Duties to address global poverty face a motivation gap. We have good reasons for acting yet we do not, at least consistently. A ‘sentimental education’, featuring literature and journalism detailing the lives of distant others has been suggested as a promising means by which to close this gap. Although sympathetic to this project, I argue that it is too heavily wed to a charitable model of our duties to address global poverty—understood as requiring we sacrifice a certain portion of our (...) income. However, political action, aimed at altering institutions at both a global and a local level is likely to be necessary in order to provide effective long-term solutions to poverty globally. To rectify this, the article develops an alternative dialogical account of sentimental education, suitable for motivating support for political action to address global poverty. (shrink)

In Democratic Education in a Globalized World (Routledge, 2019) I defend a discourse theory of global justice as the appropriate normative1 ground for conceiving educational justice and citizenship education under conditions of economic and political globalization. In addition, I articulate democratic conceptions of global educational justice and citizenship education that recognize a moral-political right to democratically adequate education and call for the creation of transnational democratic consciousness. Based on these conceptions I spell out school practices such as historically informed, cross-cultural (...) learning within socially diverse settings that would contribute to realizing these conceptions. In this article I reply to liberal perfectionist, communitarian-conservative and empiricist-historical critiques of Democratic Education in a Globalized World from Michael Festl, Martin Beckstein and Michael Geiss, respectively. I emphasize the feasibility of injustice-reducing educational practices, I explain how a discourse theory of justice accommodates considerations of both the good and the right, and I justify why the grim record of past educational experience does not render pointless the pursuit of progressive aims through education. (shrink)