Addressing Educational Accountability and Political Legitimacy with Citizen Responsibility

In this essay, Sarah Stitzlein addresses a key current crisis in public education: accountability. Rather than centrally being about poor performance of teachers or inefficiency of schools, as we most often hear in media outlets and in education reform speeches, Stitzlein argues the crisis is at heart one about citizen responsibility and political legitimacy. She claims that the recent accountability movement has shifted the onus of curing society's problems almost exclusively onto schools, but contends that these burdens should not just be unidirectional. There is, Stitzlein maintains, a corresponding obligation on the part of citizens to public schools. This includes all citizens, not just those closely tied to schools through their children or employment. Moreover, this obligation entails a robust commitment that extends beyond merely supporting public schools through taxes, voting for levies, and choosing to send one's children to them. The responsibility of citizens includes upholding a commitment to schools as a central institution of democracy — something that sustains democracy but also, in its best forms, is democracy in action.     

The Educator's Dual Role: Expressing Ideals While Educating in Nonideal Conditions

In this essay, Jennifer Morton discusses educators as central examples of agents who engage in ideal and nonideal ways of thinking. The educator, as a representative of the political community, is tasked with two aims. The first is nurturing students with the skills and knowledge they need for the world as they will find it. In pursuing this goal, the educator is assuming certain social facts, some of them unjust, that constitute the present nonideal world. The second aim is civic — educating future citizens. Insofar as the educator is involved in pursuing this goal, his or her role is to work at making certain future social facts true, in the hope of making the future slightly more ideal. Morton argues that if we think of these two aims instrumentally, they can come into conflict. She does not suggest a resolution to this conflict, but rather develops an alternative expressive account of the civic role of the educator. Ideal thinking by educators, Morton maintains, should be thought of as constituting an expression of respect toward their fellow citizens here and now. Ultimately, she argues that this expressive component of the educator's job is crucial to the educator's role in the political community.     

The Democratic Potential of Parental Dissent: Keeping Public Schools Public,Legitimate, and Educational

In this essay, Sarah Stitzlein describes the democratic potential of parents choosing to opt out of school testing, explaining how they ought to engage in political dissent to best fulfill their responsibilities as citizens and to practice democracy on behalf of children and schools. Parents' decisions to opt out are often based on rights claims about their oversight as parents; moral claims regarding the potential undue pressure testing places on children and the misuse of students' scores; political and economic concerns with the role of corporations in testing; and educational claims about the validity of scores, the narrowing of curriculum, and the deprofessionalization of teachers who feel they must teach to the test. By building publics around these rationales and shared concerns, parents may increase the political legitimacy of public schools and create public schools that are more deeply public; in some cases, they may also provide an educational model of democratic life for budding citizens in schools to observe and learn from.     

Critical liberal education: an undergraduate pedagogy for teacher candidates in socially diverse university settings

This article addresses the lack of attention universities have given to adjusting liberal education, the undergraduate major for teachers in California, to the increase of multi‐ethnic, multi‐racial, and social class heterogeneity in state universities. This article argues for a revised pedagogy for undergraduate liberal arts education for teacher candidates in California called critical liberal education. This pedagogy emphasizes the interdisciplinary knowledge and inquiry skills of a traditional program in conjunction with intercultural competence, civic engagement and an ethical stance toward social justice. This pedagogy brings liberal arts education in line with living in our complex multicultural democracy to create analytic, engaged teacher‐citizens for the twenty‐first century.     

Between Mere Tolerance and Robust Respect: Mutuality as a Basis for Civic Education in Pluralist Democracies

This essay by Suzanne Rosenblith and Benjamin Bindewald is motivated by the question of how do those who value civic liberalism give the religiously orthodox a reason to engage in pluralist democratic deliberations in a manner that does not allow intolerance to undermine the foundations of liberal democracy. Introducing the idea of tolerance as mutuality — that is, a will to relationship — the authors argue, strikes a balance between those theories that are too demanding of the religiously orthodox and those that are not exacting enough. Applying the principle of tolerance as mutuality to the special space of public schools allows for a new way to conceptualize civic education in pluralist democracies.     

THE RIGHT TO DISSENT AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR SCHOOLING

In this article Sarah Stitzlein highlights an educational right that has been largely unacknowledged in the past but has recently gained significance given renewed citizen participation in displays of public outcry on our streets and in our town halls. Dissent is typically conceived of as a negative right—a liberty that guarantees that the government will not interfere with one's public self‐expression. Stitzlein argues that, insofar as the legitimacy of the state depends on obtaining the consent of the governed, the state must allow the lively proliferation of dissent. Attending to this negative rights perspective, Stitzlein explores the educational implications of reframing the right to dissent as a positive right. This includes discussing the state's obligation to cultivate the skills of dissent in its young citizens and, correspondingly, student entitlement to this training. These educational implications, especially for civics education, are far more substantial than the thinner implications of the negative right to dissent.     

