Democratic Education in a Globalized World

A Normative Theory

Julian Culp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429640698
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Due to the economic and social effects of globalization democracy is currently in crisis in many states around the world. This book suggests that solving this crisis requires rethinking democratic education. It argues that educational public policy must cultivate democratic relationships not only within but also across and between states, and that such policy must empower citizens to exercise democratic control in domestic as well as in inter- and transnational politics.

Democratic Education in a Globalized World articulates and defends democratic conceptions of global citizenship education and educational justice on the basis of a democratic understanding of global justice. It will be of interest to researchers across the fields of education, political theory, philosophy, development and postcolonial studies.

1 Introduction

1 Global problems from an educational perspective

Presently, several pressing problems can be neither understood nor solved from an exclusively nationalist point of view. These are ecological, social and democratic problems such as the harmful effects of climate change, widespread extreme economic poverty and undemocratic global governance institutions. Not only the causes but also the solutions to these problems involve various actors from around the world, which is why it is apt to call them “global problems.” Social scientists (Habermas 2001, 2008a, 2008b; Beck 2008; Lessenich 2016, 50–63) suggest analyzing such global problems from the point of view of “world domestic politics,” rather than the binary perspective of “domestic” and “foreign affairs.” Similarly, moral and political philosophers argue that an adequate normative understanding of these problems requires to avoid restricting the use of the concept of justice to problems of “domestic justice” or “social justice” within states, but to extend its use to problems of “global justice” worldwide.¹

The adoption of the perspectives of global justice is also imperative in the case of educational public policy, especially as it pertains to school education – that is, institutions of primary and secondary formal education.² This is because, first, to the extent that the solutions to problems such as extreme economic poverty require actions of various actors from around the world, citizenship education through schooling must no longer be limited to nurturing a consciousness for domestic justice.³ Rather, it has to be conceived in terms of what is usually referred to as global citizenship education and must contribute to the creation of a motivationally effective consciousness for global justice.⁴ Second, as a particular kind of school education of a certain quality is a necessary condition for solving global problems such as large-scale extreme economic poverty, the rights to such an education should be understood as a matter of global educational justice (cf. Bloom 2004). This is to say that states should not be regarded as the only actors that bear moral responsibility for the realization of the rights to education of their citizens. Instead, other public actors, such as other states and international organizations, should also be recognized as carriers of such responsibility.⁵ Thereby, global problems such as extreme economic poverty – as well as, although differently so, the harmful effects of climate change and undemocratic global governance institutions – have a bearing on issues of global citizenship education, on the one hand, and global educational justice, on the other.

However, thus far, the philosophical literature on global justice has neither tackled the issue of the particular ways in which global citizenship education should nurture which kind of consciousness for global justice. Nor has it determined which rights to which kind of school education should be recognized as a matter of global educational justice. Several of the existing conceptions of citizenship education have a domestic bias and consider merely which consciousness citizenship education would have to nurture in order to deal properly with domestic problems (cf. Gutmann 1987; Anderson 2007; Lange 2010; Lange and Himmelmann 2007; Satz 2007). Other conceptions of citizenship education, by contrast, do not have such a bias and take global problems into consideration (cf. Suárez-Orozco and Qin-Hilliard 2004; Suárez-Orozco 2007; Suárez-Orozco and Sattin-Bajaj 2010). However, they fail to be informed by theories of global justice and therefore lack a systematic normative-theoretical exploration and treatment of global problems. Similarly, the existing conceptions of educational justice also have a domestic bias, as they specify merely which rights to education exist as a matter of domestic justice (cf. Brighouse 2000; Anderson 2004; Brighouse and Swift 2006a, 2009a, 2014a; Satz 2007; Stojanov 2006, 2011; Swift 2003).

This is why, I argue, it is necessary to reformulate and justify anew the principles of global educational justice and global citizenship education on the basis of a theory of global justice. Therefore, this book aims at developing novel conceptions of global educational justice and global citizenship education by fleshing out the normative implications of a particular conception of global justice for educational public policy. These conceptions of global educational justice and of global citizenship education consist of principles which determine which moral rights to education individuals have as a matter of global justice and which kind of consciousness for global justice should be promoted in which ways by global citizenship education. Thus, the idea that guides this book is that educational public policies that address primary and secondary institutions of formal education should be normatively justified by reference to a conception of global rather than merely domestic justice or some other normative ground. By working out this idea, this book provides a normative conception of how educational public policy bears on the solution of global problems that is based on considerations of global justice.

The aims of this introductory chapter are to emphasize the importance of engaging with the demands of global justice in educational public policy and to outline the argumentative trajectory that I will pursue in order to articulate and defend my conceptions of global educational justice and global citizenship education. To achieve these two aims, this introductory chapter unfolds as follows. In Section 2 I begin to elaborate on the neglect of normative issues of education by contemporary political philosophers. I qualify this neglect in Section 3 by showing that there is actually a considerable amount of current philosophical research on what could be dubbed political philosophy of education and philosophy of political education. In Section 4, however, I argue that neither political philosophers (of education) nor philosophers of (political) education have thus far examined the relevance of global justice theorizing for educational public policy. On the one hand, I will thereby lend support to the claim that contemporary political philosophers have neglected thus far normative problems of education. On the other hand, however, my argument also points out that there has been a certain neglect of political philosophy by contemporary philosophers of education, since these philosophers of education have failed to incorporate the recent findings of the theories of global justice in their conceptions of educational justice and citizenship education. This book fills the gap in the philosophical literature that has resulted from this specific kind of mutual neglect by way of bridging the literatures in philosophy of education and political philosophy. Section 5 lays out the particular way in which this book does so by outlining the overall argumentation of this book in the form of a chapter-by-chapter synopsis.

