I have come to the realization that we cannot regulate what we cannot define. However, the public sphere should be a place where dialogue is readily stated even if it makes someone uncomfortable, and this is not hate speech. Otherwise, we begin to stop talking about difficult things, and secondly, there is not anything I can say that is not going to offend someone if the crowd is large enough. Who defines hate? This is an insoluble problem; thus, it (...) should not be regulated. That is why we need the public sphere so desperately so that those with an invested advantage do not make our decisions for us. Western society lives in worldless times. The salvation of worldlessness is firstly, a world that is based in continuity and permanence, even though human beings require the unpredictability and uncertainty of a controlled outcome, and secondly, thinking that is driven by meaning-making, reason, and wonder, rather than the reverence of sciences and technology and lastly an education that provides children deployment of trust from the world in order to reproduce. I will begin by defining the intricacies of worldlessness an Arendtian term, defining what thinking is, and how worldlessness relates to thinking. I will then demonstrate how various forms of thinking can be detrimental to society, and the public sphere. Additionally, I will investigate the prolific use of technology and sciences as an affecting mechanism in the way human beings think. Finally, I will be taking a closer look at how culture is formed or deformed through worldlessness and what the model of education needs to be in order for future generations to become more thoughtful thinking adults. (shrink)

I have come to the realization that we cannot regulate what we cannot define. However, the public sphere should be a place where dialogue is readily stated even if it makes someone uncomfortable, and this is not hate speech. Otherwise, we begin to stop talking about difficult things, and secondly, there is not anything I can say that is not going to offend someone if the crowd is large enough. Who defines hate? This is an insoluble problem; thus, it (...) should not be regulated. That is why we need the public sphere so desperately so that those with an invested advantage do not make our decisions for us. Western society lives in worldless times. The salvation of worldlessness is firstly, a world that is based in continuity and permanence, even though human beings require the unpredictability and uncertainty of a controlled outcome, and secondly, thinking that is driven by meaning-making, reason, and wonder, rather than the reverence of sciences and technology and lastly, an education that provides children deployment of trust from the world in order to reproduce. I will begin by defining the intricacies of worldlessness an Arendtian term, defining what thinking is, and how worldlessness relates to thinking. I will then demonstrate how various forms of thinking can be detrimental to society, and the public sphere. Additionally, I will investigate the prolific use of technology and sciences as an affecting mechanism in the way human beings think. Finally, I will be taking a closer look at how culture is formed or deformed through worldlessness and what the model of education needs to be in order for future generations to become more thoughtful thinking adults. (shrink)

With the 21st century, we are witnessing the mass spread of the communication technologies and social media revolution. Interactive networks built on a global scale have led to the formation of a virtual world of reality that is connecting the whole world. With the global spread of communication networks, the question of whether social media points to a new public sphere has been raised. Social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are nowadays seen as a place where (...) political campaigns are carried out, causing the destruction of authoritarian regimes, organizing global protests and innovation culture, and discussing political, social and cultural changes. What gives social media a similar quality to the agora of Ancient Greek city-states is the characteristic of been a place where citizens come together and talk about issues that are considered to be public, eventhough in a virtual reality. This work, following the Arendtian sense, discusses whether social media really is a place where public issues are discussed, common ideas are produced and transparency prevails. In her work "The Human Condition", Arendt makes a fundamental distinction between private and public sphere based on human activities. By conceiving the activities that she describes as labour and work in relation to the private sphere, Arendt tackles the activity of action through linking it to public sphere. Arendt defines the public sphere as a sphere of freedom and a political sphere. The public sphere consists of equal people without hierarchy, who come together with their completely free will. According to Arendt, the condition for the public sphere to be possible is transparency and commonality. Firstly; it has a wide transparency in the sense that something have to be seen and heard by others, and the second is that it points to a common world that belongs to everyone, except for the part that is privately owned. Considering the public sphere in relation to the transparency not a direct transfer of things that happen in the private or intimate sphere. It is precisely related to the fact that something pertaining to the private exhibits a presence within the world of public and the fact that the private acquires a public chatacter. This does not mean that the public sphere is a sphere in which the private and intimate are directly transferred. According to Arendt, leading a private life as a whole will lead to the lack of what is necessary to be a true person. It also leads to the lack of a common world that unites and separates them. Arendt thinks that with the modern period, what belongs to the purely private and intimate sphere expands and causes the collapse of the public. The collapse of the public sphere in the modern period; It has caused both the loss of difference and interaction and the emergence of individuals who are increasingly alike, unable to think and act. In this kind of society, action has left its place to behavior, difference to standartization and thought to obedience. Arendt sees the public sphere as a sphere where public affairs are discussed, while the private sphere is a sphere where intimate and private activities take place. Arendt argues that with modern society the distinction between public and private has became indistinct , and as a third sphere, the social sphere has swallowed up both the public and the private. The social sphere has removed the distinction between the public transparency and commonality of the public and the privacy of the private sphere and activities. This study considers social media as a sphere where public issues are discussed. It also dıscusses the private sphere events and the most intimate issues. It claims that social media is not a new public sphere as it is cosidered, but it is a social sphere in which the distinction between private and public in the Arendtian sense is become indistinct. In this context, the study seeks to answer the following questions: How does the distinction between public and private spheres, which is central in Arendt's thought, look like in today’s world? Is it possible to talk about a public sphere in the modern age? Can social media be considered as a public sphere? Or is social media a sphere of freedom and a political sphere? Does social media allow discussions on public issues? Is social media a non-hierarchical nature open to the free participation of everyone, difference and plurality? (shrink)

ArgumentBy the late nineteenth century, science pedagogues and academicians became involved in a vast movement to popularize science throughout the Russian empire. With the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, many now found the new Marxist state a willing supporter of their goals of spreading science to an under-educated public. In the Stalin era, Soviet state officials believed that the spread of science and technology had to coalesce with the Communist Party's utilitarian goals and needs to revive the industrial (...) sector of the economy. This resulted in a new Stalinist technologically oriented popularization campaign. In the Khrushchev era (1953–64), Soviet politicians became increasingly more aware of the competitive power of Soviet technology in the global arena and developed extensive campaigns to publicize Soviet feats for a broad domestic and foreign public audience. This was particularly true for topics such as the space program and big technologies such as nuclear power. (shrink)

Universities are under increasing pressure to demonstrate the economic and social relevance of the research they produce. In the UK, for example, recent developments in the UK under the Research Excellence Framework (REF) suggest that future funding schemes will grant “significant additional recognition…where researchers build on excellent research to deliver demonstrable benefits to the economy, society, public policy, culture and quality of life” (HEFCE 2009 ). Having conceded that this and similar developments are likely to continue into the (...) future, this paper explores the problematic ethical terrain facing philosophers of education under increasing pressure to produce work that has unambiguous, demonstrable practical value on terms offered by various funding regimes. A preliminary ethics of relevance is developed through an examination of the debate between John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas on the relationship between philosophy, public policy and public reason. The paper then articulates and defends a principle of legitimate relevance . This principle is then applied to the case of directing disciplinary competence in philosophy of education for the educational policy process as a means to producing social and economic benefits. (shrink)

This introduction contextualizes a set of papers, which originated from the Theory, Culture & Society Summer School, that explore the connections between the public sphere, the post-university and the scholarly apparatus. The impetus was the consideration of Habermas’s recent writings on the structural changes in the public sphere, along with his concerns about the mediating role of the university and its capacity to act as a specialized internal public sphere. Yet, with digitalization, metrics have become increasingly (...) important in administration and evaluation of faculty. This has been accompanied by significant shifts in the digitalization of the scholarly apparatus and the way of conducting research and publishing. A consequence has been calls to rethink the public function of the university and related knowledge institutions, and to explore new forms of educational practice in relation to media and computer literacy. (shrink)

The political sphere Arendt strove throughout her career to defend and restore depended upon the performative abilities of its participant speakers. But Arendt's theatricality is that of the speech act, not of the stage in a literal sense, where original utterances and originary deeds are not primarily at stake. Arendt versus Zweig replays the cultural enmity of Berlin versus Vienna, giving voice and person to a Central European cultural fissure that travels far and wide into the émigré experience and remains (...) too regularly overlooked in all of its venues by scholars of Central Europe. The distinction is especially elusive to American scholars, who often remain insufficiently sensitive both to the cultural differences between northern and southern Central Europe, and to the survival of religiously marked cultural differences. Hannah Arendt was an émigré from the northern German world and from the German language. In cultural as well as geographical terms, she was an émigré from Prussia. Born in Hanover, reared in Koenigsberg, educated in Heidelberg, she identified with Berlin and its claim to cosmopolitanism. She therefore became a cosmopolitan thinker from Berlin, a metropolis whose generosity and arrogance has resided at least since the 1870s in its self perception as the center of the world. But Arendt also did battle with her fellow Berliners, especially when they seemed to abandon their Berlin-trained worldliness. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

The book examines the trajectory of joint philosophical-pedagogical concepts within the framework of the dialogue between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, put in the context of questions concerning the nature of modernity.

In this conversation, Berkeley-based philosopher Judith Butler offers insights into her understanding of the public sphere and its current transformations as a core dimension of political subjectivity. Beginning with her own understanding of Habermas’ classic, the interview centers around its connection to other classical texts (e.g. of Hannah Arendt) and timely political debates.

This chapter develops and discusses a Deweyan perspective on the contemporary difficulties of deliberation within the highly fragmented digitized public spheres of liberal democracies. A high level of fragmentation is a key feature of digitized public spheres, as digital technologies like computers, the internet, and social media platforms facilitate the creation of political content, the circumvention of traditional gatekeepers like journalists, and the personalization of access to political debates. As a result, democratic theorists are concerned that the digitized (...) public spheres are insufficiently inclusive for identifying public opinions that are generally. The Deweyan perspective developed in this chapter adds new insights into the existing analyses of political deliberation by emphasizing the importance of a well- functioning democracy for citizens’ lifelong education, as well as by highlighting the impact of cultural transformations on liberal democracy. However, despite the valuable insights that can be generated by the Deweyan perspective, this article also criticizes it for failing to deal adequately with the unavoidable pluralism of reasonable understandings of the good life in a liberal democracy. The chapter therefore also seeks to evaluate to what extent, if at all, the Deweyan insights can be taken up as well by a political liberal perspective that seeks to accommodate this pluralism. (shrink)

In this article Julian Culp offers a new conceptualization of democratic citizenship education in light of the transformations of contemporary Western societies to which the use of digital technologies has contributed. His conceptualization adopts a deliberative understanding of democracy that provides a systemic perspective on society-wide communicative arrangements and employs a nonideal, critical methodology that concentrates on overcoming democratic deficits. Based on this systemic, deliberative conception of democracy, Culp provides an analysis of the public sphere's normative deficits and argues (...) that current political communication may be systemically distorted. Drawing on this analysis, he suggests that practices of democratic citizenship education in digitized societies must not concentrate narrowly on the effective and responsible use of digital technologies. Instead, these practices should also focus on the economic and cultural conditions that are co-responsible for the structural problems of political communication as well as address the democratic deficits that are reflected in inadequate communicative arrangements. (shrink)

The article takes a novel look at the extensive debates about the “Jewish Question” in early Imperial Germany by analysing how Jews and Protestants communicated with each other. These debates were shaped by two hitherto neglected facts: by the character of pamphlets as an anarchic media and by the bourgeois background of their Jewish and Protestant authors. The “Jewish Question” played a considerable role in the public communication of the German educated middle-class, urging mostly Jews and Protestants to raise (...) their voice. Their different motivations to do so are discussed and the overall make-up of this body of literature is delineated. The specific media structure of the debates and especially the problematic power of pamphlet literature seemed to jeopardize the established ways of bourgeois communication. Thus, the very structure of the “Jewish Question” itself appeared to epitomize the contradictory positions of Jews in the public sphere and in middle-class culture. By briefly characterizing the Jewish responses to the challenges in these debates, the article concludes that in this structure a communicative gap between bourgeois Jews and Protestants became visible. At the same time, this serves as a concrete example to refute a dominance-free, Habermasian concept of the public sphere and to highlight the importance of the ability to universalize one's position in the public communication of 19th-century Germany. (shrink)

For Hannah Arendt, authority is the shape educational responsibility assumes. In our time, authority in Arendt’s sense is under pressure. The figure of Greta Thunberg shows the failure of adult generations, taken collectively, to take responsibility for the world and present and future generations of newcomers. However, in reflecting on Arendt’s use of authority, we argue that her account of authority also requires amendments. Arendt’s situating of educational authority in-between past and future adequately captures its temporal dimension. We make explicit (...) another, spatial, dimension: authority in-between world and earth. Arendt’s neglect of the material earth also has implications for the relational dimension of authority. Arendt’s authority depends on a dichotomy between the private and the public sphere. This is problematic. First, we agree with Arendt’s feminist critics that the personal can be made into the site of the political. Second, we point once more to Thunberg, the child, taking the public stage, thereby contesting the division between public and private. In response, we situate the relational dimension of authority in-between private and public. The three dimensions of educational authority taken together imply that it is situated in-between domains that cannot be reduced to each other or taken as absolutes: past and future, world and earth, and the private and public sphere. This brings us to our concept of ambiguous authority, which expresses the Arendtian nature of our reflections and the ways in which we seek to renew her original insights on educational authority. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:SACRIFICE AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE Colin Jager University ofMichigan The Inscription on the Memorial to Irish Freedom in Parnell Square, Dublin, reads: "O generations of freedom, remember us, the generations of the vision." The irony, of course, is that the generations of freedom to whom the inscription is addressed have yet to be born. Or rather: they/we are partly a generation of freedom, while remaining also and of (...) necessity a generation of vision. Freedom—always partial and imperfect where it exists at all—remains bound up with vision. And violence (so the memorial tells us) is never far from vision. Is itpossible to conceive ofa public sphere free from violence? This is the question I address here with the help ofHannah Arendt. I begin by describing Arendt's distinction between the public and private realms and summarizing Seyla Benhabib's interpretation ofthese categories. Arendt, ofcourse, valued the public sphere ofcontestation that she associated with the Greek world; for her, the private realm of the household should remain completely separate from public life—the private was a place ofmere necessity, devoted solely to maintaining the physical body. According to Benhabib, we can follow Arendt in thinking of the public sphere as a place of contestation and hence of potential pain, or we can allow the concerns of the private into the public realm, and thus work to create a public sphere based on association and potential solidarity. Working out of the communicative theories of Jürgen Habermas, Benhabib tries to pull Arendt toward Habermas by emphasizing what she calls Arendt's "reluctant modernism": those elements ofher thought that move away from a sharp distinction between public and private and tend toward association and solidarity. And yet—this is the conviction that motivates this essay—history tells us that we cannot simply exchange one for the other. The poignancy ofmy epigraph springs, I think, precisely from our 58Colin Jager realization that vision never modulates easily into freedom. The monument's inscription, the very fact of its existence, links vision indissolubly with bloodshed and sacrifice, while imagining freedom as a peaceful realm beyond violence, a place ofharmony and solidarity for which the "generations ofthe vision" were willing to sacrifice themselves. Yet we are not that generation of freedom. We have not shed the burden of vision and history, for history is never simply behind us. What the eighty bloody years since the Easter uprising have taught us, if anything, is that the coming offreedom is always delayed and that the hopes for a peaceful transition from vision to freedom, agon to association, revolution to democracy, are forever marred by the reality ofa world where there is more than one vision and where continued sacrifices in the name ofvision seem to bring us no closer to peace, or to freedom. Who is the monument for, then? We must conclude that it is for us who remain somewhere between vision and freedom, forced by our own monuments to acknowledge that history that continues to infect our present. If agon and association, vision and freedom, inevitably bleed into each other, then we cannot talk realistically about one simply replacing the other. In this regard Arendt's work is crucial because it teaches us that movement from an agonistic Greek public to an associative modern public is accomplished only at the cost of displacing the distributive violence of the Greek world onto a figure ofsuffering. The necessity ofsuch suffering is the element that Benhabib, with her emphasis on the ideal communicative community, misses. Therefore, highlighting suffering helps us to understand Arendt: the suffering figures scattered through her work are the only way to make sense of her crucial notions of storytelling and forgiveness. More generally, highlighting suffering helps us understand what is at stake in any Utopian theory of the public sphere: envisioning the transition from an agonistic public sphere, defined by its relationship to violence, to a nonviolent associative public sphere of peace and communicative ethics is impossible wiüiout acknowledging those who pay the price for such a passage. Freedom, ifit does come, comes at a terrific cost—and there is no guarantee that it will still be here tomorrow. 1. Agonism and Associationism... (shrink)

