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What does living in a democracy mean for kids?

W hat does living in a democracy mean for kids? This question rises to the surface of our consciousness in the wake of watching the impulse for democracy literally explode in the past year in North Africa and the Middle East, and over the last several decades, around the world. It is a question that taps into important social and intellectual issues that have concerned me for several decades. I found inspiration for this concern in the classic work by political scientists Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture, an examination of the habits of the mind and heart that define human relationships in democratic societies. I use the term pluralistic to mean a setting in which social agents and entities represent different expectations, sanctions, and rewards for members of the society but share an underlying commitment to the validity of divergent views and the necessity of nonviolent structures and processes to resolve conflict. In pluralistic societies, differences generate intergroup conflict, which is regulated by a set of ground rules (such as a constitution and a common commitment to the rule of law despite individual interest in particular rulings and enforcement). This is the essence of democracy. A monolithic setting, in contrast, is one in which all social agents and entities are organized around loyalty to a single set of principles and social organizations, and divergence from these values, norms, and structures is treated as treason. In political terms, such societies are best understood as the community