Sigal Ben-Porath

• Professor at University of Pennsylvania

Democracies are calling on schools to respond to a rise in extremist ideologies and actions. In this article Sigal Ben‐Porath situates the rise in extremism within the broader context of political polarization. She suggests that the latter is a more appropriate target for school intervention than the former. She further suggests that addressing pol...

This short essay relates the impact of war on democratic and civic education to similar impacts generated by persistent polarization and extremism. Some misguided responses to both are discussed, especially those that entrench nationalistic sentiments and undermine democratic attitudes, as well as responses focused on singling out some identity gro...

Historically, debates about educational choice have wrestled with big, unresolved tensions that lie at the heart of American life, having to do with individual rights, community obligations, public and private interests, religious freedoms, and more. But in recent years, school reformers have tended to talk about choice as though it referred only t...

Tensions around open expression at universities in the United States and around the world arise mainly from two sources. Campus members increasingly call to restrict hurtful and hate-based speech, and demand silencing, ‘cancelling’ or ‘de-platforming’ outside speakers and campus members who espouse extreme ideological views. At the same time, publi...

Objective We describe disparities in civic engagement along two axes: the modal, describing the extent to which civic engagement is structured, and its content, describing the extent to which civic engagement has partisan objectives. Accordingly, this structure creates four domains of civic engagement: associational–partisan (e.g., voting), social–...

This chapter surveys arguments in support of allowing parents to choose their children’s school, and considers key counterarguments prioritizing public and democratic goals. The chapter begins with an examination of the two themes in the debate: that privatization and market-based school choice is a solution to a cumbersome, overly bureaucratized p...

Parental choice and market-driven schooling are not new phenomena in the US. The book explored ways society balances public and private aims of schooling, asking: whose education is it? How much innovation do we encourage, and what kind of accountability? And what role do we seek for schools in building an inclusive, equitable society? Today certai...

Returning to the colonial period, this chapter revisits several key aspects of how parental choice evolved, through to the early republic. This first chapter reminds us of both the fundamental choice of schooling relative to other means of education (church, family, apprenticeship, etc.), as well as the wide mix of “providers” evident since our ear...

Online platforms enable free-form, spontaneous, unbridled political expression, blurring the public and private, the written and spoken, and the norms of formal and casual speech. Consequently, they pose new opportunities and challenges to civic interactions, necessitating a reconfiguration of the norms informing civic exchanges. In this paper, we...

Situationists have suggested that educational efforts to improve character and instill virtues should be abandoned, as individuals' behavior is predicted by contexts and situations rather than by character traits. More recently it has been suggested that civic education and especially the effort to cultivate civic virtues are ineffective for simila...

Modern democracies need an educated citizenry to survive and to thrive. “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1816, “it expects what never was and what never will be.” Democratic societies are both enriched and challenged by a diverse citizenry. Democratic education encompasses the vari...

Implementing school choice programs and bolstering parental engagement are both frequently touted as critical steps in improving educational outcomes in US schools. Many policy makers contend that by providing parents with more schooling options for their children, parents will become more involved in their children's education, resulting in better...

The expectation that schools resuscitate civic virtues and create a vibrant civic and public sphere competes with a more powerful contemporary demand on schools, namely, that they generate equal opportunity and mobility, especially for poor and minority youth. This equal opportunity is framed solely in the context of grades on standardized tests. T...

This chapter argues that the fate citizens share with each other—the institutional, historical, linguistic, cultural, territorial, and other dimensions which bind them together—should constitute the shared foundations of political membership, and that the project of defining and realizing shared national projects should be a key dimension of citize...

In contemporary democratic societies, many citizens are affiliated with a variety of sub-groups. Some forms of diversity are part of the human condition, while others evolve through political, technological and social developments. With the multiplicity of differences within a democratic framework, what continues to demarcate and bind together the...

This article examines the rationales for school choice, and the significance of choice mechanisms for racial disparities in educational opportunities and outcomes. It identifies tensions between liberty-based rationales and equality-based rationales, and surveys research findings on the outcomes of school choice policies, especially with regard to...

