Moral Education and the “Tie that Binds” in Liberal Political Theory

1991 ◽  
Vol 85 (3) ◽  
pp. 875-901 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. Paris
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Moral Education ◽  
Core Values ◽  
Shared Values ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Intellectual Virtues ◽  
The Public ◽  
Implicit And Explicit ◽  
Liberal Political Theory

I examine the search for a “tie that binds, “ or “core” values, in liberal political theory, specifically Rawls's recent arguments, and in proposals concerning moral education in the public schools. Both Rawls and the proponents of moral education appeal to consensus or shared values, but the search for core values in both theory and practice is only partly successful. Specifically, this search is misguided insofar as it does not reflect how values are embedded in specific institutions and practices. The various forms of moral education in the public schools, both implicit and explicit, illustrate a consensus about a range of moral and intellectual virtues that is broader and more complex than arguments for core values allow. Comparing arguments concerning core values in political theory and moral education suggests how liberal political theory might deal with questions of consensus, justification, and the task of political theory generally.

Desperately Seeking Democracy: Unreflexive Liberalism and the ‘Privacy Bias’ in Journalism Ethics

2005 ◽  
Vol 114 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Wilkinson
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Liberal Theory ◽  
Right To Know ◽  
Privacy Rights ◽  
Public Accountability ◽  
Journalism Ethics ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
Weak Notion ◽  
Liberal Political Theory

Because journalism ethics draw deeply, and perhaps unreflexively, on liberal political traditions, there is a lot of confusion about what public accountability entails. When interpreted from the standpoint of liberal theory, the perception of the need for public accountability is generally framed by a simplistic opposition between the public's right to know and the individual's right to privacy. Central to the liberal framing of the accountability is a weak notion of ‘publicity’ anchored in notions of representation and revelation. Furthermore, there is also a strong tradition within liberal theory to treat ethics as a matter of private concern, rather than something that can be publicly resolved. For these reasons, the balance of democratic consideration always seems to sit more comfortably with privacy rights than it does with considerations of accountability to the public. This paper explores some of these dilemmas surrounding journalism ethics and public accountability by examining their theoretical underpinnings in liberal political theory and comparing them with a model of public accountability grounded in publicity construed as public participation.

Global Citizenship

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
April R. Biccum
Keyword(s):  
Educational Reform ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Global Education ◽  
Global Citizenship ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Financial Flows ◽  
The Public ◽  
Global Democracy ◽  
Wide Range

The concept of “Global Citizenship” is enjoying increased currency in the public and academic domains. Conventionally associated with cosmopolitan political theory, it has moved into the public domain, marshaled by elite actors, international institutions, policy makers, nongovernmental organizations, and ordinary people. At the same time, scholarship on Global Citizenship has increased in volume in several domains (International Law, Political Theory, Citizenship Studies, Education, and Global Business), with the most substantial growth areas in Education and Political Science, specifically in International Relations and Political Theory. The public use of the concept is significant in light of what many scholars regard as a breakdown and reconfiguration of national citizenship in both theory and practice. The rise in its use is indicative of a more general change in the discourse on citizenship. It has become commonplace to offer globalization as a cause for these changes, citing increases in regular and irregular migration, economic and political dispossession owing to insertion in the global economy, the ceding of sovereignty to global governance, the pressure on policy caused by financial flows, and cross-border information-sharing and political mobilization made possible by information communications technologies (ICTs), insecurities caused by environmental degradation, political fragmentation, and inequality as key drivers of change. Global Citizenship is thus one among a string of adjectives attempting to characterize and conceptualize a transformative connection between globalization, political subjectivity, and affiliation. It is endorsed by elite global actors and the subject of an educational reform movement. Some scholarship observes empirical evidence of Global Citizenship, understood as active, socially and globally responsible political participation which contributes to global democracy, within global institutions, elites, and the marginalized themselves. Arguments for or against a cosmopolitan sensibility in political theory have been superseded by both the technological capability to make global personal legal recognition a possibility, and by the widespread endorsement of Global Citizenship among the Global Education Policy regime. In educational scholarship Global Citizenship is regarded as a form of contemporary political being that needs to be socially engineered to facilitate the spread of global democracy or the emergence of new political arrangements. Its increasing currency among a diverse range of actors has prompted a variety of attempts either to codify or to study the variety of usages in situ. As such the use of Global Citizenship speaks to a central methodological problem in the social sciences: how to fix key conceptual variables when the same concepts are a key aspect of the behavior of the actors being studied? As a concept, Global Citizenship is also intimately associated with other concepts and theoretical traditions, and is among the variety of terms used in recent years to try to reconceptualize changes it the international system. Theoretically it has complex connections to cosmopolitanism, liberalism, and republicanism; empirically it is the object of descriptive and normative scholarship. In the latter domain, two central cleavages repeat: the first is between those who see Global Citizenship as the redress for global injustices and the extension of global democracy, and those who see it as irredeemably capitalist and imperial; the second is between those who see evidence for Global Citizenship in the actions and behavior of a wide range of actors, and those who seek to socially engineer Global Citizenship through educational reform.

scholarly journals Political theology and religious pluralism: Rethinking liberalism in times of post-secular emancipation

2020 ◽  
pp. 136843102096867
Author(s):  
Saul Newman
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
The Public ◽  
To Come ◽  
Liberal Political Theory

Recent debates in liberal political theory have sought to come to terms with the post-secular condition, characterised by deep religious pluralism, the resurgence of right-wing populism, as well as new social movements for economic, ecological and racial justice. These forces represent competing claims on the public space and create challenges for the liberal model of state neutrality. To better grasp this problem, I argue for a more comprehensive engagement between liberalism and political theology, by which I understand a mode of theorising that reveals the theological basis of modern secular political concepts. In considering two contrasting approaches to political or public theology – Carl Schmitt’s and Jürgen Moltmann’s – I argue that liberal political theory can and should open itself to a diversity of social movements and ecological struggles that pluralise the political space in ways that unsettle the boundary between the secular and religious.

