This contribution develops a defence of a universalist conception of Global Citizenship Education against three prominent critiques, which are, among others, put forward by postcolonial scholars. The first critique argues that GCE is essentially a project of globally minded elites and therefore expressive both of global educational injustices and of the values and lifestyles of a particular class or milieu. The second critique assumes that GCE is based on genuinely ‘Western values’, which are neither universally accepted nor universally valid and (...) therefore unjustly forced on members of non-Western cultures and societies. GCE, according to this critique, is assumed to be another version of the educational justification of a hegemonic and unjust global Western regime. The third critique focuses on the epistemological preconditions of GCE. It assumes that GCE relies on a particular, culturally embedded ‘Western epistemology,’ which perpetuates historically grown global educational and epistemic injustices by dominating and subjugating alternative epistemological approaches. With respect to the first critique I argue that it is to a certain extent sociologically plausible, but wrong when it is applied to the educational and political legitimacy of GCE. The second critique overestimates the consensus within the ‘Western tradition’ and underestimates the transnational dissemination of universalist ideals and values as well as its own reliance on universalist validity claims. I argue that in order to provide a plausible criticism of historically grown global educational and political injustices, it is imperative for GCE to integrate central insights provided by the postcolonial critique, without giving up on universalist ideals and values. The third critique is, according to my argumentation, based on flawed epistemological assumptions, which do not withstand critical scrutiny. Instead of identifying epistemic and scientific claims as the expressions of a particular ‘culture’ or geographical location, I defend the position that philosophical and scientific research should ideally be conceived as a democratic and universalist project, whose emancipatory potential can only be realized on the basis of a universalist epistemology. (shrink)

This paper rethinks the fostering task of the teacher in a time when it, paradoxically, has tended to become marginalized and privatized despite its public urgency. Following post-holocaust thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and Zygmunt Bauman, the position explored here is radical in the sense that it takes ‘the crisis of traditions’ and the erosion of a common moral ground or value basis seriously, and it is conservative in the sense that it insists on responding educationally to the call from (...) the past by returning to the moral character of our existence and our own embeddedness in the incompleteness of living traditions. The argument is that there is a difference between educating for common values—which entails a belief in pre-existing commonalities—and making values common in and through education. The latter, we argue, entails an aspiration for continuously creating new commonalities and for cultivating the ability to act and judge as a thinking moral agent in specific, lived and worldly cases. In this sense, the fostering task of the teacher is to create commonality of what is not common, turning the liberal democratic values of the past into contested objects of study. (shrink)