Teaching about Religions: A Democratic Approach for Public Schools. By LesterEmile. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2011. 314p. $70.00. - Volume 10 Issue 1 - Sigal R. Ben-Porath

The state's commitment to educating all children can be framed as a matter of human capital development, or the economic benefits accrued to individuals and society as a result of educational attainment; it can be framed as a matter of capabilities, or the development of functionings that enable human flourishing; and it can be framed as a matter o...

In Varieties of Sovereignty and Citizenship, scholars from a wide range of disciplines reflect on the transformation of the world away from the absolute sovereignty of independent nation-states and on the proliferation of varieties of plural citizenship. The emergence of possible new forms of allegiance and their effect on citizens and on political...

This paper examines the connections among compatriots, their conceptualization and the effects that war has on the moral realities of nationality. Recent conceptions of citizenship, and particularly the view that citizenship is an aspect of personal identity, are considered in light of the demands that wartime creates within a nation. I focus on th...

The debate over the accommodation of culture in liberal democracies tends to emphasize exit rights. Autonomy is typically taken as a pre-condition for exit, and public schools are often charged with promoting or facilitating it. I argue that diversity liberals have a more justifiable view than that of autonomy liberals on cultural accommodation, bu...

To what extent should government be permitted to intervene in personal choices? In grappling with this question, liberal theory seeks to balance individual liberty with the advancement of collective goals such as equality. Too often, however, society's obligation to provide meaningful opportunities is overshadowed by its commitment to personal free...

Liberalism, Neoliberalism, Social Democracy: Thin Communitarian Perspectives on Political Philosophy and Education. By OlssenMark. New York: Routledge, 2009. 294p. $95.00. - Volume 8 Issue 2 - Sigal Ben-Porath

In policy and scholarly discussions, choice is regularly contrasted with paternalism, often as a pretext to rejecting the latter. Depicting a policy as allowing individuals to control their choices is often presented in more positive tones in public and scholarly debates when contrasted with more paternalist – interventionist, restrictive – policie...

But docs choice as constructed in contemporary theory and policy truly provide such a comprehensive response? This book is an attempt to critically examine some of the ways in which choice is framed in contemporary theory and policy, and to suggest an alternative framework that balances choice and intervention in order to better achieve the twin go...

School choice is most often viewed through the lens of provision: most of the debate on the issue searches for desirable ways to offer vouchers, scholarships or other tools that provides choice as a way to achieve equality and/or freedom. This paper focuses on the consumer side of school choice, and utilises behavioural economics as well as ethnogr...

Citizenship under Fire examines the relationship among civic education, the culture of war, and the quest for peace. Drawing on examples from Israel and the United States, Sigal Ben-Porath seeks to understand how ideas about citizenship change when a country is at war, and what educators can do to prevent some of the most harmful of these changes....

In this essay, Ben-Porath begins from the assumption that just war theory should be extended to include a jus post bellum component. Postwar conduct should be significantly informed by a care ethics perspective, particularly its political aspects as developed by Joan Tronto and others. Care ethics should be extended to the international postwar are...

To Restore American Democracy: Political Education and the Modern University. Edited by Robert E. Calvert. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. 288p. $75.00 cloth, $28.95 paper. Power to the People: Teaching Political Philosophy in Skeptical Times. By Avner de-Shalit. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006. 224p. $85.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. The autho...

In this paper I argue for considering patriotism as a civic virtue, and in particular I defend the view that patriotism should be endorsed under certain conditions as a perspective suitable for teaching in public schools. My argument begins with an exposé to the debate on patriotism as virtue between those who endorse it as a requisite of morality...

When a democracy enters a period of war or overt security threats, its citizens' lives are affected in many ways. Their feel­ings about their country can be transformed; public and political distinctions between "us" and "them" shift; citizens' expecta­tions from the government can be revised in light of what they perceive as their most urgent inte...

There are various understandings of peace education. What might be called maximalist peace education refers to educating students towards personal fulfilment and the creation of a just and co-operative society. What might be called minimalist peace education refers to educating students to avoid war, militarism and arms races. Peace education is on...

In the summer of 2002, Israeli students took their final exams toward a high-school diploma. At seventeen or eighteen, just before gaining their voting rights and beginning their military service, the civic studies exam confronted them with the question: “explain why conscientious objection is subversive.” With the stroke of a pen, decades of democ...

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