EDUCATIONAL THEORY最新文献

Secondary schools are well placed to avert radicalization processes toward extremism because such trajectories often begin in adolescence. Adolescents are in the process of forming their identities, and most adolescents are idealistic, which makes them susceptible to groups that passionately pursue utopian visions. To avert the path toward extremism, Doret de Ruyter and Stijn Sieckelinck propose to balance a prevention approach with a positive educative ethos that is sensitive to the emotions involved in students' quest for meaning in life and identity formation. This involves schools being places where all students experience that they matter and where they can express their passion for their ideals and experiment with their identities without being ridiculed; at the same time, schools must guide students in learning that not everything they value will be accepted and that they must also take into account the interests and rights of others. The schools' role is thus complex and precarious, and teachers are in a position of navigating a politically sensitive minefield daily. Therefore, any theoretical proposition regarding what schools can realistically do to prevent extremism must be informed by everyday educational practice.

In this article Julian Culp offers a new conceptualization of democratic citizenship education in light of the transformations of contemporary Western societies to which the use of digital technologies has contributed. His conceptualization adopts a deliberative understanding of democracy that provides a systemic perspective on society-wide communicative arrangements and employs a nonideal, critical methodology that concentrates on overcoming democratic deficits. Based on this systemic, deliberative conception of democracy, Culp provides an analysis of the public sphere's normative deficits and argues that current political communication may be systemically distorted. Drawing on this analysis, he suggests that practices of democratic citizenship education in digitized societies must not concentrate narrowly on the effective and responsible use of digital technologies. Instead, these practices should also focus on the economic and cultural conditions that are co-responsible for the structural problems of political communication as well as address the democratic deficits that are reflected in inadequate communicative arrangements.

How might a theory of communicative rationality be applied to policymaking to secure the morally justifiable administration of public education? In answer, Darron Kelly uses conceptual resources found in Habermasian practical discourse to outline development of a survey instrument. The survey is designed to measure constituent satisfaction with actual conditions of educational policymaking. To do this, the survey operationalizes and quantifies the epistemic conditions of inclusion, participation, truthfulness, and noncoercion. Once captured, analysis of these conditions in actual cases of policymaking further provides for assessment of the degree of communicative agency and rational trust experienced by educational constituents. The instrument, as such, offers a standard gauge of the higher-level intersubjectivity of institutional communication in education — a necessary measure for constructing morally justifiable policies.

The guidelines followed by many educational boards recommend behavioristic practices for dealing with student discipline; however, Lawrence Kohlberg's idea of organizing schools as “just communities” suggests a more promising approach. It translates to the school context the core principle of Habermas's discourse ethics: those norms to which all concerned agree are valid. In such democratically organized schools, students engage in less violence and take greater responsibility for safeguarding each other's welfare. Public debates about rules and handling transgressions generate knowledge regarding shared norms, promote role-taking abilities, and foster ego-syntonic commitment to democratic values. Such participatory experiences may contribute to constituting ego identity. Whereas identity politics relies on particularistic affiliations and emphasizes demarcations between social groups, ego identity is based on a commitment to universal moral values. This commitment allows individuals to develop and sustain a sense of coherence, continuity, and uniqueness, and it fosters democratic cooperation and social cohesion. In this article, Gertrud Nunner-Winkler provides empirical support for these claims.

In recent years we have seen a newfound engagement with Jürgen Habermas's work in philosophy of education, focusing on his conception of argumentative dialogue, or discourse, as the origin of both truth-related epistemic judgments and justifications of moral norms that claim rightness rather than truth. In this article, Krassimir Stojanov first reconstructs the way in which Habermas determines the relation between truth and rightness, and he then shows that moral rightness functions as a “truth-analogue” since moral norms, like true facts, transcend the actual and local practices of their justification. In the case of moral rightness, this transcendence occurs as an infinite process of inclusion of the perspectives and interests of all potentially concerned persons — also (and foremost) the perspectives and interests of those who are strange to each other in their respective values, worldviews, and interests. With this account of “truth-analogue” moral rightness, Habermas conceptualizes a kind of processual and “difference-sensible” universalism, which is very different from the substantialist universalism of some traditional conceptions of education, or Bildung. In the final section, Stojanov shows why including children in their otherness as children in the discursive process of production of moral knowledge, and thus treating them with a kind of epistemic respect, is a constitutive condition for that process. The demand for the discursive inclusion of children follows from the discourse ethics approach, but it requires an enlargement and some corrections of that approach.

The concept of indoctrination is typically used to characterize the actions of individual educators. However, it has become increasingly common for citizens to raise concerns about the indoctrinatory effects of institutions such as schools and universities. Are such worries fundamentally misconceived, or might some state of affairs obtain under which it can be rightly said that an educational institution is engaged in indoctrination? In this paper Christopher Martin outlines what the concept of institutional indoctrination could mean. He then uses Jürgen Habermas's discourse theory in order to develop a specific conception of institutional indoctrination: an educational institution indoctrinates when it exercises its authority in order to support the deliberative norm that some belief P ought to be exempt from tests of or challenges to its truth or rightness just because it is belief P. Martin argues that this norm undermines conditions of symmetrical and inclusive public discourse essential to the development of knowledge and understanding among free and equal citizens. That is, institutional indoctrination involves a closing of the public mind.

