Action as an educationalvirtue: toward a different understanding of democratic citizenship education

Educational Theory

Volumn 55, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 323-342

  Waghid, Yusef ^a  

^a STELLENBOSCH UNIVERSITY   (South Africa)

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EID: 50249102379     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (56)

1. For more on citizenship education in the United States, see Morris Janowitz, The Reconstruction of Patriotism: Education for Civic Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983);
2. in Europe, see William K. Cummings, Saravanan Gopinathan, and Yasumasa Tomoda, eds., The Revival of Values: Education in Asia and the West (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1988);
3. in Taiwan, see Bao-Jane Yuan and Jianping Shen, "Moral Values Held by Early Adolescents in Taiwan and Mainland China," Journal of Moral Education 27, no. 2 (1998): 191-206;
4. in Malaysia, see Cummings, Gopinathan, and Tomoda, The Revival of Values in Asia and the West, 152-157;
5. and in Africa, see Ewald Katjivina, "Epilogue: Education and Self-Respect," Prospects 29, no. 2 (1999): 259-264.
6. Matthew C. Altman, "What's the Use of Philosophy? Democratic Citizenship and the Direction of Higher Education," Educational Theory 54, no. 2 (2004): 143.
7. Penny Enslin, Shirley Pendlebury, and Mary Tjiattas, "Deliberative Democracy, Diversity and the Challenges of Citizenship Education," Journal of Philosophy of Education 35, no. 1 (2001): 116.
8. T.H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (London: Pluto, 1992), 18.
9. Gerard Delanty, Citizenship in a Global Age: Society, Culture and Politics (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2002).
10. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).
11. Delanty, Citizenship in a Global Age, 30.
12. Ibid., 34, 35.
13. Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction, 2d ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 285.
14. Delanty, Citizenship in a Global Age, 30.
15. For instance, there is a strong minority view in South Africa that the new outcomes-based education (OBE) system in schools undermines creativity and imagination. But the Ministry of Education has given scant attention to this view, despite significant empirical evidence from previously disadvantaged schools that OBE is simply not achieving its desired intentions
16. Jü rgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rheg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 299.
17. Ibid., 147.
18. Jü rgen Habermas, "Three Normative Models of Democracy," in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996), 21-30.
19. Ibid., 29.
20. Ibid., 24.
21. Iris Marion Young, "Politics and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship," Ethics 99, no. 2 (1989): 257-258.
22. Ibid., 258.
23. For example, in most South African university classrooms, where the language of communication is not the mother tongue of the majority of students, imposing standards of eloquence and rational articulation would seem to impede students' aspirations to make their arguments more persuasive.
24. Iris Marion Young, "Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy," in Democracy and Difference, ed. Benhabib
25. Ibid., 132.
26. Meira Levinson, "Challenging Deliberation," Theory and Research in Education 1, no. 1 (2003): 27.
27. I have encountered several Black master's students from countries such as Namibia, Lesotho, and Zimbabwe who are hesitant to challenge the views of professors.
28. Levinson, "Challenging Deliberation," 28.
29. Ibid., 36.
30. Of course, learning a language of power is not without its dilemmas. In South Africa, certainly, acquiring a language of power (in this case, English) could further widen the gap between Black students (the majority population group) and White, Colored, and Indian students, most of whom have not mastered a Black indigenous language. One would not necessarily consider an African language a "language of power," but there are compelling reasons to acquire such a language in a postapartheid society, where the likelihood of achieving reconciliation and social justice could be enhanced through mastering the indigenous languages of the previously racially oppressed and marginalized. Certainly, the reconciliation process would be furthered if we made a higher priority of improving our communication with fellow South Africans (the majority of whom are Black). For this reason, learning a "language of power" should not occur at the expense of people having to acquire some understanding of the indigenous African cultures and ethnicities of the country's majority population. The point of acquiring a language of power should be to enable (African) students to communicate their stories to others, who might otherwise not be familiar with indigenous cultures. A number of African students in my master's seminars have noted that their lack of English-language skills hampers their articulation of a variety of religious, genealogical, mythical, and proverbial arguments and claims. In this way, not knowing a language of power would in many ways undermine what stories (sometimes through folklore and ritualistic practices) they (African students) have to tell. In other words, not knowing a language of power would mean that the speakers could do little to ensure that their stories are told. In addition, the process of globalization has placed considerable demands on people - certainly all South Africans, including the previously disadvantaged majority - to cope with the stark realities of having partial information and misinformation disseminated through what Levinson refers to as "technologies of power" (the Internet, the nightly news, lobbyists, and organs of state power). The ideas disseminated through these technologies pose a challengeto our disadvantaged majority that I contend can be addressed by means of their learning a "language of power." See Levinson, "Challenging Deliberation," 28.
31. Klas Roth, "Freedom of Choice, Community and Deliberation," Journal of Philosophy of Education 37, no. 3 (2003): 407-409.
