Symposium Introduction: Education Against Extremism

Do schools have a role to play in counter-radicalization? Insofar as extremism and terrorism represent a clear and present danger to public safety, are there steps educators can reasonably be asked to take to mitigate the threat? And if so, what does a defensible program of education against extremism look like?

In the UK, schools already have a statutory duty to “have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism,”¹ and the Department for Education (DfE) has issued advice on how this duty should be fulfilled.² Schools are charged, first, with identifying and referring to the police “children at risk of radicalization” and, second, with providing learning opportunities that “build pupils' resilience to radicalization.”³ Among the resilience-building measures recommended by the DfE are “providing a safe environment for debating controversial issues,” equipping pupils to “understand and manage difficult situations,” teaching “effective ways of resisting pressures,” and cultivating “positive character traits.”⁴

The UK Prevent duty is by no means unproblematic. The identifying-and-referring part of the duty casts teachers in the role of informants, undermining trust in teacher-pupil relationships and inhibiting open discussion in the classroom. The stipulated definition of extremism — “vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values”⁵ — is strikingly inadequate. And the recommended resilience-building measures are excessively vague and diffuse.

Still, it is not absurd to think that certain kinds of educational intervention might reduce young people's susceptibility to extremist ideas, attitudes, and thinking styles. While it is possible that the causes of extremism lie wholly beyond the reach of education, it is also possible that, armed with a more adequate account of extremism and a more focused set of resilience-building measures, schools may be in a position to do something about them. We think the latter possibility is at least worth exploring.

In 2021 we convened a group of scholars with an interest in these matters for an Educational Theory Summer Institute. We had planned to meet in person at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, but the COVID-19 pandemic pushed our gathering online (and, with participants stretched across the globe from Karachi to Calgary, added some interesting time zone challenges). Over three days we workshopped draft versions of the seven papers collected here, and in the weeks that followed we revised and refined them in light of our conversations. As convenors, we would like to extend sincere thanks to our fellow participants for their fine papers and constructive engagement with one another's work, and to Nicholas Burbules for his judicious chairing of the discussions and his editorial support in bringing this symposium for Educational Theory to fruition.

Needless to say, our contributors do not speak with one voice. The attentive reader will note differences of opinion, or at least of emphasis, with respect both to the causes and characteristics of extremism and to the form and focus of educational measures to forestall it. But we think the different perspectives we bring to these issues are, by and large, complementary. There is broad agreement among us that extremism (or, perhaps, extremism of certain kinds) poses a genuine threat to public safety, political stability, and the well-being of those in its grip; that at least some of the sources and drivers of extremism are susceptible to educational influence; and that it is possible to say something of practical use to professional educators about the forms education against extremism should take.

In the first article, “Education, Extremism, and Aversion to Compromise,” Michael Hand focuses on one core component of the extremist mindset — the attitude of aversion to compromise — and inquires into the possibility, desirability, and means of educating against it. He argues that aversion to compromise is demonstrably undesirable and readiness to compromise demonstrably desirable, so discursive teaching of these attitudes should guide pupils toward these verdicts. And he identifies three methods of formative teaching by which readiness to compromise can be cultivated in pupils.

In “Recasting ‘Fundamental “British” Values’: Education, Justice, and Preventing Violent Extremism,” David Stevens challenges the view that ideas are the main drivers of radicalization and extremism. Rather, he proposes, people in circumstances of socioeconomic injustice are drawn to extremist groups by the “intense package” of social goods they offer — goods of friendship, solidarity, and self-worth. The most important contribution educators can make to tackling extremism, then, is to promote the values and commitments of socioeconomic justice, thereby creating social conditions in which friendship, solidarity, and self-worth are readily available to all.

Sigal Ben-Porath's “Learning to Avoid Extremism” situates recent enthusiasm for extremist ideas and causes within the broader context of political polarization. As we sort ourselves into increasingly isolated and distrustful political identity groups, Ben-Porath contends, “the permission structures for extremism are expanding.” The appropriate educational response is not to target students experimenting with extremist ideas for special treatment, but rather to cultivate in all students the critical thinking, media literacy, and democratic habits needed to navigate and repair our polarized political landscape.

Laura D'Olimpio switches attention from preventing extremism to managing its fallout. In “Educating the Rational Emotions: An Affective Response to Extremism,” she argues that education has a role to play in equipping young people to cope with the fear and anxiety induced by the threat of terrorism. She advocates an approach to educating the emotions whereby students are enabled to assess the reasons for their emotional responses and to proportion their fear to the severity of the threat. She also considers the ways in which anxieties about terrorism are exacerbated by social media and the 24-hour news cycle and what educators might do to moderate these influences.

In “Creating Caring and Just Democratic Schools to Prevent Extremism,” Doret de Ruyter and Stijn Sieckelinck construe radicalization as “a derailed quest for meaning and identity.” They argue that schools should provide safe and supportive environments for the exploration of meaning and the development of identity. Specifically, they should be places where students feel accepted as human beings, where they can express what matters to them, where it is made clear to them that some ideas are morally unacceptable, and where they learn to take the interests of others into account.

Dianne Gereluk, in “A Whole-School Approach to Address Youth Radicalization,” takes issue with counter-radicalization programs that require the identification of at-risk students. Instead, she thinks, educators should favor a whole-school approach with four key components: political deliberation should be central to the curriculum; students should learn to recognize and question their own biases and assumptions; teachers should create diverse and inclusive spaces in which all students feel valued; and there should be a school ethos characterized by freedom of expression and democratic values.

Finally, in “(Dis)locating Meaning: Toward a Hermeneutical Response in Education to Religiously Inspired Extremism,” Farid Panjwani examines an idea central to religious forms of extremism: that of unmediated access to God's will. In the context of Islam, he suggests, susceptibility to this idea can be explained in part by inattention to the insights of modern hermeneutical theory. He proposes that schools can and should discourage essentialist readings of sacred texts by helping students to recognize human agency in religious meaning-making.

Let us emphasize, in closing, that none of our contributors is under the impression that responsibility for tackling the problem of extremism can be laid wholly, or even primarily, at the door of educators. The phenomenon of extremism has deep roots in politics and religion, poverty and injustice, social exclusion and psychological vulnerability, so an adequate response to it will involve work by multiple agencies on a number of different fronts. Our thought is simply that educators may have something to contribute to this endeavor. In the papers collected here we hope to have made some headway with the task of articulating what that contribution might be.