Tomas Englund Department of Education Örebro university 701 82 Örebro Sweden
tomas.englund@pi.oru.se Philosophy of education network Paper for the 35th NERA-conference in Turkku, Finland
The right to deliberate Tomas Englund
The general context for the following discussion is the Western democracies where there is an ongoing discussion of different ideals of democracy and where the idea of deliberative democracy is one prominent idea. The more specific context is the educational systems of the Western democracies and what kind of role that could be given to the educational system for the sustainability and deepening of (deliberative) democracy.
Seyla Benhabib (1996) characterizes modern Western democracies as facing the task of securing three public goods: Legitimacy, economic welfare and a viable sense of collective identity or as I would prefer to call it, a sense of community. In her essay Benhabib is primarily concerned with one of these goods, the good of legitimacy and the philosophical foundations of democratic legitimacy. She argues “that legitimacy in complex democratic societies must be thought to result from the free and unconstrained public deliberation of all about matters of common concern. Thus a public sphere of deliberation about matters of mutual concern is essential to the legitimacy of democratic institutions.”
Is it then possible to say that everyone, every pupil or student in school, should have the right to be able to, or perhaps to have the right to develop his or her ability to deliberate? On what grounds, if any, could this be maintained? What kind of (citizenship) right should this be referred to?
I will try to develop an answer to these three, closely related, questions by referring to, first, the discussion on citizenship rights that can be led back to Thomas Marshall (1949) and his development on civil, political and social citizenship rights and to some of the critique to his theory put forward by Bryan Turner, Anthony Giddens and others seeing the development of these rights within a theory of modernization. In a second stage I will supplement this critique by launching Dewey’s Democracy and Education (1916) as a starting point for a communicative rationale within this perspective of modernization. In a further development and critique of the Marshall-scheme I am presenting the ideas put forward by Jürgen Habermas and his argumentation for
communicative rights as basic for political rights seeing every human being as a potential author of law. This also means coming back considering what Marshall call education as a social right and what Habermas calls welfare rights – rights creating equal opportunities for each citizen to participate in political processes.
(1) Is it possible to say that everyone, every pupil or student in school, should have the right to be able to, or perhaps to have the right to develop his or her ability to deliberate?
In his classic study, originally presented as a lecture in 1947 and published in 1949 Citizenship and Social Class - quoted here from Class, Citizenship and Social Development (1964) - Marshall posited the gradual emergence of three different types of citizenship rights: civil, political and social. What these rights entailed in more detail he described as follows:
The civil element is composed of the rights necessary for individual freedom – liberty of the person, freedom of speech, thought and faith, the right to own property and to conclude valid contracts, and the right to justice. The last is of a different order from the others, because it is the right to defend and assert all one's rights on terms of equality with others and by due process of law. This shows us that the institutions most directly associated with civil rights are the courts of justice. By the political element I mean the right to participate in the exercise of political power, as a member of a body invested with political authority or as an elector of the members of such a body. The
corresponding institutions are parliament and councils of local government. By the social element I mean the whole range from the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society. The institutions most closely connected with it are the educational system and the social services (Marshall 1964, pp. 71f.)
Marshall thus viewed the right to education as a social right. However, he defined social rights generally in relatively vague terms and left a great deal of room for interpretation regarding the concrete meaning of 'to the full' and 'the life of a civilized being'. Marshall did, though, set out the more detailed meaning of education as a social right and its relationship to citizenship and the other rights:
The education of children has a direct bearing on citizenship, and, when the State guarantees that all children shall be educated, it has the requirements and the nature of citizenship definitely in mind. It is trying to stimulate the growth of citizens in the making. The right to education is a genuine social right of citizenship, because the aim of education during childhood is to shape the future adult. Fundamentally it should be regarded, not as a right of the child to go to school, but as the right of the adult citizen to have been educated. And there is here no conflict with civil rights as interpreted in an age of individualism. For civil rights are designed for use by reasonable and intelligent persons, who have learned to read and write. Education is a necessary prerequisite of civil freedom (ibid., p. 81-82).
- Towards a theory of modernization
Marshall thus offers a perspective both on the development of society and on education as a social right within the framework of societal development. Turner
(1986), who has closely analyzed and developed upon Marshall's hypotheses, goes as far as to say that the latter's 'notion of citizenship can be used as the basic definition of modernization' (p. 59). In the same breath, however, Turner criticizes the functionalist theory of modernization for its evolutionist
assumptions and its view that there is only one feasible pathway to modernity, wishing instead to emphasize the need to 'specify the social and historical conditions which generate different routes to modernity' (p. 62).