2 Contemporary political philosophers’ neglect of education

Lately, several philosophers – including Axel Honneth (2015) and Martha Nussbaum (2010) – have critically argued that contemporary political philosophers fail to pay sufficient attention to normative questions of educational public policy. Honneth (2015), for example, expressed such a concern in his recent essay “Education and the Democratic Public Sphere – A Neglected Chapter of Political Philosophy.” Therein, he laments the fact that political philosophers engage so little with questions of democratic education:

To be sure, efforts are still made to reinvigorate theoretical reflection on democratic education, but nowadays these efforts tend to come from a pedagogical discourse abandoned by philosophers; they are no longer at the centre of political philosophy itself.… Political philosophy today seems to have lost the insight that a thriving democracy must continually reproduce the cultural and moral preconditions of its own existence by way of general educational processes.⁶

(Honneth 2015, 19)

One reason why Honneth is so concerned that so few political philosophers address issues of democratic education is simply that educational public policies have a profound impact on political behavior and choice. As Honneth (2015, 20–1) puts it:

The problem of state-organized education is far too central to political agency and far too consequential with regard to the possibility of democracy and the rule of law for it to be straightforwardly separable from the theory or philosophy of politics.⁷

Hence educational public policies must be part of any sensible philosophical analysis of political developments.⁸

Honneth (2015, 30–2) additionally emphasizes that a number of acute political problems, for example, those arising from the digitalization of economic and political life, are directly linked to questions of democratic education. In this way Honneth picks up Dewey’s thought that properly addressing political problems cannot be done without re-thinking educational public policy. Acknowledging his debt to Dewey, Honneth (2015, 30) remarks that “Dewey … pointed out throughout his pedagogical writings that along with the various challenges that require public problem solving, the material to be taught in schools must also change.”

One should therefore expect that political philosophers who grapple with the major political problems of their age would be immersed in issues of educational public policy. For example, one would assume that political philosophers would attempt to identify new conceptions of citizenship education that determine which attitudes, knowledge and skills of citizens’ educational public policy should be promoted so that citizens can act and think democratically when their economic and political lives are subject to processes of digitalization, global economic integration or ecological degradation.

It is easy to provide many more examples in order to substantiate Honneth’s point that educational public policies have a pervasive impact on democracy and that these policies should therefore also occupy the minds of political philosophers. In the case of several European and North American societies, the rise of nationalist and populist right-wing parties,⁹ the proliferation of terroristic acts by citizens with migration background and the so-called waves of refugees come easily to mind.¹⁰ What seems problematic in all of these examples, among other things, is the threat of – to use Honneth’s terminology – democracy’s “cultural and moral preconditions,” which in turn gives rise to the question of whether current educational public policies are inadequate for securing these conditions. In this way a concern for democracy seems to require reflecting upon educational public policies.

In addition, several Western countries have recently adopted educational public policies that are problematic from a democratic point of view and should therefore also be subject to political philosophers’ critical analyses (cf. Nussbaum 2010, ch. 2; Nida-Rümelin 2013, 12). For these policies have tended to adopt a narrowly conceived human capital conception of education, which means that they are oriented towards furthering the students’ future employability and economic growth (cf. Biesta 2015). Yet, again, although these changes clearly threaten the reproduction of democracy’s “cultural and moral preconditions,” so far, hardly any political philosophers have examined the recently adopted policies.

A case in point for this economization of educational public policy is that for many years the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has actively promoted the idea that a greater share of each student cohort should access tertiary education.¹¹ One aspect of the rationale for this strategy is that the number of years of formal education of a given individual correlates positively with that individual’s salary. Hence by encouraging countries to increase the number of every cohort that frequents higher education, the OECD believes they are supporting the augmentation of salaries and of economic growth.¹² Problematically, however, the heightened focus on the role that schooling has for students’ future employability and economic growth might erode the understanding among educational policy makers, school directors and teachers that schooling is indeed decisive for the democratic education of future citizens.¹³

But what renders political philosophy’s lack of interest in educational problems so curious is not just the fact that recently adopted educational public policies narrowly favor economic objectives and thereby threaten what Honneth calls the “moral and cultural preconditions” of democracy. This lack of interest is also remarkable in light of the centrality of educational questions in the canonical texts of the Western tradition of political philosophy. As Eamonn Callan (2004, 71), for example, has remarked, “the nature of citizenship and the education suited to its realization have traditionally figured the basic questions of normative political theory.”

Plato’s The Republic, for example, is as much a treatise in political philosophy as it is one in philosophy of education. For in that work Plato offers an elaborate educational theory that explains how the citizens of his ideally just city will eventually develop the kind of consciousness for justice that is assumed in his conception of justice. At the core of this educational theory is a role-specific educational system for the respective members of the three classes that constitute his ideally just city ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Global democratic justice as the normative ground of educational public policy
• 3 Global democratic educational justice
• 4 Global democratic citizenship education
• 5 Global citizenship education as transnational democratic conscientization
• 6 Critiques of autonomy and of education for autonomy
• 7 Postcolonial critiques of democratic education
• 8 Conclusion
• Index