The Ignorant Citizen: Mouffe,Rancière,and the Subject of Democratic Education

Much work in the field of education for democratic citizenship is based on the idea that it is possible to know what a good citizen is, so that the task of citizenship education becomes that of the production of the good citizen. In this paper I ask whether and to what extent we can and should understand democratic citizenship as a positive identity. I approach this question by means of an exploration of four dimensions of democratic politics—the political community, the borders of the political order, the dynamics of democratic processes and practices, and the status of the democratic subject—in order to explore whether and to what extent the ‘essence’ of democratic politics can and should be understood as a particular order. For this I engage with ideas from Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière who both have raised fundamental questions about the extent to which the ‘essence’ of democratic politics can be captured as a particular order. In the paper I introduce the figure of the ignorant citizen in order to hint at a conception of citizenship that is not based on particular knowledge about what the good citizen is. I introduce a distinction between a socialisation conception of citizenship education and civic learning and a subjectification conception of citizenship education and civic learning in order to articulate what the educational implications of such an ‘anarchic’ understanding of democratic politics are. While the socialisation conception focuses on the question how ‘newcomers’ can be inserted into an existing political order, the subjectification conception focuses on the question how democratic subjectivity is engendered through engagement in always undetermined political processes. This is no longer a process driven by knowledge about what the citizen is or should become but one that depends on a desire for a particular mode of human togetherness or, in short, a desire for democracy.     

Equality of Education and Citizenship: Challenges of European Integration

What kind of equality among Europeans does equal citizenship require, especially regarding education? In particular, is there good reason to insist of equality of education among Europeans—and if so, equality of what? To what extent should the same knowledge base and citizenship norms be taught across state borders and religious and other normative divides? At least three philosophical issues merit attention: (a) The requirements of multiple democratic citizenships beyond the nation state; (b) how to respect diversity while securing such equality and inculcating commitments to justice and norms of citizenship, and (c) The multiple reasons for equality of various kinds among political equals living in a Union as compared to a unitary state. The article responds on the basis of several arguments in favour of certain kinds of equality. All Union citizens must enjoy a high minimum level of education, and all pupils must be informed concerning the various ways of life prevalent in Europe. Furthermore, there must be standards for securing equality of opportunity across the EU, though it is difficult to measure under multiculturalism. Citizens must also be socialised to certain ‘citizenship norms’. This shared basis to be taught in schools should avoid contested religious or philosophical premises as far as possible. Yet the school system should socialise pupils to three commitments: to the just domestic and European institutions and hence the legislation they engender, to principles that justify these institutions; and to a political theory that grounds these principles in a conception of the proper role of individuals, of member states and of the Union. I also argue that equality of result is not a plausible normative requirement among Europeans, while equality of opportunity is. The paper concludes with some comments on the lessons to be drawn for ‘Global’ citizenship.     

Some introductory thoughts

Education must be a central part of the building of Europe: because access to knowledge can overcome the dangers of exclusion, but also because education offers the key to citizenship and thereby to the future of Europe.     

On the (Im)possibility of Democratic Citizenship Education in the Arab and Muslim World

The euphoria of the recent Arab Spring that was initiated in northern African countries such as Tunisia, Egypt and Libya and spilled over to Bahrain, Yemen and Syria brings into question as to whether democratic citizenship education or more pertinently, education for democratic citizenship can successfully be cultivated in most of the Arab and Muslim world. In reference to the Gulf Cooperation Council countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates) in the Middle East, we argue that unless gender inequality, mostly instigated by religious-tribal and patriarchal perspectives, is eradicated, it would be impossible to engender any plausible conception of education for democratic citizenship in most of the Arab and Muslim world. Our thesis rests on an understanding that, firstly, education in the Arab and Muslim world is located in an impoverished view of education for Muslims; and secondly, that the notable absence of democratic citizenship is enhanced by gender-based discrimination in society especially in the professions and politics. We contend that education for democratic citizenship in the Arab and Muslim world is necessary and ought to be framed along a pluralist imaginary of citizenship. However, considering the continued prevalence of authoritarianism at politico-social levels our argument is that it seems feasible to enhance and at times disrupt the cultivation of national education drawing on some of the features of a pluralist imaginary of citizenship.     

