The overall aim of the article is to analyse how the universal right to education have been built, legitimized and used. And more specifically ask who is addressed by the universal right to education, and who is given access to rights and to education. The first part of the article focus on the history of declarations, the notion of the universal right to education, emphasizing differences in matters of detail—for example, the meaning of ‘compulsory’, ‘children’s rights’ or ‘parents’ rights’—and critically (...) examining the right of the child and the right of the parent in terms of tensions between ‘social rights’ and ‘private autonomy rights’. Despite differences in detail, the iterations of the universal right to education do share to the full in the idea of education as such. In the second part the attempt to scrutinize the underlying assumptions legitimizing the consensus on education, focusing again on the notion of the child. In conclusion I argue that a certain notion of what it is to be a human being is inscribed within the circle of access to rights and education. These notions of what it means to be a child, a parent, a citizen or a member of the ‘human family’ are notions of enlightenment and humanity and, to my understanding, aspects of how democracy is configured around freedom, equality and fraternity. (shrink)

Increased attention to the relationship between democracy and education in the UK has been accompanied over the past thirteen years by an interest in how art can be used to promote democratic citizenship.While this approach has led to increased funding for the arts, it is not without its problems,and has often entailed an apolitical and instrumentalist view of both art and education. This paper turns to the political philosophy of Mouffe and Rancière, the work of Rancière in aesthetics, and Biesta’s (...) educational philosophy to develop an alternative way of understanding the significance of art for democracy and education. Building on their work, I take a performative and collective view of democratic subjectivity as the basis on which to construct this alternative understanding. I further argue that this conceptualisation can aid our understanding of democratic learning and our ability to provide opportunities for it through art and educational practice. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

This paper argues that a new patriotism has emerged in New Zealand over recent years. This has been promoted in tandem with the notion of advancing New Zealand as a knowledge economy and society. The new patriotism encourages New Zealanders to accept, indeed embrace, a single, shared vision of the future: one structured by a neoliberal ontology and the demands of global capitalism. This constructs a narrow view of citizenship and reduces the possibility of economic and social alternatives being considered (...) seriously. The paper makes this case in relation to tertiary education in particular. The first section outlines the New Zealand government's vision for tertiary education, as set out in the Tertiary Education Strategy, 2007–12 (Ministry of Education, 2006). This is followed by a critique of the Strategy and an analysis of the model of citizenship implied by it. The paper concludes with brief comments on the role tertiary education might play in contesting the new patriotism. (shrink)

The study of a middle school social studies and literacy project this paper addresses occurred in the national capital region of the United States, where perceptions of “patriotism” and immigration policies were the subjects of frequent media reports. With this examination the authors considered one overarching research question: how do middle school students describe and illustrate citizenship when given access to multimodal texts and media (e.g., digital photography and slam poetry)? The authors called on young adolescents to create slam poems (...) with incorporated images to address the question “What does it mean to be a ‘citizen’?”. The authors examined products of this project, which included surveys and slam poems, to address this research question, identifying findings that might inform social studies educators’ practices and curricula. Employing alternative and multimodal texts motivated students to engage with this project and to more candidly share expansive perspectives about what they believe makes a “citizen”. (shrink)

The role of education in citizen training has been well mapped out in youth education. What has been less studied is how this role comes into being in adult education. By providing illustrative empirical examples from a recently completed study of adult students enrolled in adult education, this article aims to offer a theoretical response to the question of the role of adult education in adult student citizen subjectivity formation. Taking on Diken’s concept of ‘reactive nihilism’, we wish to make (...) the following arguments. First, that citizen formation in adult education, when students are asked about it, is actualised as processes of recovery of will in order to be a successful and happy citizen in society. Secondly, that these processes point towards a role of adult education as one where these formation processes work in tandem with those of the reactive nihilists. This means that the citizen formation processes made possible in this educational site are those marked out by the desire to mobilise one’s will formation so that it adapts to the prevailing societal situation—that of late capitalism, which is a situation not considered by the adult students as possible to change. (shrink)

In the educational sphere, the concept of democracy is used in many and varied ways, though the hegemonic school culture often starts from a concept of democracy that is taken for granted, and it is understood that the entire educational community shares a similar concept. As a result of the research project “Democracy, participation and inclusive education in schools” we realized that the above-mentioned concept is used without being accurately defined in the school setting. This observation is what has prompted (...) us to write this article, basically structured in two parts. In the first part, based on the theoretical debate occurring in the field of social sciences, we delimit the concept of democracy and structure it in four basic dimensions: governance, inhabitance, otherness and ethos. In the second part, we specify and examine in depth these four dimensions in the school setting in order to construct a broad and transversal, yet specific, definition, with which to be able to develop ambitious democratic projects and, in turn, contribute to scientific debate. (shrink)

This study aims to investigate how teachers’ citizenship beliefs relate to the way they teach citizenship in the classroom. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 65 sixth-grade primary sch...

Este artículo parte de la tesis doctoral “Aprendizaje democrático y ciudadanía a través de la participación de cuatro jóvenes: una perspectiva narrativa” que versa sobre cómo las experiencias de participación –comprendiéndolas desde una perspectiva amplia y atendiendo a los contextos familiar, escolar y de tiempo libre– de cuatro jóvenes de origen familiar inmigrado contribuyen a la vivencia de la ciudadanía.