Would-be citizens must complete a multistep process that includes answering--in person and orally--10 questions selected from 100. These 100 questions range across civics, American government, US history, a bit of geography, and even major holidays and symbols. The revealing 2018 Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation survey shows that…

Hannah Arendt has been criticised for the sharp distinction she drew between the social and political realms, and her application of this distinction to schools. In this paper, I demonstrate that this distinction can be interpreted as a heuristic that Arendt developed to address a tension that she had encountered in her attempt to understand…

In Singapore, resilience lies at the heart of the nation's efforts at building a strong civic culture. For those experiencing urban poverty, resilience holds little weight against the national rhetoric of self-reliance and meritocracy as keys to success. This paper presents a three-way conversation between the researcher, applied theatre…

In this essay, Chung-Hin Kevin Ho, a history education university student in Hong Kong, narrates his search for civic identity. Composed through a process of critical and reflective dialogue with Hayes Tang, the essay describes the tension between Chung-Hin's Chinese ethnic and cultural identity and the democratic values held by Hong Kongers. As a…

This paper sets out to draw together a number of themes shared by four papers, three of which appear in this publication [Kopnina and Cherniak; Pashby and Andreotti (see EJ1108094); Sund (see EJ1108100) ; and Van Poeck, Goeminne and Vandenabeele (see EJ1108089)]. The frame of reference employed as a means of relating the papers is Rorty's…

Democracy needs dissent. More specifically, democracy needs citizens with "knowledge" of how to practice political dissent, a willingness to "think" about why and when such dissent is necessary, and "habituation" to the practice of good dissent. Where, then, are citizens to develop such habits? In Sarah Stitzlein's…

This is a response to Ásgeir Tryggvason's argument that the deliberative critique of the agonistic approach to citizenship education is based on a misreading of the main concepts in agonistic theory--a misreading that has important implications for any attempt to bring closer agonism and deliberation in citizenship education. My aim in this…

In this article, I will argue that the implementation of deliberative democracy needs to be supplemented by a specific political morality in order to cultivate free and equal citizens in exercising public reason for achieving a cooperative and inclusive liberal society. This cultivation of personality is literally an educational project with a…

As a postsecondary educator with most of my experience teaching in colleges, but with some also in undergraduate and postgraduate studies both in Canada and the United States, I have been teaching politics and government for close to fifty years. That time has been spent not only undertaking empirical analyses of political behaviour and the…

Postsecondary teacher, Howard Doughty, has been teaching politics and government for close to fifty years. That time has been spent not only working with the empirical analysis of political behaviour and the normative analysis of political theory, but also in the practical activity of promoting understanding of what is frequently called civic…

Since the 1990s, ethnic studies and other components of multicultural education have been criticized by neo-conservative and assimilationist scholars who maintain that school diversity initiatives weaken national identity and fail to help students attain the knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed to function effectively in the national mainstream…

Teacher education is charged with the goal of training teachers who will prepare the next generation of citizens. Since Horace Mann's common schools, teachers have been the purveyors of political education, often through teaching patriotic songs and celebrated historical events and individuals. Through liberal education and critical pedagogy,…

This article looks at the critical writings of Mark C. Taylor. It suggests that Mark C. Taylor is rewriting a global imaginary devoid of the kind of citizenship that Henry Giroux claims as the basis for public education. Instead, Taylor wants to see the university take shape as profit-generating. According to Taylor, in lieu of learning to take…

Education has become one of the foremost arenas in which political liberals attempt to differentiate their account from that of comprehensive liberals. Rawls posits that the requirements of his theory, as laid out in "Political Liberalism," will be far less stringent than those of liberals such as Kant, Mill or Joseph Raz. However, a number of…

In this essay, Bruce Maxwell, David Waddington, Kevin McDonough, Andree-Anne Cormier, and Marina Schwimmer compare two competing approaches to social integration policy, Multiculturalism and Interculturalism, from the perspective of the issue of the state funding and regulation of conservative religious schools. After identifying the key…