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Analyses the relationships between cultural coherence, cultural pluralism, civic education, and autonomy. Section 4.1 argues that the skills, habits, values, and beliefs that underlie the capacity for autonomy also underlie the capacity for citizenship; hence, education for citizenship and for autonomy are mutually reinforcing. Section 4.2 develops an ‘English’ model of political liberal education, contrasting it with an ‘American’ model developed in Section 4.3 and a ‘French’ model in Section 4.4. Section 4.5 concludes that all of these political liberal models of education, which attempt in different ways to balance cultural coherence and civic virtue without promoting autonomy, are inferior—on both theoretical and empirical grounds—to weakly perfectionist liberal education.

The essays in Part III of the book, on liberal constraints and traditionalist education, argue for a more regulatory conception of liberal education and emphasize the need for some controls over cultural and religious educational authority. Kevin McDonough’s essay, on multinational civic education, develops a conception of this that allows for both federal and minority national groups to reinforce conditional civic attachments. This ‘conditionalist’ view of civic education is necessary in multinational federal societies, he argues, because appeals to one set of national attachments may exacerbate rather than alleviate particular injustices in particular circumstances. For example, McDonough argues that when aboriginal women and children are the victims of injustice at the hands of tribal institutions and leaders, they must be able to appeal to their fellow non-aboriginal citizens and federal institutions for assistance, although this is not possible unless citizens – aboriginal and otherwise – have come to regard attachments to the minority nation as conditional rather than absolute. Similarly, citizens whose primary identification is to the federal society must be able to recognize that some of their fellow citizens legitimately have a minority nation as the object of their primary loyalty – otherwise, efforts to support federal intervention in minority national affairs will be vulnerable to forces of cultural insensitivity and arrogance, rather than of liberal justice.

Canvasses some of the ineradicable obstacles to success in liberal democratic civic education. The persistence of unreasonable pluralism in any society is the most obvious obstacle; another is the permanent fact of reasonable pluralism; and finally, the tension between the ‘rational’ and the ‘reasonable’ in the lives of ordinary citizens would be an inevitable source of failure even if these other two could be surmounted.

While young children lack the moral powers that Rawls calls a conception of the good and a sense of justice, psychological data show that adolescents are closer to adults in this respect. The idea that civic education should be compulsory for younger person but not for adults cannot be justified by appeal to the supposed incapacities of the former. A more democratic ’participation‐oriented’ approach to the civic education of the young is more appropriate than an ’authority‐oriented’ approach. Such an approach is a requirement that flows from according younger persons the respect that justice requires.

This is the third of the four essays in Part II of the book on liberalism and traditionalist education; all four are by authors who would like to find ways for the liberal state to honour the self-definitions of traditional cultures and to find ways of avoiding a confrontation with differences. David Blacker’s essay on civic friendship and democratic education develops a Rawlsian conception of civic friendship, the scaffolding of which is necessarily provided by the wide range of comprehensive conceptions of the good that characterize democratic societies. Thus, Blacker argues, a democratic civic education ‘allows citizens to embrace democracy on their own terms, drawing support for democracy’s requisite political conceptions from the perspectives of citizens’ many different secular and/or religious comprehensive doctrines’. For Blacker, a conception of civic friendship that is friendly to citizens’ multiple comprehensive doctrines also entails a substantial lowering of the ‘wall of separation’ between church and state so that courts might be more willing than they currently are to allow the use of state funds to support religious groups, in particular where these groups perform functions within public (common) schools that converge with public interests. The essay concludes by proposing and defending two American educational policy initiatives that are consistent with Blacker’s politically liberal ideal of civic friendship – the revival of a ‘school stamps’ plan first proposed in the 1970s, and a modified version of a ‘clergy in the schools’ programme recently struck down by a federal circuit court in Texas.

Jeremy Waldron’s essay centres around Martha Nussbaum’s ideas on cosmopolitan education: Nussbaum argues that we should make ‘world citizenship, rather than democratic or national citizenship, the focus for civic education’. The essay provides just a few examples to illustrate the concrete particularity of the world community for which we are urged by Nussbaum to take responsibility, with the aim of refuting the view of those who condemn cosmopolitanism as an abstraction. The arguments for and against Nussbaum’s idea (universalism vs particularism) are presented, and one of the opposing views highlighted: that cosmopolitan moral education is not just an education in moral ideas; it is (or ought to be) an education in the particular ways in which people have inhabited the world (rather than the purely local aspects of their inhabiting particular territories). The different sections of the chapter look at how a society becomes multicultural, the infrastructure of cultural interaction, the identification of citizenship (citizenship in relation to civic responsibility, exclusivity, subjection), the language of citizenship, and its concrete reality and its cosmopolitan dimensions.