Let us examine further qualifications of Marshall's analysis. Anthony Giddens (1982), who has also placed considerable stress on the value of Marshall's analysis today, argues that he
writes as though the development of citizenship rights came about as something like a natural process of evolution, helped along where necessary by the beneficent hand of the state ...[and that Marshall fails} to emphasise that citizenship rights have been achieved in substantial degree only through struggle (Giddens, 1982, p. 171).
Though Giddens' criticism on these points is largely correct, it must nevertheless be stressed that Marshall presents citizenship and social class as two opposing entities, claiming that 'it is clear that, in the twentieth century, citizenship and the capitalist class system have been at war' (Marshall 1964, p. 84). Unlike Giddens, Turner even argues that Marshall's 'view of citizenship appears to rest on a contingent view of historical development' (Turner 1986, p. 45). Thus Turner asserts, in a direct counterattack on Giddens, that Marshall does not hold an evolutionary view, enlarging upon this by noting that 'Marshall's account of citizenship does not necessarily entail some commitment to an immanent logic in capital' (Turner 1986, p. 45).
However, what Giddens is really criticizing - and rightly so - is Marshall's unproblematical view of the state as an evolutionary force. And Giddens seeks to define how the struggle for citizenship rights relates to the state. He writes that
the state, in capitalism, is a state in a class society, in which political power is skewed by the nature of class domination. But the existence of citizenship rights, and the struggle of labour movements to actualise or expand them, have brought about major social changes.... it seems that citizenship rights are important bases of freedoms that those in subordinate positions are able to sustain; and that, far from being able to take them for granted, we have to emphasise that in the context of - liberal democracy they are continually subject to contestation (Giddens, 1982, pp. 126f.).
What Giddens does, then - like Turner - is to lay greater stress than Marshall on the constant struggle for citizenship rights and on how the real substance of these rights can constantly change. Furthermore, in contrast with a Marxist tradition that has tended to undervalue various 'bourgeois rights', Giddens
highlights (and Turner develops this point further) the importance of the struggle engaged in, primarily by the labour movements of different countries, over the formal status of these rights, with a view to their realization. Giddens sums this up: 'All three forms of citizenship distinguished by Marshall are double-edged. They do serve, as levers of struggle, to extend the range of human freedoms possible within Western societies: but at the same time they continue to be the sparking-points of conflict' (Giddens 1982, pp. 174f.). The tangible implications of the different forms of citizenship, then, are not selfevident; they only assume meaning and are realized in a specific historical, social context. Their concrete interpretation will be decisively dependent on how well rooted they are in public opinion, what significance they have to different groups within society, and what actual scope different groups in society have to realize their citizenship rights.
The underlying principle of citizenship/citizenship rights and democracy in Marshall's perspective - that every individual must be treated equally and have the same opportunity to influence developments - is thus in constant danger of being counteracted by existing class and social structures. One of Marshall's conclusions concerning the role of the education system in the development of citizenship is that 'through education in its relation with occupational structure, citizenship operates as an instrument of social stratification' (Marshall, 1964, p. 110). Marshall's line of reasoning, then, is that many of the rights achieved by struggle have subsequently become integrated as duties towards the state and towards an education system that differentiates citizens on the basis of principles ranking higher than those of citizenship rights. At the same time, as we have seen, Marshall has a tendency to view the state as a guarantee of
'development/modernization'.
(2) My second question, put in the beginning of this paper, was on what grounds, if any, could this – the proposal that everyone, every pupil or student in school, should have the right to be able to, or perhaps to have the right to develop his or her ability to deliberate - be maintained?
My general answer to that is that this leads to a thinking of a society (and its education system) based in a communicative rationality rather than some other form of rationality.
Institutionalized socialization – what we generally call education, teaching and learning – presupposes, according to the socio-history that has created it,
teachers, learners and other specific categories such as classes and curricula. Hamilton (1989) argues that there is a close relationship between changing conceptions and assumptions, e.g. about the individual and the state, and changing pedagogical discursive practices. However, the shaping and
institutional framing of education and teaching over the years and in different contexts are seen by many as the persistence of a once-given pattern. Utterances and analyses stressing this continuity are numerous. On top of that it is obvious that the past decades have seen a gradual restoration of traditional education. The dominant rationality aimed for is an instrumental one (with traces of a value rationality of a religious character).