Summary Although George Davie has identified the debate between Dugald Stewart and Francis Jeffrey as a crucial chapter in the history of Scottish philosophy, their exchange remains a neglected episode. Jeffrey questioned the role of the philosophy of mind in nineteenth-century culture and suggested that it lacked a truly scientific method of investigation. Although Jeffrey was not articulating a common perception, his criticism stimulated both Stewart's further exploration of our intellectual powers and his search for a new role for (...) the philosophy of mind. The result was a stronger emphasis on education in Stewart's thought and a shift away from Reid's formulation of common sense philosophy. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to give an example of how an exercise in post-critical educational research might be conceptualized. The example refers to an enquiry into building a public sphere around education in Poland. First, a post-critical approach in educational research is defined with reference to the two dominant perspectives of social research, namely the (neo)positivistic and the critical paradigm. Next, and following insights of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière, the idea of building is presented in terms (...) of the persistent introduction of a new beginning into a social reality through acting in line with an assumption (an axiom) that, from the point of view of critical knowledge about the current status quo, seems fictional (or impossible). Such a persistent verification of an impossible axiom aims at establishing a sphere of exception from the dominant social order, offering—through the ideas of Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben—a nondialectical logic of social transformation. Finally, in conclusion the article focuses on the phenomenon of condensation as one of the key results of the exemplary research project analysed throughout the text. This points to the kind of knowledge that post-critical research projects are able to bring about. (shrink)

The central theme and core objective of this comprehensive resource for elementary teachers on climate change and children’s emotions and resiliency is supporting children’s understanding of and respect for the interconnectedness all life: human, animal, plant, and clean air, water, and soil. Its broad social/cultural perspective emphasizes that social and ecological justice are interrelated. Challenging elementary teachers to more explicitly address current environmental issues with students in their classrooms, the book presents a diverse set of topics from a variety of (...) perspectives. Coverage includes descriptions of environmental education pedagogies such as nature-based experiences and place-based studies; peace-education practices; children doing environmental activism; and teachers supporting children emotionally in times of climate disruption and tumult. The pedagogies described invite student engagement and action in the public sphere. Children are represented as ‘agents of change’ engaged in social and environmental issues and problems through their actions both local and global. (shrink)

In our increasingly instrumentalist culture, debates over the privatization of schooling may be beside the point. Whether we hatch some new plan for chartering or funding schools, or retain the traditional model of government-run schools, the ongoing instrumentalization of education threatens the very possibility of public education. Indeed, in the culture of performativity, not only the public school but public life itself is hollowed out and debased. Qualities are recast as quantities, judgments replaced by rubrics, (...) teaching and learning turned into exchange values. Schools should be central to public life: key locations for the regeneration of values, the cultivation of judgment, and the creation of the conditions for positive freedom. In this article Chris Higgins, drawing on Hannah Arendt and Alasdair MacIntyre, goes beyond typical treatments of the schools as equalizer of individual opportunity to explore three aspects of educational publicity: the school as an object of communal concern, schooling as preparation for public life, and the classroom as public space. (shrink)

In this paper I ask how Arendt, a relatively obscure Zionist activist, became a public intellectual in postwar US and Europe. I argue that Arendt’s idealization of Europe—that is her presentation of a federal Europe as the political and cultural ideal for other peoples to imitate—accounts for her postwar success in both Euro-American and German and Jewish-American public spheres. An analysis of Arendt’s writings during the period shows that she idealized Europe despite also condemning European fascism, imperialism, and (...) totalitarianism. I also show that Arendt’s idealization of Europe determined her self-presentation. While much has been made of Arendt’s insistence on identifying as a Jew, in fact in the postwar period she identified alternatively, as a Jewish, European, and non-national public intellectual. She held these varying identifications precisely because her idealized view of Europe led her to conflate Jewish and European identities despite also considering these to be separate. (shrink)

Many have bowed before the recently acquired powers of ‘new technologies’. However, in the shift from tekhnē to tekhnologia, it seems we have lost human values. These values are communicative in nature as technological progress has placed barriers like distance, web pages and ‘miscellaneous extras’ between individuals. Certain values, like the interpersonal pleasures of rendering service, have been lost as their domain of predilection has for many become fully commercially oriented, dominated by the cadence of profitability. Though the popular cultures (...) of the artificial have surged forth to deliver us from the twentieth century, they have enabled some very superfluous dreaming—Man has succumbed to the Godly role of simulating himself and creating other beings. Communication is replaced by machines, services are rendered via many automated devices, procreation has entered the public sphere, robots and entertainment agents educate our youth and mesmerising screen-integrating ‘forms of intelligence’ even think for us. As such, this so-called culture threatens the very values Man constructed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to guide himself into the future. But what if the phenomena mentioned just reflect our new values? The author presents an investigation into this cultural shift, its impact on human practices with regards the mind and the body and evokes some pros and cons of generally accepting the ‘Culture of the Artificial’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Romanian Cultural and Political IdentityDonald R. KelleyThe Journal of the History of Ideas, in collaboration with other institutions, including the Universities of Bucharest and Budapest and the Soros Foundation, recently sponsored the second in a series of international conferences being planned on topics in current intellectual history. (The first, “Interrogating Tradition,” was held at Rutgers University, 13–16 November 1997.) The Romanian conference, which was held in the Elisabeta Palace (...) in Bucharest (27–31 May 1998), was devoted to “Culture and the Politics of National Identity in Modern Romania.” Over forty scholars, mainly from Romania but some also from the U.S., France, Germany, and Hungary, gathered to discuss a variety of questions about Romanian society, past, present, and speculative future; and they were joined by at least as many visitors, especially students, from the local area and beyond.Topics discussed included politics, language, economics, historiography, religion, education, philosophy, ideologies, intelligentsia, particular intellectuals, minorities, and women (though not Gypsies or gays). Under this riot of rubrics a wide range of questions were posed in interdisciplinary fashion, with frequent, sometimes impassioned interventions. What is—was, might have been, can be—Romania? Who is a Romanian (and who not)? What is Romania’s relation to the West and the East? (And what are the “West” and the “East”?) To modernity, to modernism, to modernization? What is—has been, should be—the function of intellectuals, of political and cultural elites, in understanding the Romanian past and in setting a course for the future? What, more generally, is the role of history in answering such questions? Or is history perhaps (as Karl Krause remarked of psychoanalysis) the disease for which it claims to be the cure?Keith Hitchens’s keynote address suggested that rehashing old essentialist debates might not be productive at millennium’s end, but the conference itself could not avoid some excursions down the paths of memory and myth. For historians, Western historians anyway, Romania seems to have too many pasts. Located at the juncture of four previous empires, Romania is a mosaic, or perhaps a pandemonium, of ethnic, religious, economic, and ideological groups that can only imagine, or invent, a nationality. Geographically (and in many ways culturally) remote from the West, Romania for a long time (as Sorin Antohi remarked) lacked both a public sphere and a civil society; and suffering “a Counter-Reformation without a Reformation” (Alexandru Dutu’s phrase), it has not enjoyed a tradition of religious or ethnic toleration. Nor have either the Germans or the Jews (as Glass said) found their own unity within the changing borders of the modern Romanian state. Not until the nineteenth century did Romania develop, out of its Boyar background (as Siupiur argued), an intellectual elite that could create a modern national history and help turn “peasants into Romanians” (Antohi’s phrase); and even then this elite seemed more attracted to conservative [End Page 735] (Herder, Savigny, Burke) than to liberal views of autochthonism. Many features of Western modernity, such as Newtonian science, reached Romania late, and indeed there was a retrograde movement against liberalism under the aegis by orthodox religion. In any case this intelligentsia has been as fragmented and multiform as the Romanian past itself. True, some Romanian scholars like to posit a mainstream tradition, “excesses aside,” as one speaker put it—but how, asked another, can historians put “excesses” aside from the devastating perspective of this century?Political and cultural self-examination was the dominant theme of this conference. Nationality, said Pippidi, depends on three factors, viz., name, language, religion, and territory. The Romanian name dates from the tenth century, indicating a separation of the Roman from the Greek tradition in Wallachia; and from the seventeenth century the idea of a mainly Roman provenance was given privilege. As a language, “Romanian” was spoken in the late Middle Ages, but the first written document is dated 1521. The principal religion in Romania was and is Greek orthodox, although there are also Roman Catholic, Jewish, Islamic, and German Protestant communities, as well as the Uniate church created in the eighteenth century. As for the territory, this has been a matter of change, conflict, and confusion throughout the tragic course... (shrink)