Epistemological notes on recent studies of social perception

Among three possible avenues toward a good society — revolutionary Marxism, liberal‐democratic reform, and radical citizenship education — this paper examines and advocates the third. Societies are held to be ‘good’ so long as the Most Basic Rights are in fact enjoyed by all (i.e. the right (1) to stay alive, (2) to remain unmolested, and (3) to be free to develop one's potentialities). Some key propositions in ‘contract theory’ as represented by such diverse theorists as Socrates, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Tussman and Meiklejohn are discussed, and an alternative tradition, ‘freedom theory’, is sketched, with contributions from Socrates, Godwin, Thoreau, and Camus. An argument is then developed to the effect that the contract theorists have all contributed to the basis on which the contemporary ‘liberal make‐believe’ rests. This term refers to the myth that our society is democratic, i.e. that working (only) within the system of our constitutional procedures will or can lead toward a just society. Finally, it is argued that the highest priority in citizenship education is to destroy this liberal make‐believe, and that freedom theory provides a better foundation than contract theory in the struggle for human rights, and for mankind's survival.     

An Education of Shared Fates: Recasting Citizenship Education

In this paper I explore how citizenship education might position students as always/everywhere political to diminish the pervasive belief that one either is or is not a “political person.” By focusing on how liberal and radical democracy are both necessary frameworks for engaging with issues of power, I address how we might reframe citizenship education to highlight the ubiquity of politics, offering a deepened sense of democracy. This reframing of citizenship education entails highlighting how liberalism and radical democracy are mutually reinforcing when it comes to illustrating political life as entangled in power relations. My argument centers on Sigal Ben-Porath’s (Edu Theory, 62(4):381–395, 2012) concept of shared fate as a frame for citizenship education. In this model, students are habituated into thinking of democracy as an “enduring pluralism” in which their fates are connected to that of their fellow citizens. In this paper I recast shared fate education in the singular to an education of shared fates in the plural. By doing so I theorize how citizenship education might construct citizenship as relational, emotional, embedded in power, and uncomfortable.     

Eros as the Educational Principle of Democracy

This paper explores the value of the eros motif for critical pedagogy and citizenship education. The conceptual affinities between eros and democracy are identified and integrated into a theory of democratic political education. Long recognized as vital to the process of self knowledge, the ancient Greek concept of eros has nevertheless been largely erased from contemporary educational debate. By retrieving eros from the fringe of academic discourse and integrating it with critical pedagogy, the aims of radical democracy can be more fully achieved. The essay emphasizes the civil society or cultural dimensions of democracy as against its legal or procedural aspects. Renewed emphasis on the associational qualities of democracy underscore the importance of eros as an educational principle. The ancient pedagogical motif of educating the desires is posited as an alternative to the liberal/modernist paradigm of education which de-values affective domains of knowledge.     

Democracy,Education and the Need for Politics

Even though the interrelationship between education and democratic politics is as old as democracy itself, it is seldom explicitly formulated in the literature. Most of the time, the political system is taken as a given, and education conceptualized as an instrument for stability and social integration. Many contemporary discussions about citizenship education and democracy in the Western world mirror this tendency. In the paper, I argue that, in order to conceptualise the socio-political potential of education we need to understand democracy in more political terms. This means that democracy can neither be seen primarily as a mode of associated living (Dewey), nor a model for handling different life-views (political liberalism à la Rawls and Gutmann). A third alternative is Gert Biesta’s notion of democratic subjectification. Even though Biesta identifies depoliticising trends in citizenship education policies, I argue that his alternative still fails to be a sufficiently political alternative. What is lacking in Biesta is the explicit attention to political causes and the kind of collective activities that define a democracy: the creation of one’s own laws, norms and institutions. This capacity of the collective to question and govern itself is put in relief by Cornelius Castoriadis’s notion of “the project of autonomy”.     

