Darwich (2020) asked "What Kind of Citizens Do Educators Hope Their Students Become?" in her response to "Storypath: A Powerful Tool for Engaging Children in Civic Education" (McGuire et al., 2019). She argued that civics should be rooted in social justice grounded by critical civic empathy, which requires focusing on power and…

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…

In this interview, Dr. Amy Gutmann discusses the legacy of her book "Democratic Education" after 30 years since it was first published. After presenting some of the main ideas from "Democratic Education," Dr. Gutmann emphasises the importance of both democratic education and democratic deliberation as central elements of public…

On January 10, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the Albert Shanker Institute cosponsored a panel moderated by AFT President Randi Weingarten on the role that American education should play in responding to the threats confronting our democracy. Two leading public intellectuals, Timothy Snyder, the Richard C. Levin Professor of History…

Henry Giroux begins this discussion by observing that he thinks there is a lot to be learned about what happens to higher education when authoritarians win elections and a liberal democracy morphs into something else. Giroux believes that under the regime of Donald Trump, higher education is under siege, and its stated purpose to produce the…

The 2016 presidential campaign and its aftermath have underscored the extreme polarization of the electorate, the dismissal of people with opposing views, and the widespread acceptance and circulation of one-sided and factually erroneous information. In addition, only a small proportion of those who are eligible actually vote, and a declining…

This Cousins Research Group report includes two articles by Kettering Foundation president David Mathews that were published previously. "The Public for Public Schools Is Slipping" was first published in "Education Week" in 1995. The second piece, "Putting the Public Back into Public Education: An Old-Fashioned Remedy for…

New religious diversity of the late 20th and early 21st centuries requires Americans to move from the idea of a Judeo-Christian America to that of an Interfaith America. This article notes that a big part of America's current problem is how it has sacralized its tribal divide, with tribalism in today's America taking a particularly dangerous turn.…

One of Amy Gutmann's important achievements in "Democratic Education" is her development of a "democratic interpretation of equal educational opportunity." This standard of equality demands that "all educable children learn enough to participate effectively in the democratic process." In other words, Gutmann demands…

In this article, the author explores key distinctions relevant to aims talk in education. He argues that present formulations of aims fail to adequately capture or speak to several overlapping domains involved in schooling: qualification, socialization, and the educational in the form of subjectification (Biesta, 2010). Drawing off Egan and Biesta…

In this essay, Marianna Papastephanou discusses three books--Michalinos Zembylas's "The Politics of Trauma in Education"; Sigal Ben-Porath's "Citizenship Under Fire: Democratic Education in Times of Conflict"; and Kenneth Saltman's "Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools"--from the perspective of the material causality of…

The author takes up the invitation to engage in the dialogue on the imperatives for civic engagement in teacher education at the intersections of youth, immigration, and globalization in urban contexts--especially when given that many of the youth in K-12 schools are immigrants or children of immigrants. The first imperative considers the…

After a brief overview of what intellectual virtues are, I offer three arguments for the claim that education should aim at fostering "intellectual character virtues" like curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual courage, and intellectual honesty. I then go on to discuss several pedagogical and related strategies for achieving this aim. (Contains…

In this article I synthesise and apply elements of political and reading theory to demonstrate how central themes in learners' lives (such as freedom, faith, autonomy, equality, rationality and rights) can be read and interpreted differently. I suggest that policy and pedagogy for citizenship and democratic education informed by research into…

A resurgence of national and international interest in citizenship education, citizenship and social cohesion has been coupled with an apparent emergence of a language of crisis (Sears & Hyslop-Margison, 2006). Given this background, how can or should one consider a subjective sense of membership in a single political community? What this article…