With the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, the discourse of an authoritarianism and the echoes of a fascist past have moved from the margins to the center of American politics. A culture of war buttressed by the forces of white supremacy and militarization has been unleashed in a series of policies designed to return the United States to a history in which the public sphere was largely white and Christian, and the economy (...) and the state were governed by a ruling corporate elite. Militarization and a war culture have become normalized in the United States and this article explores the ways in which a neo-fascism has emerged that furthers war not only abroad but also at home, especially with regards to the ongoing assaults waged by the state against Muslims, immigrants, women’s reproductive rights, and poor minorities of class and color. Against the rise of neo--fascism, this article advances the idea that education is central to any viable notion of politics, that progressives... (shrink)

When attempting to capture the concept of enlightenment that underlies and motivates philosophical (and political and scientific) developments in the 18th century, historians of philosophy frequently rely upon a needlessly but intentionally exclusive account. This, namely, is the conception of enlightenment first proposed by Kant in his famous essay of 1784, which takes enlightenment to consist in the “emergence from the self-imposed state of minority” and which is only possible for a “public” to attain as a result of the (...) public use of reason, a privilege enjoyed by citizens and exemplified in the activity of the scholar. That women, among other groups, did not hold the status of citizens and did not enjoy access to the institutions or training that might gain them recognition as scholars is apparently not a concern for Kant, as he notes that the enlightened condition is likely out of reach anyway for “by far the greatest part of humankind (including the entire fair sex)” (AA 8:35). This naturally leads one to wonder what a history of this period could look like when considered from the perspective of a different, more inclusive conception of enlightenment, and in this chapter I propose to conduct an experiment of sorts just along these lines. As opposed to Kant’s exclusionary conception, I will instead take that proposed by his distinguished contemporary, Moses Mendelssohn, as my starting point. In addition to offering a conception of enlightenment distinctive both for its wide scope and progressive character, Mendelssohn’s has the advantage, or so I will show, of bringing the manifold intellectual contributions of a diverse set of women into focus, though it does more than this in that it also reveals these women to actively and critically engage with key aspects of Mendelssohn’s and others’ philosophical views. (shrink)

The form of commemoration offered by Remembrance Day ceremonies works to produce a sense of nationalist patriotism. The ‘public history’ of the nation, as a mode of self-representation, presents a particular narrative of limited scope, occluding all elements that do not fit its ideological framework. Remembrance Day simultaneously invokes and educates Canadian collective memory and public history, mediated through the contemporary power/knowledge discourse on war. The values, structure, and 'tendencies of a society' become evident in collective memory and (...) this cultural heritage of society becomes a site at which it is 'visible to itself'. (shrink)

Après avoir montré que la conception arendtienne de l’éducation vise à concilier autorité et liberté, cet article aborde certains facteurs socio-techniques qui, selon Hannah Arendt, affectent dans ses fondements le milieu éducatif au point que la crise de l’autorité et de la transmission enregistrée dans cette « sphère particulière » n’est susceptible que de solutions inédites. Car si la crise de l’éducation est d’abord le résultat d’une rupture avec la tradition, elle se traduit également par l’incapacité à gérer la démesure (...) qu’entraîne le progrès en ce domaine. L’ouverture aux générations futures permet toutefois de redonner à l’éducation sa place dans la fondation et le maintien d’un monde public commun. After demonstrating how the arendtian conception of education aims to reconcile authority and freedom, this article tackles some of the social and technical stakes, which, according to H. Arendt, have a basic effect on the world of education to the point that the crisis of authority and transmission noted in that “special sphere” will only respond to unusual solutions. For, if the crisis in education is first of all the result of the break with tradition, it is also revealed through an inability to control the excesses which seem to follow progress made in this field. Its opening to future generations enables education, however, to regain its place in the foundation and the preservation of a common public world. (shrink)

Resumo: A principal biógrafa de Hannah Arendt, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl indaga se a obra de Arendt a respeito de Rahel Varnhagen não seria um tipo sui generis de Bildungsroman. Nossa proposta é investigar o livro de Arendt sob este questionamento: há elementos formativos neste trabalho de Arendt? Para enfrentar tal tema, nos propomos a discutir a relação entre o contexto histórico de Rahel, associado às suas experiências individuais segundo a leitura da própria Arendt. Nossa hipótese é que esta hibridez presente no (...) texto de Arendt, ou seja, as instituições culturais em conflito com o sofrimento de Rahel, constituem sua própria formação. Neste sentido, a obra poderia ser lida como um Bildungsroman, ainda que a intenção de Arendt não fosse essa ao escrevê-la. Palavras-chave: Hannah Arendt; Romance de Formação; Educação; Estética A Bildungsroman outside the canon? Rahel Varnhagen, The Life Of Jewess Woman, by Hannah Arendt Abstract: The main biographer of Hannah Arendt, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, wonders if the work from Arendt about Rahel Varnhagen would not be a sui generis type of Bildungsroman. This article proposes to investigate the book of Arendt under this question: are there, in fact, formative elements in the work Rahel Varnhagen: the life of a Jewish woman? To this end, we propose to discuss the relationship between historical context of Rahel associated with her individual experiences according to Arendt. Our hypothesis is that this hybridity present in this text from Arendt, that is, the cultural institutions in conflict with the suffering of Rahel, constitute her own formation. In this sense, the work could be read as a Bildungsroman, even though this was not the first intention for Hannah Arendt. Keywords: Hannah Arendt; Bildungsroman; Education; Aesthetics Ein Bildungsroman außerhalb des kanons? Rahel Varnhagen, Lebensgeschichte Einer Deutschen Jüdin Aus Der Romantik, von Hannah Arendt Zusamennfassung: Die Hauptbiografin von Hannah Arendt, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, fragt sich, ob das Buch von Arendt über Rahel Varnhagen nicht eine Art Bildungsroman sui generis sei. In diesem Artikel soll das Buch von Arendt über Rahel auf diese Frage hin untersucht werden: Gibt es tatsächlich prägende Elemente in Rahel Varnhagen, Lebensgeschichte einer Deutschen Jüdin aus der Romantik? Zu diesem Zweck schlagen wir vor, die Beziehung zwischen dem historischen Kontext von Rahel und ihren individuellen Erfahrungen nach Arendt zu diskutieren. Unsere Hypothese ist, dass diese Hybridität in diesem Text von Arendt, das heißt, die kulturellen Institutionen im Konflikt mit dem Leiden von Rahel ihre eigene Bildung. In diesem Sinne könnte das Werk als Bildungsroman gelesen werden, auch wenn dies nicht die erste Absicht von Hannah Arendt war. Mots-clés: Hannah Arendt; Bildungsroman; Erziehung; Ästhetik Data de registro: 16/01/2023 Data de aceite: 18/10/2023. (shrink)

Is it possible to look at schools as spaces for encounters? Could schools contribute to a deliberative mode of communication in a manner better suited to our own time and to areas where different cultures meet? Inspired primarily by classical (Dewey) and modern (Habermas) pragmatists, I turn to Seyla Benhabib, posing the question whether she supports the proposition that schools can be sites for deliberative communication. I argue that a school that engages in deliberative communication, with its stress on mutual (...) communication between different moral perspectives, gives universalism a procedurally oriented meaning, serving as an arena for encounters that represents a weak public sphere. An interactive universalism of this kind attaches importance to developing an ability and willingness to reason on the basis of the views of others and to change perspectives. In that respect, the institutional arrangements of schools are potential parts of the political dimension of cosmopolitanism, as well as its moral dimension, in terms of the obligations and responsibilities we develop through our institutions and in our actions as human beings towards one another. (shrink)

