Recent efforts to integrate programming and computer science into primary and secondary curricula raise important normative questions of how education can enable students to employ computational power in responsible and normatively justifiable ways. This chapter employs John Dewey’s analysis of democracy as both a social ideal for and an integral element in education to critically discuss Seymour Papert and Jeanette Wing’s influential accounts of the educational value of computing and computational thinking. This chapter argues that neither Papert nor Wing explicitly addresses the crucial question of how computational thinking both is and normatively ought to be related to the basic social structures of a democratic society, and it shows that this failure is indicative of a deeper problem in their approach, namely a failure to adequately discuss the broader social importance and value of education. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Dewey’s educational philosophy provide a critical perspective, which supplements the arguments of Papert and Wing and point toward a more explicitly democratic understanding of how and why we should educate for computational thinking.