Education for Problematization: A Democratic Reconstruction of the School
Open Access
- Author:
- Swanson, Jared
- Graduate Program:
- Philosophy
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- December 13, 2012
- Committee Members:
- John Philip Christman, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Vincent M Colapietro, Committee Member
Christopher P Long, Committee Member
Jeffrey Nealon, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Deliberative Democracy
Civic Education
Critical Theory
Jürgen Habermas
John Dewey
Michel Foucault
Problematization - Abstract:
- This dissertation is an inquiry into the contemporary theory of democratic education, exploring in particular the demands that a vital pluralist politics places upon public educational institutions and their affiliated pedagogical practices. In the past two decades, political theorists have articulated a variety of new conceptions of civic education, including prominent communitarian and deliberative democratic variants, that emphasize the need to halt the increasing dominance of economic rationality within the school and to reorganize the institution to reinvigorate more robustly ethical forms of socialization. Although many educational critics concur that the narrowly economic goals of contemporary education are detrimental to the stability of society and the psychic health of the individual, serious theoretical debate has arisen around the question of whether it is the cosmopolitan normative principles of deliberative democracy or the culturally grounded ethical schemas of traditional communities that ought to take the lead in reconstructing the institution of the school. I argue in this dissertation that both the deliberative and communitarian trends within civic educational theory alike have insufficiently considered the interdependence of robust ethical culture and a resilient democratic public; the mechanisms of democratic debate, I contend, ought to be understood pragmatically as tools for resolving trans-communal problems, while cultural frameworks of value ought to be understood as sensitive normative instruments for detecting and publicizing emergent threats to social life. Relying upon a pragmatic conception of democratic citizenship adapted from the work of John Dewey, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas, I argue that the work of democratic education accordingly must be reconstructed around the activity of communicative problematization. If democratic politics is to continue to be responsive to the needs of the public, young citizens must be habituated and encouraged to engage in cooperative practices of social criticism, drawing on the normative motivations of their ethical lifeworld to criticize and publicize the problems encountered in their individual social experience.