我们为什么需要教育民主

本文从三个方面分析了民主与教育的关系，论述了教育民主的内涵以及价值。提出民主作为生活方式的意义在于促进人类生活关系的和谐和人格的优秀发展，是社会形成和谐的共同体和个人积极参与共同体的方式。民主对扩大社会和个人的福祉都是有价值的。从民主的智力条件和心理条件来看，教育是民主的重要条件，这是因为教育培养公民的理性、德性、个性以及民主所需要的态度和行为方式。教育的民主化是教育实现其价值的重要方式之一。教育民主涉及教育价值的实践方式，也涉及培养什么人的问题，教育民主是教育健康、有序、和谐的生活方式。教育民主意味着要为儿童提供更多的社会支持，通过提供选择的自由、理智的开放和实际的参与机会来形成学生的公共道德、理性精神、社会态度和社会责任感，形成社会实践技能。     

熊子容公民教育思想探析

我国近代教育学家熊子容,对公民教育有着独到的思考与认知:公民教育的意义不仅是培养具有良好品质的个人,更是培养良好的公民以促进社会的发展;公民教育在原则上应注重"社会心理"、"道德训练"、"社会估值"、"社会团体"、"公民性质评价"、"民主主义"六大问题;公民教育实施方法包含有公民课程形式、公民课程设计、公民教学方法;民国时期的公民教育是以三民主义为指导,充实人民生活,谋求社会生存,发展人民生计,延续民族生命,以期实现民族独立、民权普遍、民生发展,促进世界大同。熊子容公民教育思想对现代思想政治教育仍具重要的启示和借鉴意义。     

Civic education in Lesotho: implications for teaching of democratic citizenship

This paper investigates the extent to which civic education is achieving its goals of teaching democracy and producing responsible democratic citizenship in Lesotho. This is done by analysing the conceptions of civic education, democracy, public participation, human rights, freedoms and responsibilities that appear in Lesotho’s documents that are used to teach people about democracy through formal, non-formal and informal education. I therefore argue that in the current Lesotho’s political history, these conceptions do not provide enough conditions for the cultivation of active democratic citizenship. Instead the materials dwell too much on teaching citizens about the systems and structures of government, preoccupied with inconsistent definitions and characteristics of democracy and with informing citizens of the importance of knowing how to vote and abide by the laws of the country; without showing how democracy should operate in a democratic country. The findings reveal that civic education for adults in Lesotho is offered informally, through the civil society organisations and politicians that are largely based in urban parts of Lesotho. This suggest that civic education should be tailored for the rural and urban citizens in a context of democratic transition in a country that still embraces strong traditional ties to communitarian living.     

Religion, Politics and Civic Education

The proper role and influence of religion in the public sphere continues to be contested and has important implications for civic education in a liberal democracy. Paul Weithman and Michael Perry argue that religion makes valuable contributions to civic participation and that religiously grounded beliefs should be fully welcome in political decision-making. In response, this paper strives for a middle ground of preparing citizens to engage thoughtfully with a wide range of moral perspectives, religious and otherwise, while promoting a civic virtue that still honours a commitment to public reason.     

Transformation of students into active and participatory citizens: an exploratory study in Hong Kong

Based on the data collected from focus groups and individual interviews with secondary school students and civic education teachers, this article explores how young people are transformed to become active and participatory citizens. The findings show that the roles and personal beliefs of civic education teachers are of critical significance at the very first stage whereas their teaching methods help enable students to construct the notion of active and participatory citizenship at the second stage. Eventually students gradually develop a strong sense of civic responsibility and competence through social inquiry and political action in the transformation process.     

“A Liberation of Powers”: Agency and Education for Democracy

In this essay Harry Boyte and Margaret Finders argue that addressing the “shrinkage” of education and democracy requires acting politically to reclaim and augment Deweyan agency‐focused concepts of democracy and education. Looking at agency from the vantage of civic studies, which advances a politics of agency — a citizen politics that is different from ideological politics — and citizens as cocreators of political communities, Boyte and Finders explore the technocratic trends that have eclipsed agency. These disempower educators, students, and communities. Using the case study of the youth empowerment initiative Public Achievement and its translation into the Special Education Program and partnerships of Augsburg College, the authors conclude with an examination of how agentic practices have survived in “shadow spaces” in schools, how such spaces might be turned into “free spaces” for democratic change, and how teacher education needs to prepare “citizen teachers” as well as promoting pedagogies of empowerment. These suggest grounds for a movement of hope and democratic change.     

