Deliberative Democracy and Civic Education

Why Do We Educate? Renewing the Conversation

Volumn 1, Issue , 2009, Pages 112-124

  Løvlie, Lars ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OSLO   (Norway)

Author keywords

Civic education to decide on how and what to talk about; Constitutional liberal democratic government; Democratic civic education pursues democratic ideals in the making of curriculum; Democratic practice problem solving methods including discussion, negotiation, bargaining and voting; Intentional learning of complex skills reading, writing, adding and multiplying, and mastering the Internet; Moderate deliberation; Political discourse focuses on freedom and justice, love and friendship, tolerance and solidarity; Political injustice according to Habermas: "misunderstanding and incomprehension, from insincerity and deception"; Strong deliberation involves rights and norms

Indexed keywords

EID: 84889496768     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.1002/9781444307214.ch8     Document Type: Chapter

References (16)

1. I wish to thank Joseph Dunne and David Coulter for valuable comments on the text.
2. I will briefly mention a third component, namely democratic virtues, which I regard as interpersonal rather than purely personal.
3. "Deliberation," for example, is implicit in Kant's idea of "publicity" and explicit in Burke's idea of the parliament as a "deliberative assembly" and in Mill's idea of "government by discussion." 4. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1927), 67.
4. R. S. Peters, "Education as Initiation," in Philosophical Analysis and Education, ed. R. D. Archibald (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 107; also in R. S. Peters, Authority, Responsibility, and Education (London: Allen & Unwin, 1973). By this metaphor Peters deconstructs his own idea of a rational liberal education. Children do not, of course, start off as barbarians, and Peters' metaphor is thus rather uncivilized.
5. See Lotte Rahbek Schou, "Kan retfærdighed læres?" ("Can Justice Be Taught?)," in Pædagogikkens filosofi, ed. Anne-Marie Eggert Olsen (Roskilde: Roskilde Universitetsforlag, 2004), 148ff. For a very relevant discussion, see Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, with Jeremy Waldron, Bonnie Honig, and Will Kymlicka, ed. Robert Post (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
6. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 99.
7. See especially Jacques Derrida, Aporias (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993).
8. Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 35.
9. See Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, for fine-tuned analyses of this question.
10. Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 115.
11. I am grateful to Maria G. Amilburu for commending Lewis's book to me.
12. Boradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 41.
13. See John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 109ff.
14. Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 129.
15. I am thinking particularly of exploration and participation in virtual worlds, like Second Life. I have explored the creative force of the Internet in Lars Løvlie, "Technocultural education" (2006), http://www.seminar.net/volume-2-issue-1-2006/.
16. Jacques Derrida, Who's Afraid of Philosophy? Right to Philosophy 1. (Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press, 2002), 22.