Conflicting social paradigms of human freedom and the problem of justification

In recent work, Rawls, Nozick, and the ‘democratic‐socialist’ theory of Markovi? and Gould, attempt to ground rival models of just economic relations on the basis of conflicting interpretations of human freedom. Beginning with a philosophical conception of humans as essentially free beings, each derives a different system of basic rights and freedoms: (1) the familiar democratic civil and political rights of citizenship in the West (Rawls); (2) the classical bourgeois market freedoms ‐ ‘life, liberty, and property’ (Nozick); and (3) democratic socialist rights of self‐management of the work‐place (Gould and Markovi?). I argue that each of these theorists implicitly assumes a different but ungrounded ’social paradigm of human agency’ concerning the particular forms of human choice which are singled out as most important for a free, human life. None of these theories contains the methodological resources for showing why the forms of human agency it ‘emancipates’ are more important than the forms it suppresses or ignores. In order to overcome this impasse and provide a way of evaluating such rival paradigms of free agency, I elaborate a methodology based on the idea that a free society must provide its members with ‘equality in the social bases of self‐respect’. I use this methodology to argue that all three of the above conceptions are blind to problems of human agency, freedom, and dignity posed by the modern phenomena of welfare dependency, unemployment, and a self‐stultifying division of labor.     

Civic Education in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Alternative Paths to the Development of Political Knowledge and Democratic Values

Despite the proliferation of civic education programs in the emerging democracies of Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe, there have been few recent evaluations of the effectiveness of civics instruction in achieving changes in democratic orientations among student populations. We present findings from a study conducted in 1998 that examined the impact of democratic civic education among South African high school students. Using a battery of items to gauge democratic orientations, including measures of political knowledge, civic duty, tolerance, institutional trust, civic skills, and approval of legal forms of political participation, we find that civic education had the largest effects on political knowledge, with the magnitude of the effect being approximately twice as large as the recent Niemi and Junn (1998 ) finding for the United States. Exposure to civic education per se had weaker effects on democratic values and skills; for these orientations, what matters are specific factors related to the quality of instruction and the use of active pedagogical methods employed by civics instructors. Further, we find that civic education changed the structure of students' orientations: a "democratic values" dimension coalesces more strongly, and in greater distinction, from a "political competence" dimension among students exposed to civic education than among those with no such training. We discuss the implications of the findings for our theoretical understanding of the role of civic education in fostering democratic attitudes, norms, and values, as well as the practical implications of the results for the implementation and funding of civic education programs in developing democracies in the future.     

Making Attentive Citizens: The Ethics of Democratic Engagement,Political Equality,and Social Justice

Much discussion of the ethics of participation focuses on electoral participation and whether citizens are obligated or can be coerced to vote. Yet these debates have ignored that citizens must first pay attention to politics and make up their minds about where they stand before they can engage in any form of participation. This article considers the importance for liberal democracy of citizens paying attention to politics, or attentive citizenship. It argues that the democratic state has an obligation to cultivate interest in politics and that this obligation authorizes means up to and including some forms of coercion. The argument is that when citizens are inattentive to politics, it undermines political equality and social justice because it undermines what John Rawls called the fair value of the political liberties. The importance of these ends for liberal democratic states requires them to take steps to promote attentive citizenship.     

Democratic Citizenship, Education and Friendship Revisited: In Defence of Democratic Justice

Literature about the significance of cultivating democratic citizenship education in universities abounds. However, very little has been said about the importance of friendship in sustaining democratic communities. In this article I argue for a complementary view of friendship based on mutuality and love—with reference to the seminal ideas of Sherman and Derrida. My view is that teaching and learning ought to be used as pedagogical spaces to nurture forms of friendship which not only encourage mutuality but also love in order to make possible the taking of risks on the part of students and teachers. And, if teachers and students act with mutuality and love they would be more favourably positioned in their society to take risks and to enact democratic justice.     