In this paper, Anniina Leiviskä examines the moral, political, and epistemic claims of the social justice movement known as “decolonizing the university” from the perspective of Jürgen Habermas's distinction between objective and normative validity and the respective notions of truth and moral rightness. Leiviskä challenges the view, held by some representatives of decolonization, that the normative and epistemic claims of the movement are inseparable from each other and suggests that evaluating the justification of the movement requires holding these claims at least analytically distinguishable. She argues that while the moral and political claims of “decolonizing the university” find strong justification through Habermas's discourse morality, its epistemic claims, especially the rejection of shared standards of knowledge, might have epistemically problematic consequences. Accordingly, Leiviskä suggests here that the epistemic justification of decolonization is conditional on the acceptance of shared epistemic standards — the pragmatic truth concept and the criterion of impartiality — which she develops in the paper on the basis of Habermas's pragmatic theory of truth and rational discourse as a model of justification. Finally, she proposes that the implications of these criteria for practices of higher education and the curriculum should be determined through an open and unconstrained discussion by the members of an inclusive university community.

When the game of reason-giving and reason-taking is supported by broadly shared norms of civic morality, trust in public deliberation tends to follow. It is far more difficult to practice (and defend) deliberation when these norms, including deliberative norms themselves, are in dispute.

Is the contemporary situation of liberal democracies more akin to the former or the latter? The jury is still out on the nature, causes, and seriousness of what is sometimes called “political,” “affective,” or “civic” polarization. What does seem clear is that polarization has had an effect on the deliberative dimension of liberal democratic life. One worrisome development is the increasing pressure put on the Supreme Courts of liberal states, such as Canada and the United States, to resolve contentious policy differences as opposed to working them out through deliberative legislatures and informal public spheres.¹ (As many Canadian and UK readers might point out, the word “parliament” means “speak” or “dialogue.”) But education systems also seem to be pulled into the vortex. Many schools and universities have found themselves in the unenviable position of weathering a number of controversial public and political events, be those events real or manufactured by social media actors. And while partisan stirring of the civic pot is by no means new, a polarized political environment has clearly changed public perception of these controversies and the institution's response to them. What was once a “tough call” is now reframed as “picking a side.” But not picking a side is also “picking a side.” The upshot is that schools and universities are shouldering a lot of civic stress (not always well, one might add), and one consequence is a troubling decline in public trust in them. Polarization also has pedagogical costs, especially in terms of classroom deliberation. Consider teaching “controversial issues” as an approach to civic education aimed at fostering better public reasoning and civic tolerance. The framing of some issues as “controversial,” and not others, now seems to risk accusations of partisanship, or even professional misconduct.²

Polarization seems to fit the very practical situation that the discourse ethical project aims to address: when basic interpersonal norms and norms of political morality are in fundamental dispute and epistemically uncertain. As Jürgen Habermas puts it, discourse ethics “provides an answer to the predicament in which members of any moral community find themselves when … though they still argue with reasons about moral judgments and beliefs, their substantive background consensus on the underlying moral norms has been shattered.”³

Yet, the civic appetite for reason-giving, perspective-taking, tolerance, and intellectual charity seems to ebb exactly when it is most needed. How, then, can discourse ethics guide citizens in dealing with problems of educational policy and practi

In this article, Andreas Reichelt Lind explores the possibilities of a Deweyan account of education for democracy. To that end, an account emphasizing democratic habit formation, direct experience of democracy as a way of life, and the distinction between being and becoming is explicated and discussed. Lind shows how these elements together point to the issue of designing educational environments and then discusses in a preliminary way the implications of this insight from the perspective of education for democracy. The article's contribution is twofold. First, it explicitly contributes to a reconstruction of Dewey in relation to the issue of educating for democracy. This represents a reframing of his writings. Second, it highlights and discusses some theoretical implications of the possibilities inherent in the Deweyan account of education for democracy.

Andrew Aberdein recently explored whether Aristotle held a (proto-)virtue argumentation theory, which would evaluate a good argument in terms of whether the arguers engaged virtuously. Aberdein admits, however, that connections between virtue, character, and argumentation are scarce within Aristotle's works. Accordingly, here Cassie Finley approaches this question from a different angle, comparing Aristotle's concepts of dialectic and rhetoric with virtue theories of argumentation. She argues that the essential features of dialectic and rhetoric are in tension with the defining characteristics of virtue argumentation theories. However, this tension raises a deeper methodological tension within virtue argumentation theories regarding their “intuitive” conception of arguments. Finley outlines a more viable route forward for virtue argumentation theorists, one that dissolves this tension through reframing their project as a virtue dialogue theory. This shift toward dialogue would help to assuage the main objections to virtue argumentation theories regarding adversariality, incompleteness, and vulnerability to ad hominems. At the same time, developing toward a virtue dialogue theory better aligns with the intuitive sense of engaging well with others that defines the virtue argumentation project, and it also more fruitfully sets up the project to encourage future scholarship connecting virtue ethics, virtue epistemology, and philosophy of education.