Redefining the canon and the core curriculum is a popular topic in the current debate concerning multiculturalism. The focus on education is indeed crucial, insofar as it creates a symbolic ground for a democratic society, implying the possibility of universal dialogue across cultural and social differences. Yet to overcome the fragmenting dissensus among radical, conservative, and liberal positions, we need a concept of "general education" that reconciles the normative ideals of equality and freedom with the social reality of ethnic, social, (...) and sexual diversity. I argue that we can develop such a new philosophy of education in the spirit of a grounded cosmopolitanism by showing how a shared and still culturally sensitive understanding can emerge from different cultural backgrounds. The goal of democratic education consists thus in the creation of a culturally grounded yet reflexively open self, as the precondition for democratic participation in the multicultural public sphere. (shrink)

A discussão sobre o Ensino Religioso na escola pública das diferentes unidades da Federação é uma polêmica constante ao longo da história da República brasileira. A imposição legal do Ensino Religioso no âmbito escolar pode remeter à ideia de um Estado não laico e acarretar mais preocupações e discussões do que propriamente promover uma formação integral que favoreça os estudantes. No Estado laico, as religiões são livres contanto que respeitem a neutralidade confessional da esfera pública e a garantia de cuidar (...) do bem comum. O Ensino Religioso, no espaço da educação, contribui para prevenir a intolerância e instiga os estudantes a buscar seus direitos e liberdades. Isto não significa abrir mão do direito de expressão da confessionalidade de alunos e professores, mas permitir ao outro ser sujeito de sua cultura e de seus desejos. O Ensino Religioso como componente curricular está alicerçado nos princípios da cidadania, no entendimento do outro enquanto outro. E isso só é possível num Estado laico, pois é competência do Estado assegurar aos alunos o direito de receber a formação religiosa desejada. É um direito cidadão. Palavras-chave: Educação; Ensino Religioso; Estado laico.The discussion of Religious Education in public schools of the various units of the federation is a constant debate throughout the history of the Brazilian Republic. The legal imposition on Religious Education in schools may refer to the idea of a secular State and not cause more concern and discussion than actually promote an integral formation that favors students. In the secular State, religions are free provided, they satisfy the confessional neutrality of the public sphere and ensuring care for the common good. The Religious Education in the area of education helps to prevent intolerance and encourages students to pursue their rights and freedoms. This does not mean giving up the right of expression of denominational pupils and teachers, but to allow another to be subject to their culture and their desires. The Religious Education as a curriculum component is based on principles of citizenship, in understanding the other as other. And this is only possible in a secular State, it is responsibility of the State to ensure students the right to receive religious training desired. It is a citizen right. Key words: Education; Religious Education; Secular State. (shrink)

Education as a respectable social institution reflects the processes of changing the classical scientific paradigm in the modern world and forms a new, postmodern educational space, which leads to the construction of a postmodern paradigm of a decentralized pedagogical process, which provides for the coexistence of various autonomous "centers", paradigms, methods, approaches, etc., competing, complement each other and among which there are no dominant ones. Under these conditions, the pedagogical process acts as an open, temporal, indeterministic, pluralistic, emergent entity, forms (...) an "environment of a free position" in which something constantly disappears and then appears, and is sensitive to minor influences. The philosophical analysis of education should be consistent with postmodern socio-cultural processes of a public, state and global nature and their reflection in the sphere of postmodern society. At the present stage of education, new philosophical and ideological prerequisites are needed. The purpose of our article is a philosophical analysis of the concepts of education in the postmodern era and the importance of education on the transformation of the worldview. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Music Education in an Age of Virtuality and Post-Truth by Paul WoodfordPanagiotis A. KanellopoulosPaul Woodford, Music Education in an Age of Virtuality and Post-Truth (New York, Routledge, 2018)This book is provocative. And challenging. It is written with passion, aiming to induce controversy. And with good reason. For we live in times when populism professes an illusionary sense of community, invoking a seemingly 'anti-systemic' but highly hypocritical, racist, and (...) sexist discourse;1 in times where "bullshitting"2 has advanced to the highest governmental levels in many countries; in times where "authoritarian neoliberal statism"3 becomes the new status quo, inducing a scandalous increase of economic inequalities, forcing large populations to live precarious lives; in times where privatization of educational services in the context of market-oriented practices impose restrictive and ultimately unjust politics of accountability and performativity;4 in times where instrumentalization of educational ends has taken the lead, assisted by a systematic co-option and misappropriation of notions such as excellence and creativity;5 in times, finally, where spaces that allow for "the sharing (out) of the incalculable,"6 forging unknown potentialities in education, life, and thought, are being destroyed. In such times, Paul Woodford has stepped in, reclaiming his right to speak uncompromisingly.Hannah Arendt has written that "[w]hen men [sic] are deprived of the public space--which is constituted by acting together and then fills of its own accord [End Page 108] with the events and stories that develop into history--they retreat into their freedom of thought."7 Woodford refuses to retreat. He writes as a public intellectual of the highest order, committed to upset and not please those in power. A great service that his latest book performs is that it speaks daringly, stirring a debate that helps us all to do away with fear. For as Bertrand Russell has aptly said quite a long time ago, "[I]f thought is to become the possession of many, not the privilege of the few, we must have done with fear. It is fear that holds men [sic] back."8Resisting the "melancholy of inner exile,"9 but not immune to possible accusations of left melancholy, understood as "a refusal to come to terms with the particular character of the present,"10 the author wrote a book that provokes music educators to actively think beyond their sealed and safe world of convictions that is based on ideology-free conceptions of music teaching. Estelle Jorgensen has long ago brought to our attention the urgency of this task: "in an era in which the mindset and political reality have changed dramatically, … there is an urgent need to revisit the political character of music education and the ways in which it needs to address the cultural issues of our day."11Along this pathway, Woodford's book encourages music educators to live and teach as public intellectuals, forging "a democratic purpose for music education"12 that acts against the "anachronistic and formalist conception of music that reduces music education to supply-side economics as children are conceived as either future professional musicians or consumers and not as citizens to be prepared in schools to participate intelligently in the political life of society."13 Woodford articulates a vision of music education "as preparation for adulthood and democratic and global citizenship."14 He strongly advocates an approach that balances performance and creativity-based experiences with a socio-historical study of the social, ideological, and cultural workings of different musics in a wide variety of contexts. He encourages music educators to teach "how music's structural properties and qualities contribute to the shaping of people's perceptions and understandings of themselves and their world,"15 "asking the who, what, when, where, how, to, with, or for whom, and, most importantly of all, why of music."16 He envisions a music classroom that exercises social criticism "directly and self-consciously"17 both through "learning how to make music"18 and through thinking about music. He sees this approach as a tool for raising students' consciousness. Woodford's ultimate vision of music education is one that casts it as a means for cultivating "a justice-oriented" approach... (shrink)

COVID-19 has necessitated inquiry into the capacity of technology to build learning communities to solve problems beyond proximal boundaries. Platforms like Zoom offer pathways for communication and content-delivery, but little stimulus for collective online outcomes (projects/learning-objects/discussion forums). We aim to examine how monetized platforms fit within Marcuse’s technological rationality and its capacity to exercise social control. This owes to dominance of aspects of technology related to providing content rather than how we direct agency towards using it. Such control is reminiscent (...) of influence exercised by portals like television and radio in the mid-1900’s. We suggest Habermas’ communicative rationality using technology can foster critical thinking in online education. We often assume technology is the basis for change in classrooms. As Marcuse says, this enables technology to exact control upon us, and fragment outcomes obtained from using it to learn, warranting creation of new tools. Integrating bottom-up ways of using technology into existing frameworks can mitigate fragmentation of the public sphere resulting from industrialized online education. Fragmentation becomes pervasive with migrating classes online. We provide a framework/design to better encourage critical reflection in online learning communities during unprecedented times such as the era of COVID-19. (shrink)

