Liberal Education and Democratic Citizenship

Liberal Education and Democratic Citizenship PDF Author: Michael H. McCarthy
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666948780
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
In Liberal Education and Democratic Citizenship, Michael H. McCarthy carefully describes the many crises confronting American democracy and identifies their philosophical, cultural, and institutional origins. He argues that a liberal education, properly understood, can address several of these crises effectively. The book’s successive chapters explore the sources, areas, and levels of division in contemporary America, and show how they have created important disagreements about the major challenges we presently face and the credible solutions they require. McCarthy articulates what a liberal education actually is and why it is vitally important for both our personal and civic lives. He also clarifies the critical contrast between effective freedom, the aim of a liberal education, and the concepts of freedom within economic and political liberalism. McCarthy addresses the distinctive educational challenges presented by modernity and post-modernity: their moral aspirations, acute historical consciousness, and passion for radical criticism, as well as the traditional (Tocqueville) and contemporary (William Galston and Charles Taylor) discontents of American democracy. A central part of the book’s unfolding argument is the enduring cultural contrast between the principles and aspirations of civic republicanism and the imperial assumptions of economics. This juxtaposition helps us to understand the power and limitations of the “stories we Americans live by” as well as the civic virtues we commonly need to create a free, just, and multi-racial America. These critical virtues, McCarthy argues, are the specific goal of a liberal and democratic education

Liberal Education and Democratic Citizenship

Liberal Education and Democratic Citizenship PDF Author: Michael H. McCarthy
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666948780
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 167

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Liberal Education and Democratic Citizenship, Michael H. McCarthy carefully describes the many crises confronting American democracy and identifies their philosophical, cultural, and institutional origins. He argues that a liberal education, properly understood, can address several of these crises effectively. The book’s successive chapters explore the sources, areas, and levels of division in contemporary America, and show how they have created important disagreements about the major challenges we presently face and the credible solutions they require. McCarthy articulates what a liberal education actually is and why it is vitally important for both our personal and civic lives. He also clarifies the critical contrast between effective freedom, the aim of a liberal education, and the concepts of freedom within economic and political liberalism. McCarthy addresses the distinctive educational challenges presented by modernity and post-modernity: their moral aspirations, acute historical consciousness, and passion for radical criticism, as well as the traditional (Tocqueville) and contemporary (William Galston and Charles Taylor) discontents of American democracy. A central part of the book’s unfolding argument is the enduring cultural contrast between the principles and aspirations of civic republicanism and the imperial assumptions of economics. This juxtaposition helps us to understand the power and limitations of the “stories we Americans live by” as well as the civic virtues we commonly need to create a free, just, and multi-racial America. These critical virtues, McCarthy argues, are the specific goal of a liberal and democratic education

Citizenship and Education in Liberal-Democratic Societies

Citizenship and Education in Liberal-Democratic Societies PDF Author: Kevin McDonough
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199253668
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
The essays in the volume address educational issues that arise when national, sub-national and supra-national identities compete. How can we determine the limits to parental educational rights when liberalism's concern to protect and promote children's autonomy conflicts with the desire to maintain communal integrity? Given the advances made by the forces of globalization, can the liberal-democratic state morally justify its traditional purpose of forging a cohesive nationalidentity? Or has increasing globalization rendered this educational aim obsolete and morally corrupt? Should liberal education instead seek to foster a sense of global citizenship, even if doing so would suppress patriotic identification?In addressing these and many other questions, the volume examines the theoretical and practical issues at stake between nationalists, multiculturalists and cosmopolitans in the field of education. The fifteen essays, plus an introductory essay by the editors, provide a genuine, productive dialogue between political and legal philosophers and educational theorists.

Liberal Democracy and Liberal Education

Liberal Democracy and Liberal Education PDF Author: Daniel E. Cullen
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498502474
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
The essays in this book reflect on the paradoxical relationship of liberal education and liberal democracy. Liberal education emphasizes knowledge for its own sake, detached from all instrumental purposes. It also aims at liberation from the manifold sources of unfreedom, including political sources. In this sense, liberal education is negative, questioning any and all constraints on the activity of mind. Liberal democracy, devoted to securing individual natural rights, purports to be the regime of liberty par excellence. Since both liberal education and liberal democracy aim to set individuals free, they would seem to be harmonious and mutually reinforcing. But there are reasons to doubt that liberal education can be the civic education liberal democracy needs. If liberal education is in tension with all instrumental purposes, how does it stand toward the goal of preparing the kind of citizens liberal democracy needs? The book’s contributors are critical of the way higher education typically interprets its responsibility for educating citizens, and they link those failures to academia’s neglect of certain founding principles of the American political tradition and of the traditional liberal arts ideal.

Liberal Education and Citizenship in a Free Society

Liberal Education and Citizenship in a Free Society PDF Author: Justin Buckley Dyer
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826274889
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 462

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Book Description
The liberal arts university has been in decline since well before the virtualization of campus life, increasingly inviting public skepticism about its viability as an institution of personal, civic, and professional growth. New technologies that might have brought people together have instead frustrated the university’s capacity to foster thoughtful citizenship among tomorrow’s leaders and exacerbated socioeconomic inequalities that are poisoning America’s civic culture. With Liberal Education and Citizenship in a Free Society, a collection of 19 original essays, editors Justin Dyer and Constantine Vassiliou present the work of a diverse group of scholars to assess the value of a liberal arts education in the face of market, technological, cultural, and political forces shaping higher learning today.