Public School/Catholic School: 1914–World War II

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James W. Sanders
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Catholic School ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Parochial Schools ◽  
The Public ◽  
Boston Public Schools ◽  
School Committee ◽  
Irish Catholics ◽  
Boston School

Even though Cardinal O’Connell believed that Catholic schooling was the only adequate answer to the education of Catholic youth, he did not come close to fully implementing this conviction. Events in Boston largely took schooling out of O’Connell’s hands. By the 1910s, Irish Catholics had taken over the Boston public schools. Simultaneously, Irish politicians took over the city and a majority of Irish Catholics now controlled the Boston School Committee, appointing an Irish Catholic educator as the city’s school superintendent. By at least the 1920s, the public and parochial schools had taken giant steps toward one another in theory and practice under the leadership of the Catholics who presided over both systems. Though Cardinal O’Connell and his circle continued to preach the need for Catholic children to attend parochial schools, parents, most of whom had attended public schools themselves, knew that the public schools would not undermine their children’s faith.

Principled Toleration and Respectful Indifference in the Liberal Polity

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Phillip Cole ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
The Public ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
Or Practice ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Liberal Individualism ◽  
Liberal Political Theory

This paper examines toleration at two levels. At the first level, liberal individualism is concerned that the individual must be as free as possible to pursue their own goals and lifestyles. At the second level, liberal political theory is concerned with the value of liberal political culture and institutions and how to maintain and protect them. I argue that we can learn a great deal about the exercise of toleration and respect at the level of the liberal polity by examining them at the level of the liberal individual. Both tolerance and intolerance at the level of the polity must be principled. Principled tolerance and intolerance have the following features. First, the judgment whether to tolerate a particular belief or practice must be based on the value of toleration itself, not pragmatic political requirements. Second, it should be an issue of setting aside moral principles and convictions rather than dislikes, prejudices or fears. Third, it should respect the distinction between the public and the private, and should only recognise an issue as one of toleration if there is a public impact at stake.

Irish vs. Yankees

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James W. Sanders
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Public School ◽  
School System ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Parochial Schools ◽  
Parochial School ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Moral Exemplars ◽  
The Public ◽  
Irish Catholics

As a social historian, James W. Sanders takes a new look at a critical period in the development of Boston schools. Focusing on the burgeoning Irish Catholic population and framing the discussion around Catholic hierarchy, Sanders considers the interplay of social forces in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that led to Irish Catholics’ emerging with political control of the city and its public schools. The latter reduced the need for parochial schools; by at least the 1920s, the public and parochial schools had taken giant steps toward one another in theory and practice under the leadership of the Catholics who presided over both systems. The public schools taught the same morality as the Catholic ones, and, in the generous use of Catholic saints and heroes as moral exemplars, they came dangerously close to breaching the wall of separation between religion and the public school. As a result, despite the large Irish Catholic population, Boston’s parochial school system looked very different from parochial schools in other American cities, and did not match them in size or influence. The book begins in 1822 when Boston officially became a city and ends with the Irish Catholic takeover of the Boston public school system before the Second World War.

A Pedagogical Testament

2019 ◽  
pp. 124-141
Author(s):  
Anilkumar Belvadi
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Moral Education ◽  
Sunday School ◽  
Training Methods ◽  
American Missionaries ◽  
The Public ◽  
Professional Educators ◽  
American Experience ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Trained Teachers

Chapter 5 describes the efforts of American missionaries in putting together a philosophy of education for the new institution they intended to create in India. Since their views, materials, and organizational model were borrowed from the American experience, the chapter first reviews the functioning of the Sunday school in America. Between 1827 and 1838, beginning in Massachusetts, public schools came to be secularized. With the teaching of the Bible effectively proscribed in public schools, the American Sunday School Union, organized in 1824 and supported by several Protestant denominations, found that by 1838, it was obliged to work outside of the public-school system. As an institution dedicated to Christian and moral education, and, around the time of the Civil War as a public counseling center, it enjoyed broad support. By 1872, American Sunday school leaders had created a bureaucratized organization patterned after the very secular forces they had fought, as well as an elaborate seven-year curriculum, the Uniform International Lesson System. American missionaries imported these into India. They soon found, however, that their system could not be implemented in toto in the Indian context given the “heathen” home backgrounds of Indian children and the absence of suitably trained teachers. The chapter discusses missionary thinking on reaching out to the youngest children, using the latest “universal,” “scientific,” child-education and teacher-training methods, and locating all that was “modern” in the Bible itself. Creating a “philosophy of childhood,” and an institution with “form and system,” Sunday school missionaries transformed themselves into professional educators.

Moral Education in the Public Schools

1910 ◽  
Vol 72 (13) ◽  
pp. 339-340
Author(s):  
George H. Martin
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Moral Education ◽  
The Public
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