This book offers an opportunity for an anti deficit and positive examination of Black/Black-multiracial culture and its role in creating educational efficacy among academics of color. Through personal narrative, educational and learning theory, and creative writing/poetry, this hybrid text examines the cultural path to the doctorate.

What are the prospects for ambitious political reform in communities of traditional, passionate, and even self-righteous citizens? Can thoughtful legislators create a healthy society for citizens whose judgment is typically unsound? In a searching and provocative analysis, Ryan Balot addresses these timely - though universal - political questions by offering a novel interpretation of Plato's Laws. Turning to the ancient past is essential to reinvigorating our contemporary understanding of these all-important issues. Previous readers have either celebrated the work's (...) idealism or denounced its totalitarianism. Balot, by contrast, refuses to interpret the dialogue as a political blueprint, whether admirable or misguided. He shows instead that it constitutes Plato's greatest philosophical investigation of political life. In this transformative re-appraisal, Balot reveals that Plato's goal was to cultivate a tragic attitude toward our political passions, commitments, and aspirations. The result is a profound political inquiry with far-reaching consequences. (shrink)

Creating education systems that promote democratic sustainability has been the concern of political thinkers as diverse as J. S. Mill, Dewey, Benjamin Barber and Derek Bok. The classic dichotomisation of democratic theory between deliberative democrats and Schumpeterian democrats suggests that education in the service of democracy can be constructive—that is, provide a student with the skills necessary to elect her leaders without changing her nature—or reconstructive—that is, fundamentally and radically reshape the student to produce a citizen whose (...) goals are transformed to be congruent with society. Michael Oakeshott, who has written extensively both on political regimes and on the purpose of liberal education, offers a third way to assess the connection between government and education. Despite his own dismissal of civic or political education as fundamentally vocational and thus beyond the boundaries of the liberal arts, this paper provides a potentially surprising Oakeshottian defence of political education within the liberal arts with reference to the importance he places on experience as a pedagogic tool. Thus, Oakeshott's educational philosophy has a certain resonance with the recent calls to locate the relevance of liberal arts within the burgeoning development of experiential civic engagement programmes in American universities. (shrink)

Any liberal democratic state must honour religious and cultural pluralism in its educational policies. To fail to honour them would betray ideals of freedom and toleration fundamental to liberal democracy. Yet if such ideals are to flourish from one generation to the next, allegiance to the distinctive values of liberal democracy is a necessary educational end, whose pursuit will constrain pluralism. The problem of political education is therefore to ensure the continuity across generations of the constitutive ideals of (...) liberal democracy, while remaining hospitable to a diversity of conduct and belief that sometimes threatens those very ideals. Creating Citizens addresses this crucial problem. In lucid and elegant prose, Professor Callan, one of the world's foremost philosophers of education, identifies both the principal ends of civic education, and the rights that limit their political pursuit. This timely new study sheds light on some of the most divisive educational controversies, such as state sponsorship and regulation of denominational schooling, as well as the role of non-denominational schools in the moral and political development of children. Oxford Political Theory presents the best new work in contemporary political theory. It is intended to be broad in scope, including original contributions to political philosophy, and also work in applied political theory. The series will contain works of outstanding quality with no restriction as to approach or subject matter. The series editors are David Miller and Alan Ryan. (shrink)

This timely and important book presents a compelling new theory of political education for liberal democracies. Amidst current concern over the need to encourage a morally sensitive and committed citizenry, Professor Callan's study provides a much-needed balanced discussion of the proper ends of education, as well as the moral rights of parents and children.

The radical Democratic-Republican Societies that emerged during the 1790s not only challenged conventional interpretations of the civic republican tradition, they also adopted Enlightenment principles in their advocacy for universal public education. Brian W. Dotts’ The Political Education of Democratus: Negotiating Civic Virtue during the Early Republic shows that, unlike mainstream educational philosophy of the period, radical democrats supported universal political education as essential in protecting liberty and political equality.

Philip Stevens; Political Education and Political Teachers, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 21, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 75–83, https://doi.org/10.

