adult-driven agendas rather than truly listening to their voices. Research shows that children's participation is often tokenistic; their presence is acknowledged but their voices are ignored.
For decades, children have been regarded merely as future citizens, with little recognition of their present epistemic and democratic agency. I first became aware of this during my master’s studies. In 2011, following the devastating tsunami and nuclear power plant disaster in my home country of Japan, a large anti-nuclear movement emerged. I visited a protest one day after class. The crowd was energetic—beating drums, shouting slogans, and voicing deep concern. Many repeated the phrase “for our children’s future!” Yet, no children were present. Their absence made me question: how can adults claim to speak for children without including them?
This experience marked the beginning of my journey to explore how children’s roles in politics and education might be redefined. It raised crucial questions about adult authority and the structural marginalization of children’s voices in both politics and education.
An excerpt from the book (pages 223–224):
Given that children have democratic agency, what should democratic education be and what forms can it take? This book has been primarily geared toward addressing this question. For a long time, the view that children have democratic agency has not been taken into account or even criticized due to the widespread assumptions of children’s biological immaturity and their lack of knowledge and experience.
Whether implicitly or explicitly, scholars in the democratic education camp have fallen into ablism and elitism, assuming that democracy is not open for “amateurs”— in other words, assuming that only knowledgeable, capable and mature citizens can and should legitimately contribute to democracy. In addition, with a Piagetian-inspired evolutionary view of human development, people believe that citizenship is something to be gained after the successful completion of predetermined learning steps.
Taken together, these viewpoints have ensured that children are seen as future citizens who have to wait until they become more capable and complete all the required steps to participate in democratic processes. Democratic education has been designed and theorized accordingly.
As the deliberative turn becomes dominant in democratic theory, however, such traditional explanations of children and democracy are found to be less persuasive than before, precisely because deliberative democracy is open for all. Deliberative democracy should not be the concern only of educated and capable individuals; it is rather a macrocosm of verbal as well as nonverbal democratic communications by diverse individuals across diverse sociopolitical settings, each of whom has different capacities and makes unique contributions.
As demonstrated in chapter 1, the supposed fact of children’s biological immaturity no longer justifies the view that their contributions to deliberative democracy are inferior to adults, because children are already actively contributing to deliberative democracy’s ideal, albeit in different ways and in different spaces from adults. The exclusion of children from the scope of deliberative democracy on the ground of their immaturity or lack of competence is, normatively speaking, a form of injustice and, practically speaking, a great epistemic loss for our democracy. It is time to reframe democratic education’s guiding question, moving away from considerations of “what children cannot do,” toward considerations of “what they can do.” Only once this shift has taken place can we begin to truly democratize democratic education.
Having said that, some may object to my suggestion by indicating that democratic education research has long explored ways of situating children’s agency at its heart. Of course, I fully acknowledge that existing empirical findings about practical applications of deliberative theory to educational settings show that well-designed deliberative practices develop children’s deliberative capacities, agency, and knowledge, thereby helping them to become effective deliberators. Nonetheless, I would caution that the terms “effective deliberators,” “deliberative capacities,” and “deliberative agency” as defined by the existing studies are unilaterally theorized, framed, and defined by adults (more specifically, researchers, teachers, and parents).
Children’s deliberative engagement and learning are significantly bounded by the adult gaze, and we adults usually say that “our educational practice is successful” within the scope of our own definition and framework. However, is it still democratic education if children have no right to define what democracy ought to be and to practice deliberation accordingly? Given that children are agents of deliberative democracy, why do they occupy a subordinate position to adults in democratic education? If democratic education is more than just a preparation for or means of adapting to what adults expect, what can children do and how should adults facilitate children’s activities?
An excerpt of part of book's introductory chapter is also available to read here.