32. Jo Anne Pagano, "The Problems of Teacher-Student Relationships in Troubled Times," in Teaching and Its Predicaments, eds. Nicholas C. Burbules and David T. Hansen (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997), 1.
33. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2d ed. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 7, 171. This work will be cited as HC in the text for all subsequent references
34. As a university student, I was a victim of racial trauma, and, during the time of apartheid, I could not share this experience with my professors because of mistrust and suspicion. At the institution where I work, Black students still feel constrained about raising their voices regarding injustices of past apartheid in their classes out of fear that they might be discriminated against or marginalized for speaking out
35. Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 299. This work will be cited as UT in the text for all subsequent references
36. My argument in defense of imaginative action has some bearing on promoting civic reconciliation in South African public spaces, including universities and schools. In 1995 the Truth and Reconciliation Committee was formed in order to promote a "culture of human rights" and to construct a new national identity, highlighting the need for South Africans adversely affected by apartheid injustices to move "beyond justice" (in Archbishop Desmond Tutu's words) to forgiveness and reconciliation. See Richard A. Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation: Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 9-11. The notion of civic reconciliation as I use it here refers to a "healing of the wounds." Apartheid atrocities severely wounded those in the Black majority, and reconciliation is needed to heal those wounds. In the political context, civic reconciliation is a shared and painful ethical voyage from wrong to right and also a symbolic settling of moral and political (and, I would add, educational) indebtedness. As Kader Asmal, Louise Asmal, and R.S. Roberts note, it is "a conscious and justified settling of accounts with the past."
37. See Kader Asmal, Louise Asmal, and Ronald S. Roberts, Reconciliation through Truth: A Reckoning of Apartheid's Criminal Governance (Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Philip Publishers, 1996), 47.
38. Asmal, Asmal, and Roberts, Reconciliation through Truth, 426
39. Ibid., 428.
40. Ibid., 430.
41. According to figures supplied by South Africa's Department of Education, 4.3 percent of young adults and 17 percent of youth are illiterate (45 percent of adults are functionally illiterate);
42. 4,407 schools are in "poor" or "very poor" condition; close to half of the nation's schools have a shortage of classrooms (almost 65,000 additional classrooms are needed);
43. 2.3 million students attend schools with no water within walking distance; 6.6 million students attend schools without toilets; and only approximately 10 percent of primary schools and around one-third of secondary schools have recreational facilities. Moreover, the South African Statistics Income and Expenditure Survey from 1995 showed that the poverty rate for Africans was slightly above 60 percent compared to 1 percent for Whites;
44. 60 percent of female-headed households fell under the poverty line compared to around 30 percent of male-headed households;
45. and the poverty rate in rural areas was roughly 70 percent compared to almost 30 percent in urban areas. For more on this, see Helle Christiansen Cawthra, Andrea Helman-Smith, and Dudley Moloi, "Political Developments in South Africa in 1999 and 2000," Development Update: Quarterly Journal of the South African National NGO Coalition and INTERFUND 3, no. 3 (2001): 80.
46. Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts and Social Change (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995), 16, 19.
47. Ibid., 186.
48. Ibid., 186-187.
49. In Cape Town's Hout Bay district, students at a previously advantaged White school actually considered erecting classrooms on their vacant sports field to accommodate other students who had been subjected to overcrowded classrooms in a neighboring disadvantaged Colored school. Although not without its conflicts and tensions, this decision (if implemented) would go some way toward promoting civic reconciliation among Hout Bay Whites and Coloreds who had previously been segregated by apartheid laws]
50. Maxine Greene, "Teaching for Openings: Pedagogy as Dialectic," Pedagogy in the Age of Politics, eds. Patricia A. Sullivan and Donna J. Qualley (Urbana, Illinois: NCTE, 1994), 25.
51. I shall limit this discussion to my role as a university teacher of, in this case, preservice teachers in their final year of university training to receive certification as teachers.
52. Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Modern Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (London: Duckworth, 1990), 231-232.
53. One of my White colleagues once mentioned in conversation that his Afrikaner parents did not encourage questions about or criticisms of the apartheid education legislation. He noted that, if he had known the "damage" a racist, segregationist education system had brought about, he would not have voted for White minority rule. The point I am making is that caring, when it takes the forms of questioning, challenging institutions as well as points of view, and subjecting one's views to critical scrutiny by others, fosters imaginative actions that could expedite civic reconciliation
54. Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), 14.
55. Ibid., 91.
56. For example, I remember one case in which a White undergraduate student became agitated in class about a Black student's presentation regarding the racial prejudice her elder sister experienced while studying at a White Afrikaans-speaking university. In telling this story, the Black student seemed to be deliberately attempting to provoke her classmates, without recognizing that the White students in her current class were not responsible for the discrimination her sister had experienced. Such interactions preclude the possibility of imagining a different future and work against civic reconciliation