The aim of this article is to state a case for Karl Mannheim as an interlocutor no less important than Michael Oakeshott for an inquiry into the manner and purpose of teaching politics. Beginning with Max Weber, I develop an account of Karl Mannheim as a prime contender for Weber's legacy in political education, along with two contemporaries, Albert Salomon and Hans Freyer, whose contrasting appropriations of the legacy will highlight important elements that distinguish Mannheim's approach from the (...) stereotype into which Oakeshott would be inclined to cast it. This treatment will offer an understanding of the issues in political education that will give ample reason to give preference to Mannheim's reading of the contrast between himself and Oakeshott and substantial support for the conclusions he derives for the design and point of political education. Mannheim's surprisingly modest conclusions are closer to the `scepticism' with which Oakeshott credited himself in his inaugural lecture, as he ironically apologized for the contrast with his predecessors, than to the rather shallow prophetic convictions of Graham Wallas and Harold Laski, which Oakeshott attacks. Unlike Oakeshott, however, he recognizes not only the urgencies of a conflict where tradition is only one of the parties but also the justice of impatient contenders against an order that persistently does them harm. The need is not to take up a conversation, but to cultivate a `platform' for negotiated settlements; and this political task is the educational work of intellectuals, who must nevertheless never presume to rule. (shrink)

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (1992) provided both a powerful framework for analyzing public opinion and a highly influential account of the role of political elites in shaping public opinion. Zaller's subsequent work has focused less on the mechanics of opinion change than on the role of public opinion in the broader political process. This evolution has entailed sustained attention to V. O. Key, Jr.'s concept of ?latent opinion??the opinion politicians are likely to face in the (...) next election, as distinct from what is currently measureable in surveys. It has also entailed a downgrading of the importance attached to Media Politics??the attempt to govern on the basis of words and images that diffuse through the mass media??relative to Party Politics??the substance of party performance.? In recent work, Zaller and his colleagues have emphasized the key role of interest groups and activists in shaping parties' policy choices, largely free of effective constraint by the mass public. This work provides a rather more pessimistic take on ?The Question of Elite Domination of Public Opinion? than does the epilogue to The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to offer a sympathetic reconstruction of the political thought of Paul Feyerabend. Using a critical discussion of the idea of the ‘free society’ it is suggested that his political thought is best understood in terms of three thematic concerns – liberation, hegemony, and the authority of science – and that the political significance of those claims become clear when they are considered in the context of his educational views. It emerges that (...) Feyerabend is best understood as calling for the grounding of cognitive and cultural authorities – like the sciences – in informed deliberation, rather than the uncritical embrace of prevailing convictions. It therefore emerges that a free society is best understood as one of epistemically responsible citizenship rather than epistemically anarchistic relativism of the ‘anything goes’ – a striking anticipation of current debates about philosophy of science in society. (shrink)

In Corrupting Youth, Peter Euben explores the affinities between Socratic philosophy and Athenian democratic culture as a way to think about issues of politics and education, both ancient and modern. The book moves skillfully between antiquity and the present, from ancient to contemporary political theory, and from Athenian to American democracy. It draws together important recent work by political theorists with the views of classical scholars in ways that shine new light on significant theoretical debates such as (...) those over discourse ethics, rational choice, and political realism, and on political issues such as school vouchers and education reform. Euben not only argues for the generative capacity of classical texts and Athenian political thought, he demonstrates it by thinking with them to provide a framework for reflecting more deeply about socially divisive issues such as the war over the canon and the "politicization" of the university.Drawing on Aristophanes' Clouds, Sophocles' Antigone and Oedipus Tyrannos, and Plato's Apology of Socrates, Gorgias, and Protagoras, Euben develops a view of democratic political education. Arguing that Athenian democratic practices constituted a tradition of accountability and self-critique that Socrates expanded into a way of doing philosophy, Euben suggests a necessary reciprocity between political philosophy and radical democracy. By asking whether we can or should take "Socrates" out of the academy and put him back in front of a wider audience, Euben argues for anchoring contemporary higher education in appreciative yet skeptical encounter with the dramatic figure in Plato's dialogues. (shrink)

This study aims to explore the promoting effect of the combination of mental health education and ideological and political education for college students on improving their comprehensive psychological quality and ideological and political theoretical level. The research adopts a combination of system analysis methods, experimental methods and clustering algorithms, and conducts course experiments through experimental methods, providing basic data. In the process of the experiment, from the perspective of educational psychology theory, the systematic analysis method is (...) used to distinguish subject and object, and functional analysis is carried out. At the same time, clustering algorithms are used to classify the mental health problems of different students. The research results indicate that in terms of subjectivity, teachers’ psychological communication ability, psychological understanding ability and psychological guidance ability have a significant positive impact on students’ psychological state. The level of ideological and political theory and psychological strain ability also have a significant positive impact on students’ psychological state. Intervention on students’ values and personality psychological issues is also effective. These findings provide an important basis and guidance for further carrying out higher education reform. Contribution: With the development of society, students need to face more and more external concepts during their growth. Students whose mental growth is not mature are likely to have certain psychological problems in this process. This research can be utilised by scholars in the field of youth ministry and religious educational studies. (shrink)

This paper will focus on Young's theories of heterogeneity, as they have developed from the essays in Throwing Like a Girl to those in Inclusion and Democracy . Reading her theories of heterogeneity together with recent developments in political theory which seek to reclaim the agonistic and frictional aspects of polity and political democracy, the paper will argue that attempts to promote ‘citizenship education’ are less pressing than attempts to develop and promote political education.