Theorizing Democratic Education from a Senian Perspective

Despite the growing body of literature and general interest in the intersection between the capabilities approach (CA) and education, little work has been done so far to theorize democratic education from a CA perspective. This essay attempts to do so by, first, getting clear about the theory of democracy that has emerged from Amartya Sen’s recent work and understanding how it informs his CA; and, second, by carefully drawing out the implications of these aspects of Sen’s thinking for democratic education. Ultimately, I argue that Senian democratic education (SDE) is a composite of various learning processes that enhance one’s capability for social and political (democratic) participation. Particular attention is given to the learning that happens through one’s actual engagement in democratic practices and that which happens through one’s formal schooling. I call the former of these learning processes SDEp and the latter SDEs. SDEp is democratic life itself, and its effectiveness both depends on and contributes to the development of a culture of political participation within society. SDEs is best understood as the process of facilitating children’s achievement of democratic functioning, that is, children’s achievement of certain “beings and doings” associated with the emergence and exercise of their individual and collective democratic existence.     

Progressive Politics: Liberalism,Humanism, and Feminism in Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach

Abstract

A purely theoretical analysis of Martha Nussbaum’s basis of the capabilities approach in feminist (rather than more broadly liberal humanist) justice yields a philosophical project that may appear inconsistent, if not incoherent. However, I suggest in this paper that when the reader considers the project’s very concrete aims, there surfaces an intelligible reason for the apparent incongruities between her feminist and liberal commitments. Since even a capabilities approach rooted in feminist justice is itself radical and must win political support in order to be implemented, I suggest that Nussbaum’s basis of the approach in feminist justice can perhaps be understood as a canny attempt to win support for her project on politically popular grounds, using the rhetoric of sex and social justice that has already been embraced by current economic powers. Once arguments based on morally irrelevant differences between sexes are politically endorsed, it will perhaps be easier to argue for the directly parallel moral irrelevance of differences based on accident of birth into the underdeveloped world.     

Whole School Meetings and the Development of Radical Democratic Community

Serious re-examination of participatory traditions of democracy is long overdue. Iconically central to such traditions of democratic education is the practice of whole School Meetings. More usually associated with radical work within the private sector, School Meetings are here explored in detail through two examples from publicly funded education, (1) Epping House School, a mixed residential primary/elementary school for students with severe emotional, social and behavioural difficulties and (2) secondary/high schools within the Just Community School movement in the USA. In addition to providing richly textured accounts of the multiple realities and challenges of pioneering overtly democratic practices such as School Meetings within the publicly funded sector of education substantial attention is paid to analytic engagement with the kind of organisational structures, practices and cultures that seem to play an important role in their successful operation and development. The different phenomenological and theoretical strands weaving their way through the texture of Meeting practices also raise a number of key issues within the fields of social and political philosophy, in particular, whether School Meetings are best understood as predominantly political or communal phenomena. In gesturing towards the philosophical groundwork of a satisfactory answer I argue for the importance of the undeservedly neglected notion of democratic fellowship within the lexicon of democratic polity and aspiration.     

The Case for Developmental Methodologies in Democratization

Interdisciplinary integration of adult and political development knowledge into the study and process of countries’ democratic transitions is necessary, so democratization does not become an incendiary process further destabilizing the planet. The incoherence in research and practice can be resolved by employing insights into the political reasoning, culture, and institutional structures at key stages of development. Drawing on Chilton’s (1988, Defining political development, Boulder: Lynne Rienner; 1991, Grounding political development, Boulder: Lynne Rienner) theory of political development, this coherent micro/macro connection is required for study of the central co-reinforcing elements for stable democracy: civil society, political society, rule of law, usable state bureaucracy, institutionalized economic society, and cultural conditions for psychologically healthy power relations. Developmental analyses of these factors provide the compelling theoretical framework the political science of democratization requires.     