M. Ally: Why Jaspers gives us Hope: Deconstruc ting the Myth of Cultural Impermeability B. Andrzejewski: Über Kant und Schelling hinaus. Zur Frage der existenziellen Theorie der Kommunikation bei Jaspers A. Cesana: Weltphilosophie und philosophischer Glaube J. M. Cho: Cross-Cultural Adaptations in Karl Jaspers J. Fukaya: The Japanese Moral Framework and Jaspers Philosophy K. Fukui: Karl Jaspers Philosophie aus Sicht der Kyoto-Schule J.-C. Gens: Jaspers Begegnung mit und sein Verhältnis zu China S. Hanyu: The Cross-Cultural Thought in Jaspers Philosophy. In (...) comparison with Kantian Thought in Toward Perpetual Peace K. Hara: Konflikte und Kommunikation der Religionen. Zur Möglichkeit des philosophischen Glaubens A. Hirano: Arendt und Jaspers: Der innere Zusammenhang und die Unterschiede zwischen den Gedanken beider S. C. Kim: Der philosophische Glaube angesichts des religiösen Pluralismus L. Lambrecht: Philosophie gegen den Nationalsozialismus: Hannah Arendt und Karl Jaspers E. Lee: Heidegger and Jaspers on the Public Sphere: Jaspers Theory of Communication as an Antidote to Heideggers Dark Public World W. Lee: Philosophischer Glaube und universale Kommunikation bei Karl Jaspers T. Nakajima: Die Idee der Universität inmitten der Popularisierung" T. Nakayama: Jaspers Philosophie und Buddhismus. Das Denken der Leerheit" C. Olay: Öffentlichkeit bei Jaspers und Hannah Arendt S.-K. Paek: Kants Schrift Zum ewigen Frieden im Spiegel dreier Interpretationen: Volker Gerhardt, Jürgen Habermas, Karl Jaspers E. Park: The Possibility of Social Existenz. A Reinterpretation of the Concept of Existenz in Karl Jaspers F. Peach: Jaspers, Existential Communication and Globalisation C. Piecuch: Welteinheit: Rationale Entscheidung oder kosmische Notwendigkeit? I. Ren: Zwei Wege der philosophischen Logik: Jaspers und Heidegger N. Reyhani: Die Anthropologie-Debatte und der Vorwurf des Positivismus gegen Karl Jaspers I. Sarin: Jaspers on Bridging the Intercultural Gap H.-J. Seideneck: Der Zusammenprall von Kulturkreisen im Weltdorf unter dem Blickwinkel des erhebenden Scheiterns bei Karl Jaspers H. Stelzer: Das Aufbrechen fixierter Weltbilder in der interkulturellen Kommunikation E. Struchholz: Karl Jaspers und Jacob Burckhardt: Existenz und Existenzbild A. Takahashi: Zur Wechselbeziehung zwischen der Kommunikation in der Geschichte und derjenigen in unserer Zeit bei Jaspers M. Wirtz: Die Regionen des Geistes. Zur interkulturellen Relevanz einer Weltphilosophiegeschichtsschreibung nach Karl Jaspers M. Wischke: Kommunikative Übergänge und Grenzsituationen. Über Schuld und Gedächtnis bei Jaspers. (shrink)

Subject to severe financial constraints while operating within a regime of moral panics driven by the `war on terrorism', higher education in the United States faces both a legitimation crisis and a political crisis. With its increasing reliance on Pentagon and corporate interests, the academy has largely opened its doors to serving private and governmental interests and in doing so has compromised its role as a democratic public sphere. This article situates the development of the university as a militarized (...) knowledge factory within the broader context of what I call the biopolitics of militarization and its increasing influence and power within American society after the tragic events of September 11, 2001. Highlighting and critically engaging the specific ways in which the forces of militarization are shaping various aspects of university life, this article focuses on the growth of militarized knowledge and research, the increasing development of academic programs and schools that serve military personnel, and the ongoing production of military values and subject positions on US campuses. It also charts how the alliance between the university and the national security state has undermined the university as a site of criticism, dissent and critical dialogue. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.3 (2000) 221-242 [Access article in PDF] Reigning in the Court of Silence: Women and Rhetorical Space in Postbellum America Nan Johnson [Figures]Nervous, enthusiastic, and talkative women are the foam and sparkle, quiet women the wine of life. The senses ache and grow weary of the perpetual glare and brilliancy of the former, but turn with a sense of security and repose to the mild, mellow (...) glow irradiating the sphere of the latter. We associate all ideas of rest with quiet women. They are soul-divinities reverently guarding their sacred trusts in the Court of Silence. When she speaks, her words are aptly chosen and fitly spoken. She is wise and thoughtful, but loving and meek. "Still waters run deep," but not in the world-applied sense; babbling rills do not wear their channels deep, but streams of calmest flow have hidden depths undreamed of, unsuspected.--Anonymous, "Quiet Women" 461In an article entitled "Quiet Women," which appeared in The Ladies' Repository in 1868, an anonymous author argues that "quiet women are the wine of life." Capturing the deep cultural longing of the postbellum period for the icon of the American woman as angel of the hearth, this portrait deifies the quiet woman and demonizes the other possibilities: the enthusiastic woman, the talkative woman, the brilliant woman, and the babbling woman. The mild and mellow queen of the "Court of Silence" is graceful, calm, and, most important of all, silent. In this characterization, an idealized woman is defined as necessarily rhetorically meek. By worshiping "the quiet woman," influential proponents of public opinion such as The Ladies' Repository reinscribed for a postbellum readership a definition of true womanhood that equated silence with feminine virtue and enthusiastic vocality with its opposite. The argument that the rhetorical conduct of the "wise and thoughtful" woman could be contrasted instructively with the trivial and ultimately inconsequential rhetorical behavior of loud and talkative women is one that was made in so many cultural conversations of the postbellum period that it achieved the power of an ideological trope. 1 [End Page 221]Efforts to regulate women's rhetorical behavior intensified rather than abated in the decades following the Civil War as women pursued education, the right to vote, property rights, and mobility in public life. In conduct literature, a genre that proliferated during the postbellum period, the preferred construction of the "quiet" woman was a mainstay in an ideological agenda that supported the generally held nineteenth-century view that character and the nature of one's rhetoric are mutually revealing. Like other types of self-help materials marketed in the last decades of the century, such as elocution manuals and letter-writing guides, conduct manuals included among their vast tables of contents the matters of how and where one ought to speak. In their coverage of deportment in all areas of life, conduct manuals promised the aspiring middle-class American an education in the home in the culturally valuable skills of public speaking and writing. 2 The collective enterprise of the parlor rhetoric movement and conduct literature in particular was to offer happiness and success to those who would follow certain rules. Enormously popular in the postbellum period and well into the turn of the century, conduct manuals argued a conservative gender agenda that appealed to the middle-class readers of a nation who seemed eager to accept the idea that correct deportment in daily life could help to restore the social calm the postwar nation longed for. Although by the 1880s the American public had well in mind notable examples of women, such as Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Frances Willard, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had assumed powerful reformist voices in the causes of abolition, temperance, and women's rights, the rhetorical space these women occupied in shaping political and cultural life was viewed as the exception rather than the rule. 3 In spite of the high profile rhetorical careers of a handful of women, or, perhaps, because of them, postbellum America wondered uneasily just how public women's lives... (shrink)

