Identity, Culture, and Conversation in Public Education: A New Focus on the Educational Foundation of a Public
This paper establishes that public education must contribute to creating a public and to renewing the way to achieve it in light of a wide-ranging pluralism. A radical pluralism underscores differences in culture and identity as the resources of moral perspectives indispensable to public deliberation, and forces the public to respect them in their own terms. But a public also needs some common ground for public deliberation. Otherwise, a public has little means to accommodate competing perspectives. Thus, public education is required to allow students to search for the common ground of public deliberation, where all individuals can participate as free and equal members, while allowing them to develop diverse cultures and identities, and their own perspectives. I examine three models of the public (the disengagement model of Foucault and Ellsworth, the articulation model of Hall, MacIntyre, Taylor, and Giroux, and the communication model of Habermas) and their educational recommendations to achieve a workable balance between these two goals for the creation of a public.
Education, Bilingual and Multicultural, Political Science, General, Education, Philosophy of
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign