Peter Levine

« Matt Leighninger on a vital moment | Main | I support the tax deal »

December 10, 2010

the philosophical foundations of civic education

Ann Higgins-D’Alessandro and I have published an article under this title in Philosophy & Public Policy Quarterly. It is actually a version (with due permission) of a chapter we published in The Handbook of Research on Civic Engagement in Youth, edited by Lonnie Sherrod, Judith Torney-Purta, and Constance A. Flanagan (John Wiley & Sons, 2010). Here it is online.

We note that educating young people for citizenship is an intrinsically moral task. Even among reasonable people, moral views about citizenship, youth, and education differ. We describe conflicting utilitarian, liberal, communitarian, and civic republican conceptions and cite evaluations of actual civic education programs that seem to reflect those values. We conclude:

With a few exceptions, such as Facing History and Just Communities, one cannot find much explicit moral argumentation in either the justifications or the evaluations of civic programs. Disclosing one’s own ethical judgments as facts about oneself is relatively straightforward. Defending them is harder, especially if one does not resort automatically to utilitarianism. Moral argumentation requires a shift out of a positivist framework, as one gives non-empirical reasons—reasons that go beyond observable facts— for one’s positions. Moral philosophy and normative social theory—as we have argued—provide rich resources for arguments about the values that society should hold and that it ought to try to transmit through civic education to future generations.

Alas, references to influential and relevant schools of philosophy, such as the capabilities approach of Sen and Nussbaum, are entirely missing in the empirical literature on youth civic engagement. The problem, however, goes both ways. Recent academic philosophy in all of its schools has not benefited enough from reflecting on innovative youth programs, a method that Plato, Erasmus, Rousseau, Dewey, and others found generative in earlier times.

December 10, 2010 8:31 AM | category: advocating civic education , philosophy | Comments

Comments

Post a comment