The True Confessions of a White Rawlsian Liberal: An Argument for a Capacities Approach to Democratic Legitimacy

Abstract

This paper takes as its point of departure the constitutional talks in South Africa in the early 1990’s. I suggest that liberal rather than democratic values held a particular attraction to South African political philosophers like me. Taking the example of Rawlsian liberalism, I show how liberalism locates the normative anchors of legitimacy outside the democratic process and is content with a weak interpretation of political equality. As an alternative I sketch a capacities approach to democratic legitimacy drawing on the work of Sen and Nussbaum. In particular I argue that the capacity to participate in democratic practices is what grounds and legitimizes principles of democratic justice agreed to by citizens. I conclude by suggesting that South Africa’s democracy would have been stronger if the state had attended to the capacities of citizens to participate in the democratic process.     

Educating for Autonomy: Liberalism and Autonomy in the Capabilities Approach

Martha Nussbaum grounds her version of the capabilities approach in political liberalism. In this paper, we argue that the capabilities approach, insofar as it genuinely values the things that persons can actually do and be, must be grounded in a hybrid account of liberalism: in order to show respect for adults, its justification must be political; in order to show respect for children, however, its implementation must include a commitment to comprehensive autonomy, one that ensures that children develop the skills necessary to make meaningful choices about whether or not to exercise their basic capabilities. Importantly, in order to show respect for parents who do not necessarily recognize autonomy as a value, we argue that the liberal state, via its system of public education, should take on the role of ensuring that all children within the state develop a sufficient degree of comprehensive autonomy.     

Farewell to multiculturalism? sharing values and identities in societies of immigration

For critics of multiculturalism, societies of immigration need to strengthen cohesion based on shared democratic values and national identities. This article suggests that democratic values are not a sufficient basis for political cohesion, because they are universal and cannot identify a particular polity toward which one ought to be loyal. Immigrants are always asked to accept a package deal that includes not only democratic values, but also the hegemony of established national cultures. Shared democratic values may also not be strictly necessary for political cohesion. They must be embedded in political institutions and ought to be respected by office holders, democratic politicians, and parties, but democratic states must tolerate that most citizens appear to hold illiberal beliefs including illiberal attitudes toward immigrants. Immigrants are then often asked to profess a commitment to values that citizens do not widely share. If political loyalty, cannot be exclusively based on democratic values, must societies of immigration then ask newcomers to assimilate into a shared national identity? The article argues that this requires, first, a self-transformation of these identities in response to immigration. Instead of regarding shared identities as overriding all other affiliations, democratic states should see them as overarching and overlapping. Different attitudes toward dual nationality illustrate the implication of this suggestion. The article concludes by proposing a catalyst model of multiculturalism as an alternative to the metaphors of the melting pot, the salad bowl, and the mosaic.     

In Defence of Ubuntu

The article defends ubuntu against the assault by Enslin and Horsthemke (Comp Educ 40(4):545–558, 2004). It challenges claims that the Africanist/Afrocentrist project, in which the philosophy of ubuntu is central, faces numerous problems, involves substantial political, moral, epistemological and educational errors, and should therefore not be the basis for education for democratic citizenship in the South African context. The article finds coincidence between some of the values implicit in ubuntu and some of the values that are enshrined in the constitution of South Africa and that on that basis argues that ubuntu has the potential to serve as a moral theory and a public policy. The educational upshot of this article’s argument is that South Africa’s educational policy framework not only places a high premium on ubuntu, which it conceives as human dignity, but it also requires the schooling system to promote ubuntu-oriented attributes and dispositions among the learners. The article finds similarities between ubuntu and bildung, whose key advocates, among others was German scholar and intellectual Wilhelm von Humboldt. It argues that it would be ethnocentric, and indeed silly to suggest that the ubuntu ethic of caring and sharing is uniquely African when some of the values which it seeks to promote can also be traced in various Eurasian philosophies.