Na sveprisutnu opasnost buđenja novih totalitarizama koji uništavaju društvenost i pluralizam, kao moguću posljedicu otuđenja Moderne, upozorila je autorica čije shvaćanje društvenosti čovjeka stoji u aporiji zbog opozicionalnosti između preferiranja elitističke političke slobode antike i augustinovske egalitarne slobode, urođene svim ljudskim bićima. Taj dvovrsni argumentacijski teorijski pravac uvjetovao je njezinu interpretaciju antičkog polisa kao ideala političke zajednice, te razdvajanje socijalne od političke problematike. Prema njoj, Akvinski čini grešku i izjednačava termine politicus i socialis, a to preuzima i Moderna. Ovo je (...) vidljivo npr. u tome što socijalna, ekonomska i tehnička pitanja sve više ulaze u politički prostor . Štošta je tome pomoglo, kako npr. tzv. protestantska etika tako i Francuska revolucija. Mnoštvo "poniženih i uvrijeđenih" željelo je u nastupu novog svijeta svoje osnovne biološke potrebe rješavati kroz ulazak u javnu sferu. Politički elitizam Hannah Arendt taj nastup mnogobrojnih zahtjeva za socijalnom jednakošću i socijalnom emancipacijom smatra dekadencijom autentičnog javnog područja, izvorno slobodnog od nužnosti života. Kako se ovakva pozicija referira na konkretnu problematiku segregacije u javnom obrazovanju, pokazuje analiza njezina teksta "Reflections on Little Rock".Hannah Arendt, whose comprehension of human beings’ sociability stands in aporia because ofoppositionality between preference for elitist political freedom of antiquity and Augustinian egalitarianfreedom, inborn to all human beings, warned of omnipresent peril of awakening of new totalitarianismswhich destroy sociability and pluralism, as a possible consequence of Modernism’salienation. That dual theoretical line of arguing determined her interpretation of antique polis asan ideal of political community, and one of separating social from political problems. According toher, Aquinas made a mistake in equating terms politicus and socialis, and Modernism accepts thatequation. This can be seen in progressive intrusion of social, economic and technical issues into political space . Many factors contributed to that situation, i.e. the Protestant Ethic and FrenchRevolution. In awakening of the new world, many of the oppressed and insulted wanted to satisfytheir basic biological needs by entering the public spheres. Hannah Arendt’s political elitism considersthe emergence of multiple demands for social equality and social emancipation as a decadenceof authentic public space, that is originally free from life’s necessities. My analysis of Arendt’stext »Reflections on Little Rock« shows the consequences of such position in specific problem ofsegregation in public education. (shrink)

Values formed in culture, reflecting social relations, fulfilling a regulatory role, are defined as norms fixed in the culture of society. Moral norms that combine such properties of morality as normativity, imperativeness and evaluativeness act as significant foundations of culture. Values and norms enshrined in culture contribute to the integration and spiritual development of society The transformational processes taking place in modern society have influence on the value system. The relevance of this study is determined by (...) the dialectic of emerging contradictions in modern Russian culture caused by the formation of ambivalent values, norms, and attitudes in mass culture that have a negative impact on collective consciousness, on changing the value foundations of culture in modern society, which jeopardizes the safety of culture. In the focus of the analyzed problem, kitsch culture as a phenomenon of mass culture acts as the subject of research. The purpose of the study is to identify threats to cultural security coming from kitsch culture, which transforms the value foundations of culture, and to identify strategies to protect Russian culture. The study of the voiced issues is carried out through the prism of socio-cultural, structural-functional, interdisciplinary approaches. The novelty of the studied problem lies in the fact that kitsch culture acts as a pseudo-culture, which is devoid of aesthetic and artistic value and moral content, as one of the sources that creates certain risks and poses threats to cultural security. In particular, we are talking about the organization of joint activities of government agencies, public organizations, scientific, cultural and educational spheres, based on the principles of optimizing the constructive impact on the consciousness of the younger generation through the mediation process and inculturation. (shrink)

Small wonder: finitude and its horizons -- The underside of modernity: Adorno, Heidegger, and Dussel -- Empire or cosmopolis: civilization at the crossroads -- Confronting empire: a tribute to Arundhati Roy -- Speaking truth to power: in memory of Edward Said -- Critical intellectuals in a global age: toward a global public sphere -- Social identity and creative praxis: hommage á Merleau-Ponty -- Nature and artifact: Gadamer on human health -- Borders or horizons?: an older debate revisited -- Empire (...) and faith: sacred non-sovereignty -- Appendix: A. The dignity of difference: a salute to Jonathan Sacks -- B. Religion and rationality: Habermas and the early Frankfurt school -- Nomolatry and fidelity: a response to Charles Taylor. (shrink)

If genuine political activity can only be undertaken by citizens in the public sphere in a nation-state, what of stateless people today – asylum seekers and refugees cut adrift on the high seas? This is what is at stake in Hannah Arendt’s political theory of necessity. This article reconsiders Arendt’s notion of the Greek oikos (household) as the sphere of necessity with the aim of challenging the idea that there is a condition of necessity or mere subsistence, where life (...) is reduced to satisfying basic biological needs. For Arendt, the Greek oikos is the model that provides the inspiration for her theory because necessity activities were kept quite separate from action in the polis. The ordinary and the undistinguished happen in the oikos and its equivalent, with the polis being reserved for extraordinary acts done for glory without any regard for life. The exclusionary nature of this theory of the polis as action has, at best, been treated with kid gloves by Arendt’s commentators. With reference to Heidegger on the polis and Agamben’s notion of oikonomia, I endeavour to show that the so-called ordinary is embedded in a way of life that is extraordinary and the key to grasping humanness. (shrink)

This contribution compares entries on Friedrich Froebel and the kindergarten in German and United States’ histories of education from 1857 to 1933. In the American histories, Froebel appears as the great “hero” of education of the 19th century, whereas in the German histories, Pestalozzi is the “hero.” This difference in the perspectives goes back to fundamental differences in the political culture and political traditions of the two countries, which differed greatly as to the shaping of the public and (...) private spheres. Consequently, there were also different views on public education. In the immigration society of the United States, it was important to integrate children with various language and cultural backgrounds. As families could not do this alone, public kindergartens were needed. In Germany, in contrast, Froebel’s idea of the kindergarten was seen as an attack on family ties, and Pestalozzi was highly esteemed, because he made home education central. The American interest in “making citizens” produced Froebel as the hero; the German interest in leaving the education of young children to mothers and in the family lauded Pestalozzi. This case study of the reception of Froebel in Germany and the United States illustrates the high context-dependence of the construction of educational “heroes.”. (shrink)

The issue of this paper is cultural plurality as a problem for public, general education and for identity. In order to examine this question, one needs to be clear about the meaning of the concepts of general education, on the one hand, and cultural diversity on the other. In the first section, we will fix the meaning of these concepts. A conceptual distinction between ‘cultural diversity’ and ‘cultural pluralism’ will be introduced. In the second section, it will be argued (...) that open pluralism can only be maintained if there is a basic common culture apart from the cultural diversity that pluralism affirms. Therefore, there is yet an indispensable role for general education in an open, pluralistic society. In the third section we will look at two metaphors that give an opposite significance to the relation between identity and diversity: the conversational metaphor and the food metaphor “mishmash”. The final section expands on the ‘conversational’ metaphor by way of an exposition of Ricoeur's hermeneutics of the self. It supplies us with a promising concept of identity that is not in complete opposition to diversity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to Masafumi Ogawa, “Music Teacher Education in Japan: Structure, Problems, and Perspectives”Peggy WheelerMasafumi Ogawa's paper presents challenge after challenge facing the teacher and the teacher educator in Japan. One has the sense that a lifetime of frustrations with the national curriculum, the set-up of student teaching, and the definition of music as a school subject each made its way into the paper. Even choosing to focus on teacher (...) training still leaves a very broad topic for a relatively short paper. The central challenge seems to be the curriculum. How does the curriculum impact the teacher and the teacher training process? How does the underlying definition of music as well as the purpose that definition implies affect the curriculum? His paper also identifies a series of dualities or tensions that exist between two important components: the curriculum or teacher education. The fact that Japanese and American music education systems seem to be at opposite ends of some of these dualities is a compelling reason for exploring and discussing them.In the arena of teacher preparation, the dualities as they appear in their relative proportion of the teacher education curriculum are (1) performance versus academic music courses, such as history, theory, and composition, and (2) education versus music courses—a familiar lament among music education students. In student teaching, modeling in the classroom by the cooperating teacher is contrasted with providing opportunities for the student teacher to experiment with the teaching process. Evaluation of student teaching is a three-way tension involving the student teacher, the cooperating teacher, and the university professor.In his discussion of the school curriculum, Ogawa deplores the triumph of attitude over skill, and pleads for discernment in the application of national standards to meet the needs of the community and students. He returns to the nature of music and music education at several points in his paper, expanding the meaning and function of music beyond music as art. His dissatisfaction with the seemingly teacher-proof curriculum peaks when he advocates for the autonomy of the teacher in the classroom. Giving teachers the opportunity to devise their own curriculum seems to go to the other extreme. Having taught with colleagues who had virtually no training in music, a standard curriculum at the district or national level provides some essential boundaries.Ogawa's discussion of the impact of the national Course of Study on Japanese music education was particularly intriguing. As teacher certification in the United [End Page 205] States has begun to promote and reward National Board Certification, it is striking to consider the restrictions and disempowerment that Ogawa describes and credits to the omnipresent Course of Study. For someone unfamiliar with the Japanese system of education, some of the descriptions were enticing but brief. Other descriptions were a bit confusing, but after visiting the MEXT website, I think most of this confusion is due to translation. It is difficult to take any phrase that is packed with meaning in one culture and find a suitable phrase in another culture that will convey the associations that are connected with it. I would recommend quoting complete descriptions or including an appendix. A reference to the history of Japanese music education on Kensho Takeshi's website would also provide more context, particularly for the connection between emotion, music, and ethics.I want to thank Ogawa for stimulating me to consider issues of curriculum including how I have changed my views of curriculum since I returned to school teaching. First, I will describe my change of perspective. Then I would like to close by describing an aspect of curriculum and teacher education that has surfaced this past year. I would call this the meta-curriculum, and I wonder how we can prepare new teachers for this part of teaching. It seems to me that the world of philosophy is the quintessential and perhaps the only appropriate arena for this preparation.Beyond Curriculum in the ClassroomLike the first spring rain on newly cut grass, music education has a fresh and vital look to me. I returned to public school teaching this year after a hiatus of seventeen years. After focusing on viola performance and liberal arts... (shrink)

