Thomas Friedman’s best-selling The World is Flat has exerted much influence in the west by providing both an accessible analysis of globalisation and its economic and social effects, and a powerful cultural metaphor for globalisation. In this review, we more closely examine Friedman’s notion of the social contract, the moral centre of his hopeful vision of a globalised world. While Friedman’s social contract holds a more generous view of social and state obligation than his neoliberal economic analysis might otherwise allow, (...) his fallacious assumptions about education rest on poorly argued claims about the nature of human beings, the proper aims of schooling, and meanings of justice in a globalised world. (shrink)

Adjectives such as “environmental”, “social”, “cosmopolitan”, “relational”, “distributive”, etc. reflect how scholars discern the many faces of justice and put several claims to, and claimants of, justice in perspective. They have also helped related research to focus on some surfaces of justice, that is, on spaces that invite justice, localities and formations, such as the state, social policies, social institutions, etc. within which ethical-political challenges unravel. Diverse philosophical perspectives enable context-specific explorations of (sur)faces of justice. However, I argue, there is (...) more to the concept of justice than what perspectives (considered alone or in their sum total) allow us to view. To theorize how this surplus may be more discernible through stereoscopic rather than perspectival optics I first describe how educational-philosophical perspectives, old and new, discuss just education or education for justice; and then I critique the very notion of perspective on which scholarly work relies. Despite their merits, perspectival framings of justice fail to address the interconnectivity of various (sur)faces of justice. (shrink)

This thesis explores the meaning and educational implications of respect in liberal multicultural democracies. Significantly, I examine respect from a philosophical perspective as a civic virtue, and hence as a central aim of civic education.