Creating Citizens

Creating Citizens PDF Author: Eamonn Callan
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191521981
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
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.

Not for Profit

Not for Profit PDF Author: Martha C. Nussbaum
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069117332X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
In this short and powerful book, celebrated philosopher Martha Nussbaum makes a passionate case for the importance of the liberal arts at all levels of education. Historically, the humanities have been central to education because they have been seen as essential for creating competent democratic citizens. But recently, Nussbaum argues, thinking about the aims of education has gone disturbingly awry in the United States and abroad. We increasingly treat education as though its primary goal were to teach students to be economically productive rather than to think critically and become knowledgeable, productive, and empathetic individuals. This shortsighted focus on profitable skills has eroded our ability to criticize authority, reduced our sympathy with the marginalized and different, and damaged our competence to deal with complex global problems. And the loss of these basic capacities jeopardizes the health of democracies and the hope of a decent world. In response to this dire situation, Nussbaum argues that we must resist efforts to reduce education to a tool of the gross national product. Rather, we must work to reconnect education to the humanities in order to give students the capacity to be true democratic citizens of their countries and the world. In a new preface, Nussbaum explores the current state of humanistic education globally and shows why the crisis of the humanities has far from abated. Translated into over twenty languages, Not for Profit draws on the stories of troubling—and hopeful—global educational developments. Nussbaum offers a manifesto that should be a rallying cry for anyone who cares about the deepest purposes of education.

Neo-Liberalism, Globalization and Human Capital Learning

Neo-Liberalism, Globalization and Human Capital Learning PDF Author: Emery J. Hyslop-Margison
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402034229
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
With a highly accessible and lucid text this book reviews the political shift toward neo-liberal ideology and explores its tremendous impact on education. It maps out in careful detail the theoretical foundations of democratic citizenship by asking the question: What does it mean to learn and live in a democracy and what responsibilities, capacities and knowledge does a citizen need to fulfill these requirements?

Reimagining Liberal Education

Reimagining Liberal Education PDF Author: Hanan Alexander
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441183442
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
This challenging and provocative book reimagines the justification, substance, process, and study of education in open, pluralistic, liberal democratic societies. Hanan Alexander argues that educators need to enable students to embark on a quest for intelligent spirituality, while paying heed to a pedagogy of difference. Through close analysis of the work of such thinkers as William James, Charles Taylor, Elliot Eisner, Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin, Martin Buber, Michael Apple and Terrence McLaughlin, Reimagining Liberal Education offers an account of school curriculum and moral and religious instruction that throws new light on the possibilities of a nuanced, rounded education for citizenship. Divided into three parts – Transcendental Pragmatism in Educational Research, Pedagogy of Difference and the Other Face of Liberalism, and Intelligent Spirituality in the Curriculum, this is a thrilling work of philosophy that builds upon the author's award-winning text Reclaiming Goodness: Education and the Spiritual Quest.

Civic Education and Liberal Democracy

Civic Education and Liberal Democracy PDF Author: Peter Strandbrink
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331955798X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
This book explores the inherent tension in civic education. There is a surging belief in contemporary European society that liberal democracy should work harder to reproduce the civic and normative setups of national populations through public education. The cardinal notion is that education remains the best means to accomplish this end, and educational regimes appropriate tools to make the young more tolerant, civic, democratic, communal, cosmopolitan, and prone to engaged activism. This book is concerned with the ambiguities that strain standard visions of civic education and educational statehood. On the one hand, civic-normative education is expected to drive tolerance in the face of conflicting good-life affirmations and accelerating worldview pluralisation; on the other hand, nation-states are primarily interested in reproducing the normative prerogatives that prevail in restricted cultural environments. This means that civic education unfolds on two irreconcilable planes at once: one cosmopolitan/tolerant, another parochial/intolerant. The book will be of significant interest to students and scholars of education, sociology, normative statehood, democracy, and liberal political culture, particularly those working in the areas of civic education; as well as education policy-makers.

Education, Autonomy and Democratic Citizenship

Education, Autonomy and Democratic Citizenship PDF Author: David Bridges
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134741960
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Across the globe educators are being required to respond to a changing political environment. New nations emerge out of the collapse of old empires; new democracies struggle out of old structures of oppression. Driven on by the fierce competitiveness of the ‘tiger economies’ of the east, old social welfare[1]based democracies are transformed into new market led enterprise societies. The essays in this international collection are a response from twenty-two educators to these changes and to the reassessment that they provoke of some of the fundamental principles which shape educational thought and practice. They focus in particular on four key clusters of issues to do with the role of education in cultivating: • national identity Authors from political settings as culturally distant as Lithuania and Taiwan consider what role, if any, nationalistic education might play in the context of a democratic liberal education. • market principles Contributors offer different perspectives on the internationally pervasive application of the principles of the market economy to education and the consequent ‘commodification’ of learning. • personal autonomy Different dimensions of the contested notion of autonomy are examined along with the related discourses of ‘edification’ and ‘empowerment’. • democratic citizenship From post-Soviet Russia to the new South Africa, in schools and in the context of professional training, educators examine what education for democratic citizenship might mean in practice and tease out some of the conflicts of principle which are raised in its implementation. The contributors are distinguished scholars drawn from every continent. They write consciously for an international readership and there is constant cross reference to developments in different parts of the world. All are practitioners in education sharing an interest in the philosophical issues underlying social change. The philosophical discussion is clearly rooted in and referred back to the world of educational practice and its political context.