This article investigates the specific cultural and collaborative nature of China’s public spaces and how they are formed through performative appropriations. Collective cultural practices as political participation were encouraged during the Mao era when cultural activities played a key role in workers’ education and participation. Since the opening-up period, performance in public space has become widespread in China and creates alternative community spaces that constitute alternatives to capitalist spaces of consumption. Using Habermas’s theory of communicative action, we argue (...) that cultural practices performed in public space create a proletariat public sphere that plays a wider role in governance and China’s democratization. Further, the article examines performative practices in public space. It traces the popular activity of public square dancing through history and counters this research with a parallel study of a much younger skateboarding practice. The two practices are very differently rooted. Yet both practices appear to move through cycles of disruption and appropriation, followed by an affirmation of governmental rule. The studies reveal that western ideas of citizenship and individual leisure are less applicable. Public spaces are largely managed through collaborative practices, whereas contemporary scholarship reaffirms Fei Xiaotong’s description of Chinese society as individuals positioned within a complex network of concentric circles. (shrink)

This article proposes to analyse some aspects of the appropriation of New School thinking in Brazil, particularly Deweyan pragmatism, in the 1950s and 1960s. The analysis is based on the assumption that the developmentalist ideology that punctuated the debate on the economic, political and social restructuring of the country in these two decades constituted fertile ground for the return and expansion of pragmatist thinking amongst Brazilian educators, articulating itself, sometimes in contradictory ways, with this ideology. The focus of the analysis (...) will be on the writings of the group of educators which circulated around the figure of Anísio Teixeira, at the time director of the National Institute for Pedagogic Studies, an organ linked to the Ministry of Education and Culture, which set itself the task of producing research that would support public policy in the field of education, as well as constituting itself as a center for teacher education and the stimulus and development of innovative experiences in the public school system. The appropriation of Deweyan pragmatism, in this context, had a triple perspective: pragmatism as scientific method, implying a specific conception of science, particularly the social sciences, with emphasis on the application of scientific knowledge in the solution of practical problems; as a way of democratic life; and as a synonym for experimentalism, in the sphere of schooling. (shrink)

The main thesis of this article is that Western societies risk becoming Balkanized if they confront the superdiversity issue without sound management of intolerance. The Balkanization process has some essential features that allow the use of this term outside the area of origin (namely the Balkan Peninsula). Thus: It always affects a diverse political unit that comprises an inextricable medley of racial, ethnocultural, religious, ideological, or gender identities. It emerges only where neither the hegemony principle nor the confederacy principle can (...) sustain a divided population’s peaceful coexistence. It entails “antagonistic and conflict-oriented relationships resistant to resolution” between the groups or classes dissociated from a diverse political unit. It increases the density of physical and psychological boundaries between the formerly associated parts. It is perpetuated by the great sponsors of the dissociated parts. Any diverse political unit can enter a process of Balkanization, regardless of its degree of culture and civilization. Balkanization does not have a fatal course. Just as there is no society immune to Balkanization, there is no diverse society doomed to Balkanization. Balkanization can be prevented, checked, stopped, or reversed, depending on society members’ individual and collective actions. To survive, the superdiverse liberal democracies from the Euro-Atlantic area need an agonistic public sphere, where actionable truths emerge from a genuine clash of educated opinions. If intolerance management is the first step in preventing the Balkanization of a superdiverse political unit, promoting social and political tolerance towards all people who express educated opinions is the best starting point to genuine tolerance. The return to Enlightenment rationalism values that underpinned our freedom of thought and expression will help us meet the challenges inherent in current and future superdiversity. By feeding enlightened conversations and debates with genuine, educated opinions, people learn to have tolerance for “unpleasant” pieces of knowledge. Then, they spread general tolerance – as a by-product – across the entire society. (shrink)

Gender equality continues to be a topic of ongoing public concern, with various alternatives proposed to achieve the ideal gender equality. Despite the utilisation of various references, the desired outcomes have yet to be realised. Local traditions in Minahasa and Christian religious education (CRE) in Indonesia offer constructive alternatives for gender equality efforts. While the political, religious and social spheres have not strongly supported gender equality, Minahasan culture and philosophy have long advocated for gender equality. Using a qualitative (...) approach with descriptive analysis, this study draws references from various books and articles to construct the idea of gender equality from the local context of Minahasa. In conclusion, the historical origins of Minahasa, traditions of leadership such as tonaas and walian, as well as the philosophy of equality in life and CRE, contribute to the values of gender equality.Contribution: This research presents the idea of gender equality drawn from the local values of Minahasa and CRE in Indonesia. Thus, the cultural-educational perspective can significantly impact social life and help combat gender discrimination. (shrink)

El actual debate sobre el papel de la "esfera pública" en la política moderna no asume un concepto único de lo "público". La reconstrucción habermasiana de la esfera pública enfatiza la apertura inclusiva de la interacción discursiva a través de la sociedad civil, pero también sus efectos políticos al proveer legitimación reflexiva y una formación racional de la opinión. La esfera pública también se relaciona con el aparecer en común y actuar juntos; o es vinculada con la cultura política, con (...) los códigos sociales de expresión y los modos de presentación entre otros, con la opinión pública y con los múltiples públicos de la sociedad civil moderna. Tocqueville propone una interpretación matizada y multidimensional del espíritu público en la revolución democrática moderna. De ese modo, va más allá de las interpretaciones del espacio público racionalistas e idealizadas (como un ámbito comprehensivo de consenso discursivo); a través de la interpretación de Tocqueville de la sociedad y la cultura pública democráticas, se esboza la posibilidad de una esfera pública descentrada y asimétrica. Current debate over the role of "public sphere" in modern politics does not presuppose a single conception of the "public". Habermas' reconstruction of public sphere stresses the inclusive openness of discursive interaction through civil society, but also its political effects in providing reflexive legitimization and a rational formation of opinion. Public sphere is related also to appearing in common and acting together; or it is linked with public political culture, with social codes of expression and modes of presentation between others, with public opinion and with the multiple publics of modern civil society. Tocqueville proposes a qualified and multidimensional interpretation of the public spirit in modern democratic revolution. So, he goes beyond rationalist and idealized interpretations of public sphere (as a comprehensive realm of discursive consensus); through Tocqueville's interpretation of democratic society and political culture, the possibility of a de-centered and asymmetrical public sphere is outlined. (shrink)

The paper attempts to explore notions of public-private dichotomy with reference to collective agency and inclusion. It looks at a women’s shelter run by a missionary wife Julie Gundert of the Basel Mission in nineteenth-century Malabar. The missionaries played a key role in the introduction of printing and the development of a modern public sphere in the region: a space, nevertheless, restricted to men from the educated elite classes. Julie’s shelter, meanwhile, provides an alternate cultural space where women, (...) especially those from the excluded communities, the disabled, the abandoned and the lowest classes and castes could come together. The shelter is seen as a location of intimate and privatised cultural contact radically different from that practised in the formal, restrictive sites of the emerging public sphere; a space where subaltern cultures challenged the status of the visible public sphere as the key platform for social-cultural inclusion and agency. (shrink)