Habermas, lifelong learning and citizenship education

Abstract

Citizenship and its education is again gaining importance in many countries. This paper uses England as its primary example to develop a Habermasian perspective on this issue. The statutory requirements for citizenship education in England imply that significant attention be given to the moral and social development of the learner over time, to the active engagement of the learner in community and to the knowledge skills and understanding necessary for political action. This paper sets out a theoretical framework that offers a perspective on learning suitable for these far-reaching aims. We argue that schools need to shift from the currently dominant discourse of accountability to incorporate a discourse of care in order to make room for an effective and appropriate pedagogy for citizenship. Habermas's social theory gives us a theoretical framework that properly locates schools within the lifeworld as part of civil society. Schools should therefore attend to hermeneutical and emancipatory concerns, not only to strategic interests. We put these in the context of Habermas's social theory to paint an alternative vision learning for citizenship education which is based in developing the dispositions, values and attitudes necessary for lifelong learning with a view to developing ongoing communicative action.

Quality teaching and values education: coalescing for effective learning

“…Habermas's theory of knowing has been instrumental in much of the thought that educationists have seized on in attempting to deepen our understanding of learning and stretching conceptions of the role of the teacher (cf. Deakin-Crick & Joldersma, 2007) One might caricature him as saying 'There is no knowing without knowing the knower', and the knower is oneself. In a sense, the ultimate point of the learning game is to be found in knowing oneself, and the consequent change of belief and behaviour, that inevitably follows.…”

Marketising Slovene adult education policies and practices using mechanisms of the Europeanisation of education

“…Factors that have ʻcolonisedʼ (Deakin Crick & Joldersma, 2007) European AE policy occur at least on three levels: 1) the marketised purpose of AE, 2) commodified valuable knowledge and 3) the formation of desirable forms of neoliberal subjectivity. Below, these factors are shortly described in more detail: 1) "Marketised purpose of AE".…”

On the Art of Being Wrong: An Essay on the Dialectic of Errors

“…And this is a question not only for the individual ( I really thought he loved me, but he was only trying to …) but for the society at large (and for social theory) as well. It might be that we without intention have created a society, or an educational system (Leisner, 2006; Deakin Crick and Joldersma, 2007), which systematically neglects this important distinction. Thus, we clearly see how Habermas' theory might be understood as an effort to grasp and delimit falsifiable knowledge, an effort, that is, to avoid the mistake of regarding simple mistakes as the only kind of mistake.…”