This chapter proposes a service learning approach to civic education the United States. It reviews the American conception of service and citizenship that may serve as the context for any program of education-based community service. It explains the two complementary approaches to service learning. The first aims at attracting student volunteers into service projects as part of a strategy aimed at strengthening altruism, individualism and self-reliance, and the other is rooted in the convergence of self-interest and public good in the setting of a healthy community.

Attaining an inclusive public space requires citizens as well as leaders to be religiously literate. Citizens and leaders do not need to become scholars of religion, but they need to understand the basics of religious identities. This chapter asserts that citizens must learn to listen to one another’s stories, to share their own, and to find areas of both agreement and disagreement. Religious literacy can happen through formal civic education, which can be part of teaching about religion in public schools, private schools, and higher education. As a comparison to the U.S., the chapter analyzes how religion is taught in public schools in Spain. The chapter also considers religion and the media, and asserts that journalists can play a role in promoting public understanding of religion in its diverse forms.

This chapter elaborates on the relationship between Confucian political perfectionism and democracy, suggesting that the two are complementary and can strengthen each other. Democracy promotes Confucian political ends such as the improvement of people's well-being and directly expresses the Confucian ideal political relationship. Meanwhile, the Confucian perfectionist approach to ethics and politics provides a robust ethical foundation for a well-functioning democracy. The chapter argues that Confucian moral education, which is humanity-based rather than citizen-based, provides a stronger incentive for citizens to cultivate civility than liberal civic education, as well as a more comprehensive foundation of virtues. Confucian political perfectionism can also offer some reflection on how to select virtuous and competent people to serve in politics.

Beginning with Meridel Le Sueur's River Road: A Story of Abraham Lincoln, this chapter examines children's literature, primarily from the 1940s and 1950s, which employed history, folklore, and American tradition toward a project of “leftist civic education”. Radicals both rewrote master narratives to emphasize a working-class perspective, and also recovered the stories of marginalized people, particularly members of the working class, women, and African Americans. Ironically, by creating markets for children's books dealing with American history and life, civic education programs and other school initiatives usually designed to boost children's patriotism fostered the production of books that used the past to criticize conditions in the present. The chapter explores the traditional association between the Left and folklore as it played out in children's literature. Finally, using biographies of black women by Dorothy Sterling, Ann Petry, Emma Gelders Sterne, and Shirley Graham, it traces leftist concern with African Americans and with women, as these played out in historical works for children.

This chapter describes a conceptual framework for developing civic education for citizen and non-citizen students. Human rights cosmopolitan education is conceptualized as the focus of civic education for non-citizen students. Multicultural citizenship education is conceptualized as the focus of civic education for citizen students from diverse groups who are marginalized because of their racial, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious characteristics. Multicultural citizenship education helps students from diverse groups become full participants in the nation-state while maintaining important aspects of their home and community cultures. The author maintains that transformative civic education should be implemented in schools because it incorporates elements of both human rights cosmopolitan education and multicultural citizenship education. It also helps both non-citizen and citizen students to acquire the knowledge, skills, and values needed to make reflective decisions, internalize human rights values, and take personal, social, and civic action.

This chapter advocates a search for compromises between educators and parents to offset the burdens imposed by apparently neutral education for citizenship. It considers the anti-accommodationist policy of political liberals in the sphere of civic education and questions their characterisation of religious devotion as a source of political unreasonableness. It contends that a liberal system bears some remedial responsibility for its effect on non-mainstream world views and shows how civic ends can be achieved without intolerance towards those who espouse beliefs that fall outside the mainstream. It re-evaluates concerns about cases such as Mozert v. Hawkins by shifting attention from the manner in which evangelical Christians (purportedly) hold their beliefs towards the subject matter of the accommodation that they demand.

This chapter explores potential implications of eighteenth-century sentimentalism for both academic research and public policy in the twenty-first century. It begins with the many potential contributions Enlightenment sentimentalism could make to today’s empirical social science, in disciplines from neuroscience to behavioral economics to descriptive moral and political psychology. It then goes on to explore sentimentalism’s potential contribution to normative moral and political philosophy, with a focus on the distinctive sentimentalist position on the proper relationship between facts and values, and hence between empirical science and normative theory. The chapter concludes by pointing out that, in addition to being of considerable academic interest, sentimentalist theory could also help improve political practice in matters including democratic deliberation and civic education.