Book Information Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy. By Eamonn Callan. Oxford University Press. New York. 1997. Pp. viii + 262. Hardback, £25.00.

Given the current concern in the Soviet Union and East Europe to emancipate public education from its Stalinist past, it is understandable that educators have called for the “humanizing” of education. Yet “humanization” is a none too clear idea and must be approached, I propose, through its opposite: dehumanization. Dehumanization, itself, can be understood as the denial of the dignity of the individual — a cardinal principle of the philosophies that comprise classical and contemporary liberal theory. This principle (...) of the dignity of the individual in turn implies duties for the liberal democratic state to treat all citizens (and for all citizens to treat each other) with equal respect as ends in themselves and equally as choosers of ends, as being, at least in principle, capable of choosing and acting on the ultimate ends in their own lives and as potential “sayers of great words and doers of great deeds” in the common public enterprise. Now in claiming that the principle of the dignity of the individual is central to an understanding of a just and humane society, we do not thereby commit ourselves to those doctrines long associated with liberalism, viz., ontological and moral individualism. The form of political, or united-reformed, liberalism argued for in this paper is clearly compatible with strong forms of community, even authoritarian types of community insofar as they do not transgress the principle of the dignity of the individual as regards informed choice. As decidedly non-perfectionist and agnostic about ultimate goods (tempered by the ban on all public forms of dehumanizing behavior and treatment), this form of political liberalism is neither individualistic nor communitarian, neither capitalist nor socialist (though the state is not indifferent to their fortunes). This rendering of the liberal democratic state sets the requirements for a deep and thorough political education that goes well beyond any familiar example today. In seeking to develop, to “humanize” individuals for a world of thought and action in the common public enterprise, political education — the premier form of education — in a liberal democratic state seeks to develop individuals who are theoretically informed and practically wise — thus the emphasis on the development of rationality in all of its forms. Moreover, despite the formal agnosticism of the state concerning ultimate human ends, a political education requires deep student exposure to and critical assessment of religion, possible ways of life, and those views of the human good that humans throughout history have found worthy of pursuit. And this even if it means that students will come to reject the principle of the dignity of the individual. (shrink)

I here explore the educational potential of cinema and TV-series through the eyes of the French philosopher Alain Badiou. To illustrate, I read the Norwegian web-based TV-series Skam, which reached out to millions of Nordic teens by a broad distribution, easy access and speaking a language young people could relate to. The series portrays the many faces and ambiguities of shame and shaming embedded in Nordic youth culture. In bringing the question of the pedagogy of cinema and TV-series to the (...) forefront, I here read Skam on three analytical levels. First, to explore the TV-series capability to captivate the viewers through a doubling of the real. Second, to examine Badiou’s idea of cinema as an ontological art, revolving around the question of the relationship between being and appearing. Third, I read Skam analytically, to consider Badiou’s claim that cinema is a democratic emblem. In sum, what may be the series’ potential for shaping the viewers’ ethical–political awareness? (shrink)

Pat White; Work-place Democracy and Political Education [1], Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 13, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 5–20, https://doi.org/10.

While philosophical engagement with ideology once necessitated a “critique of critics” and their social context, today the emphasis often lies in analyzing common and unreflective errors – whether espoused by unrepentant racists, conspiracy theorists, or others in the grip of ignorance. Though cases like these might help us understand the prevalence and persistence of modes of thought that strengthen an exploitative social order, an exclusive focus on such unambiguous examples of false consciousness leaves the reflexive character of social critique out (...) of the picture. Since its earliest philosophical treatments, however, ideology was understood not simply as the absence of education, but as a problematic form of consciousness produced and maintained through educational institutions. As a contribution to this tradition, my dissertation explores the relationship between critical social philosophy and the illusions of critics. If ideological delusion designates the tendency to self-deception accompanying any attempt to learn about society from within it, the critique of ideology demands a self-transformative assessment of ourselves, our context, and our forms of life and thought. I develop my account through an historical exploration of programs of social thought in which the educational dimension of criticism was overlooked. In the authors I examine – Karl Popper, Theodor Adorno and Karl Mannheim – I find three influential social philosophies identifying a role for critique as a tool for social transformation, but nonetheless failing in various ways to appreciate the development of their own perspective. In these theoretical programs, critique seems to issue from intellectuals whose process of becoming critical is either of little interest, incapable of being planned, or uncritically endorsed. By implicitly or explicitly excluding the educational development of the critic from the domain of critique, these social philosophies reveal the methodological and substantial obstacles confronting philosophy as the cultivation of critical consciousness today. Attending to this latter project in the writings of a few political educators, I argue in closing that understanding critique as a process of education allows us to better recognize how our own forms of life and institutional conditions work to stabilize the society in which we live. As a process of political struggle, the critique of ideology is not merely a theoretical undertaking, but a practical task in the most basic sense, aiming first and foremost at the self-conscious development of new intellectuals. (shrink)

