Habermas's educational importance is usually misconstrued or underestimated, partly because the scope and implications of ideal speech conditions are generally misunderstood. These conditions are only relevant to discursive speech situations, but non-manipulative teaching need not be discursive. And not even discursive teaching is an appropriate occasion for ideal speech conditions. They properly apply to discourse institutions, at the ‘epistemic centre of modernity’. Thus, the concept of ideal speech conditions impinges on the relation of school to higher education and on curricular (...) change as an agency of modernisation, and illuminates the need for access to discourse institutions, if personal autonomy is an aim for school children, students or adults. Neo-Marxists, traditionalists and progressives all misunderstand the importance of discourse institutions. (shrink)

Postmodernism precludes philosophical justifications for democracy. This undermines the role of philosophy of education and leaves us with weaker reasons for educational democracy than we need. If the ‘postmodern challenge’ is as Wilfred Carr conceives it, Jürgen Habermas meets that challenge. His work rests on neither Enlightenment essentialism nor foundationalism. Habermas can accept and explain that consciousness is historically and socially situated in discourse, yet still argue to the possibility of emancipation. I defend his conception of rationality from charges of (...) essentialism. Rational thinking can critique its own specific forms, so superior forms of rationality remain universalisable by rational means. A historicising account of such critique avoids situationist relativism. These considerations justify educational democracy and preserve a role for philosophy of education. (shrink)

Kevin Williams; National Sentiment in Civic Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 29, Issue 3, 30 May 2006, Pages 433–440, https://doi.org/10.11.

Habermas’s educational importance is usually misconstrued or underestimated, partly because the scope and implications of ideal speech conditions are generally misunderstood. These conditions are only relevant to discursive speech situations, but non-manipulative teaching need not be discursive. And not even discursive teaching is an appropriate occasion for ideal speech conditions. They properly apply to discourse institutions, at the ‘epistemic centre of modernity’. Thus, the concept of ideal speech conditions impinges on the relation of school to higher education and on curricular (...) change as an agency of modernisation, and illuminates the need for access to discourse institutions, if personal autonomy is an aim for school children, students or adults. Neo-Marxists, traditionalists and progressives all misunderstand the importance of discourse institutions. (shrink)

Kevin Williams; National Sentiment in Civic Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 29, Issue 3, 30 May 2006, Pages 433–440, https://doi.org/10.11.