论民主教育的目的与原则——自由主义政治哲学的视角

自治与权利平等是民主的基本属性。作为政治制度的民主,赋予公民平等的权利,信任公民的自治能力。民主的属性决定了民主教育不仅仅是一种公民教育,其根本目的是促使人成为自由、平等的人。民主的属性与价值追求决定了民主教育需要遵循自由原则、平等原则和教育与生活相统一原则。     

经济生活中诚信的缺失与重建

中国,作为一个明古国,在今天的社会经济生活中却遇到了所谓“诚信危机”的窘境。本力图分析产生这种尴尬现象的原因．以及重建诚信对于我们建立社会主义市场经济和加入WT0、融入世界经济的重要意义,并进而探究如何重建诚信社会的问题。     

Children's Reasoning as Collective Social Action through Problem Solving in Grade 2/3 Science Classrooms

Research on young children's reasoning show the complex relationships of knowledge, theories, and evidence in their decision-making and problem solving. Most of the research on children's reasoning skills has been done in individualized and formal research settings, not collective classroom environments where children often engage in learning and reasoning together to solve classroom problems. This study posits children's reasoning as a collective social activity that can occur in science classrooms. The study examined how children process their reasoning within the context of Grade 2/3 science classrooms and how the process of collectivity emerges from classroom interactions and dialogue between children as they attempt to solve their classroom problems. The study findings suggest that children's reasoning involves active evaluation of theories and evidence through collective problem solving, with consensus being developed through dialogical reasoning.     

Civic and Citizenship Education in Israel

As distinguished from the formal, political science-oriented citizenship curriculum studied exclusively in secondary schools, civic education-learning develops throughout the young-mature citizen's life in Israel. The analysis of the role and learning of two primary civic myths--'Israel is a Jewish and a democratic state' and 'Israelis are Jews'--demonstrates how this learning takes place through 'formations' of hegemony such as the family, the media, civic militarism as well as through schools' statist and social curricula. Successes of civic education enable the civic myths to be vibrant, gestalt worlds of meaning for Jewish Israelis, and sites of resistance for ultra-orthodox Jewish as well as Palestinian citizens of Israel. On the other hand, as an ethnocracy, democracy in civic Israel is not a meaningful world of value but rather a means to manage political processes. Therefore, the Israel case study is insightful for understanding the limitations of civic and citizenship education that seeks to advance democratic-oriented values such as human rights, liberty, justice, tolerance, civility, coexistence, pluralism and an alternative concept of Israel as a civil society.     

Changing roles and identities in the construction of a community of mathematical inquiry

In the current shifts in mathematics classrooms, teachers are challenged to use effective pedagogy to develop inquiry communities in which all participants are offered opportunities to engage in the reasoning discourse of proficient mathematical practices. The challenge for teachers is to know how to implement these pedagogical changes. This article outlines how a teacher and researcher worked together in a collaborative partnership using a purposely designed communication and participation framework as a tool to scaffold development of collective reasoning in the inquiry community. The findings illustrate the interconnections between the teacher’s beliefs, past experiences, and current, and future expectations for her diverse students. Explanations are provided of how different, often conflicting, voices emerged including one that drew on the teacher’s cultural knowledge. This provided many learning opportunities for the researcher as the teacher developed her students’ voices in culturally appropriate ways.     

论当代大学生的公民意识教育

党的十七大报告明确指出：＂加强公民意识教育,树立社会主义民主法治、自由平等、公平正义理念。＂这里的公民意识是一种现代社会意识,是公民对自己在国家中的社会地位、社会权利和社会责任的一种自觉认识。没有具有现代意识的高素质的公民,中国的现代化就很难实现。大学生做为未来社会发展的中坚力量,是祖国的栋梁之材,他们将站在中国与世界交流的最前列,所以当代中国大学生的公民意识决定了祖国的未来。     

关于培育社会主义公民文化的几点思考

党的十七大再次强调要扩大社会主义民主,更好地保障人民权益和社会公平正义。怎样建设社会主义的政治文明？怎样使公民政治参与有序扩大？成为摆在社会科学工作者面前的重要课题。本文仅从我国传统政治文化对当代公民政治生活的影响;公民文化的内涵和我国社会主义公民文化的特点;我国公民文化培育三个方面对此问题进行探讨。     

Book Review

This article offers an interconnected, grounded understanding of how two Gandhian endeavours in the city of Ahmedabad in Gujarat, India, make us rethink the notion of "education" in terms of civic and communal engagement. Drawing on local, vernacular ways of living, learning, being, reasoning, and believing—in this case Gujarati—I show how these endeavours engage in civically minded projects in the wake of two devastating events in the city, namely a massive earthquake in 2001 and horrendous Hindu-Muslim riots in 2002. The exploration is intended to not only move us all toward rethinking traditional notions of "education," but toward offering insights into how critical practice functions in non-Western contexts.