The relation between moral philosophy and moral practice is itself philosophically controversial. nor is there any one determinate formula through which to express the relations between the basic principles of morality and of rationality itself. the concepts of the moral and the political are both 'essentially contestable' and so too is the nature of their relations; that is, their analysis is itself of moral and political import. nevertheless, in periods of overall stability, this contestability may hardly be apparent. (...) all this, and its connection with philosophy's fundamental commitment to questioning and self-awareness has a deep significance for moral (and political) education. (shrink)

This edited volume contributes to current debates around the fate of democracy in times of uncertainty. As with so many areas of life, education has been widely posited as the answer to promoting a...

Alan Montefiore; Philosophy and Moral (and Political) Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 13, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 21–32, https://doi.o.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

This paper will focus on Young's theories of heterogeneity, as they have developed from the essays in Throwing Like a Girl (1990) to those in Inclusion and Democracy (2000). Reading her theories of heterogeneity together with recent developments in political theory which seek to reclaim the agonistic and frictional aspects of polity and political democracy, the paper will argue that attempts to promote ‘citizenship education’ are less pressing than attempts to develop and promote political education.

This is a brief introduction to the second part of a suite of papers on the theme ‘Political Education for Human Transformation’. Sceptical of the familiar and somewhat narrow frameworks for citizenship education, this East-West collaboration looks again at the very idea, and the possible means, of education for democracy. It examines the principle of an equality of voices as crucial to mature democratic citizenship, expanding on this through the idea of the ‘education of one's (...) experience’. This is a matter not of introspection but rather of turning attention outward—towards the language we use, the way others are treated, works of art and popular culture—in order to be more critically awake and to experience more fully how the world comes to light. We introduce papers by Alexis Gibbs and Léa Boman, which respectively consider the reflections of de Tocqueville on democracy in the United States and Emerson's essay ‘Self-Reliance’. Together, these essays contribute to an understanding of the manner in which we are always already implicated in structures of power. They offer a redefinition of political subjectivity. (shrink)

Facing contemporary cultural and religious pluralism, associated to the demands of recognition from minorities, in multicultural societies, neither classical republicanism nor political liberalism gives satisfactory orientation to shape a political education accommodated to this social context. Education will contribute to social pacification and social compromises, only if we elaborate a political education which takes into account and responds properly to the main actual political goal: living together with our differences. In this paper we (...) will explore the content of such political education. (shrink)

Roy Edgley; Education, Work and Politics, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 14, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 3–16, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 55, Issue 1, Page 226-228, February 2021.

Montaigne is generally portrayed either as a principal proponent of the mix of scepticism, neo-Stoicism and Tacitism that feeds the early-modern reason-of-state literature or as a thoroughgoing political moralist who rejects this literature's politics of necessity and princely deception in favour of a politics of classical or Christian virtue. I argue that Montaigne inhabits neither of these positions exclusively. Instead, he argues in utramque partem, both for and against reason of state, in order to educate > his readers about (...) the perils of following elites who would use either political necessity or religious moralism as pretexts for violence in pursuit of political gain. (shrink)

The traditional ideological and political education should keep pace with the times, and the physical and health education should highlight its value, and must combine the two. This study investigated on the integration path of mental health education and college students’ ideological and political education. A stratified random sampling was conducted on 2021 students of a higher vocational college. The subjects were divided into the control group and the experimental group. The experimental group was (...) given the integrated intervention course of mental health education and ideological and political education of college students, and the control group was given routine teaching. The depression score of the experimental group is significantly lower than that of the control group, and the mental health quality score is higher than that of the control group. Contribution: The integration of mental health education and college students’ Ideological and political education can effectively improve the level of college students’ mental health. This course constantly improves the students’ subjective consciousness, subjective ability and subjective personality, and fully reflects the educational effect of the ideological and political education of college students’ mental health course. This research provides data which could be utilised by academics in the field of practical theology, especially youth ministry and religious educational studies. (shrink)