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Reconciliation, Justice, and Indigenous Education
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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.
Recently, several groups in the United States and Canada-for example, American Indian/First Nations people, African-American males, and the deaf-have claimed the right to receive state support for cultural identity schools-that is, separate schools whose educational aims and practices are designed to reinforce a particular cultural identity. It is widely assumed that liberalism must be committed to a principle of cultural neutrality that prevents a liberal state from assigning legitimacy to such demands. This article provides a close examination of the ethical principles a liberal state may adduce in making political judgments about such matters. First, two dominant perspectives that have emerged recently within liberal political and educational theory are developed and critically evaluated and their educational implications examined. Specifically, a distinction between "strong" and "moderate" cultural identity schools is identified, and it is argued that a liberal state may legitimately support the latter but not the former. I conclude by considering several contextual factors a liberal state may have to consider in determining the legitimacy of specific demands for moderate cultural identity schools, especially demands made by disadvantaged minority cultural groups.
Challenging Deliberation
- Meira Levinson
Meira Levinson, "Challenging Deliberation," Theory and Research in Education 1, no. 1 (2003): 23-49.
doi: 10.47925/2013.246