Chapter 6 addresses global civic education as a focus of higher education. It aims to overcome widely perceived tensions between patriotism and international cooperation and skepticism about the idea of global citizenship and the possibility of global civic friendship. It argues that global civic education is needed both to prepare students for global cooperation in a world of global interdependence, and as a foundation for the legitimacy of the terms of international governance. The formative goal of such education is to prepare global citizens who (1) possess understanding, capabilities, and virtues conducive to living well together as members of a cooperative global community; (2) are engaged in global constitutional activity exhibiting such understanding, capabilities, and virtues; and (3) are connected to one another by bonds of global civic friendship. The chapter envisions these attributes, activities, and bonds as grounded in a liberal arts curriculum and established largely through participation in global service projects. The form of civic education defended is a globalized version of the Progressive Era’s “community civics” model, and the chapter concludes with the proposal that global and community-based problem-focused learning be bridged by regional initiatives that address the problems of rural communities left behind by economic globalization.

Global egalitarian principles call for a political distribution of responsibilities which are in turn dependent on relevant political and institutional reforms. For this kind of reform to be both politically feasible and motivationally sustainable, the chapter argues, existing associative relations are crucial. Cosmopolitanism becomes politically effective by taking advantage of political mechanisms that allow citizens to transform collective institutions by putting constraints on each other’s action. It may hope to be stably maintained by appealing to familiar learning processes, a particular sense of justice, and cultural resources that motivate existing moral agents. To clarify both points, the chapter invokes the concepts of popular sovereignty and civic education mentioned when exploring the tensions between cosmopolitanism and patriotism during the Enlightenment, and examines their application to the global justice debate.

When we consider civic education, we are led to ask whether parents have a right to share a way of life with their children and whether the State may justifiably shape the values of its future citizens. And when we try to answer these questions, we may on occasion have to deal with tensions and conflicts between respecting diversity and protecting adults’ rights to religious freedom, promoting the autonomy of the adults children will one day, and protecting the liberty of children. It is indeed the case that parents should not be permitted to sacrifice their children’s future autonomy for the sake of their (the parents’) religious beliefs, and nor should children’s license be permitted to undermine the project of education itself. But nonetheless, there are cases where we should accept some sacrifices in respect of future autonomy so as to better protect the liberty of children or their parents. For instance, in some cases we should allow children greater freedom to influence the design and delivery of civic education classes and to opt out of certain aspects of those programmes, if in doing so we guarantee gains in children’s liberty; and we should allow parents to remove their children from civic education classes, for short periods, and so as to engage in religious ceremonies, so as to respect diversity and protect parents’ right to liberty.

The introduction opens with an April 4, 1967 speech in which Martin Luther King argued that patriotic defense of American ideals sometimes requires protest and dissent. It goes on to pose several questions about the nature of patriotism, drawing on King’s speech, the lyrics of popular patriotic songs, controversies concerning patriotism and sporting events, and examples from the post 9.11 “war on terror” and nativist-authoritarian populist challenges to liberal democratic values. What is patriotism? How is it related to nationalism, dissent, inclusion, civic responsibility, and a government’s legitimacy? Is there a genuinely virtuous form of patriotism? Should schools attempt to cultivate patriotism, and if so why, how, and with what conception of patriotism in mind?

This introductory chapter identifies and analyzes the orthodox scholarly view of civic character education in a liberal democracy, where character education is understood as education that shapes its recipients’ values, beliefs, preferences, habits, identities, and sentiments. A portion of the orthodox view is defended, namely, its insistence on the necessity and legitimacy of some significant civic character education that is provided in part by the state. The chapter then documents and explores the orthodox view’s uncompromising commitment to cultivating and preserving critical autonomy as a civic virtue. The remaining chapters of the book will be dedicated to critiquing that commitment. The last sections of this introductory chapter specify the scope and limits of the project, explain the book’s overall structure and strategy, and sketch the major arguments of each subsequent chapter.

Schools have a sense of civic obligation to instill democratic values and personal morality among young people and to prepare them to be tomorrow's citizens. In the United States, traditional academic courses often emphasize citizenship, social norms, etc. and may include overt “character education” or “moral education” that almost always incorporates civic values, rights, responsibilities, and participation. This chapter examines the role of education in shaping citizenship and argues that the contemporary debates about education make it increasingly difficult for schools, especially public schools, to perform their traditional function: as custodians and transmitters of democratic values. It also considers a number of suggestions for strengthening school-based civic education, such as redoubling and reorienting “civic education” in the schools, introducing explicit “character education” programs into the schools, a complete overhaul of social studies, and school choice.