My position is that it is both possible and appropriate to go beyond this view and, instead, stress possible and potential differences in the education and
teaching process from both a historical and a qualitative viewpoint. I believe that these differences are primarily a matter of different rationalities, different
meaning-creating contexts within which teaching can be arranged. I am thinking here of how teaching is based in different choices of content, leading to different (discursive) offerings of meanings (Englund 1998), and how the encounters between teacher and students and between students are contextualized, implying the presence of and possible relationship to political and moral aspects, and the aspect of democracy (Englund ed. 2004).
A central point of reference for an alternative to the technological and instrumental rationale for education is John Dewey’s view of education as communication (Dewey 1916), and his analysis of the basic elements of communication and of the preconditions for communication as criteria for democracy as a life form.
- Dewey as the starting point for a communicative rationale
It is fairly obvious (to me, at least) that it is John Dewey, in the first three
chapters of his Democracy and Education (cf. Englund 1999, 2000a/2005), who provides the central starting points for the kind of tradition in education referred to in my opening question. He gives education as communication a “crucial role in creating a ‘deliberative democracy’ – a democracy whose citizens have been educated to participate in public discussions and debate, to understand different perspectives and to communicate their differences to those who may hold alternative points of view” (Carr 2005, p. 10).
Dewey took the view that democracy was an expression of a society imprinted by mutual communication and consequently a pluralist life form. The
democracy criteria related to communication which he put forward (Dewey 1916), stressing free and open communication between and within groups, provide important guidance for the development of criteria for my idea of deliberative communication in schools. As Dewey elaborates in his Human Nature and Conduct (1922), moral considerations are intrinsic to a process of
deliberation in which we seek the best of a number of alternative courses of action. It is also in the light of Dewey, but now his The Public and its Problems (Dewey 1927), that I look upon education as a possible way for the public to define itself through deliberation (cf. Englund 1996, Ljunggren 1996).
Historically, however, such a communicative reception of Dewey has not been the dominant one. The dominant receptions of his philosophy of education were to be the progressivist and reconstructionist ones (cf. Englund 2000a/2005). During the 20th century, these two receptions of his work challenged the traditional philosophies of education, essentialism and perennialism, in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. Neither of them, though, achieved any real breakthrough within educational settings, nor did they build on education as communication (although it can be said that reconstructionism has some similarities with the communicative view presented in this paper).
- The inspiration from Habermas, the deliberative communication model, and the potential of the deliberation concept to change the rationale of education The concept of deliberation has undergone a tremendous expansion in use within the social sciences in recent decades. The main reason for this is the growing use of the concept of deliberative democracy within the political sciences, especially in the US; another, perhaps more profound, is the
renaissance of classical pragmatism and the use of this specific concept within current pragmatism, especially by Jürgen Habermas (1996) and Seyla Benhabib (1996), who both draw attention to the need for mutual communication and deliberation on alternative possible courses of action. Habermas has, in a
succession of works written in the 1980s and 1990s, expounded on the need for a communicative rationality, stressing space and procedures for a rational discourse on various questions. His theory of communicative action (1984, 1987), related to the concept of moral consciousness (1990) and further
developed into a model for deliberative democracy (Habermas 1996), places the realization of deliberative policy in the institutionalization of procedures, from which an intersubjectivity at a higher level is expected to emerge.
From the standpoint of social and educational philosophy, one could say with Habermas that a way of strengthening the preconditions for normative
rationalization through communicative action would be to promote and use deliberative communication in schools, i.e. to promote social integration through collective volitional and consensual processes about what is normatively valid. But Habermas can be interpreted in different ways concerning the implications for education. What can be said is that he places the realization of a deliberative policy in the institutionalization of procedures, where intersubjectivity on a
higher level is expected to emerge; public discourses meet with a good response only under circumstances of broad participation. This, in turn, ‘requires a
background political culture that is egalitarian, divested of all educational privileges, and thoroughly intellectual’ (Habermas 1996, p. 490). Political autonomy cannot be realized by a person who pursues his or her own private interests, but only as a joint enterprise in an intersubjective, shared practice. On this account, the deliberative project could be regarded as the continuation of the project of modernity.
Habermas’s (1984/1987) theory of communicative action, further developed into a model for deliberative democracy and a discourse theory of law and
democracy (Between Facts and Norms, 1996), is perhaps also the most highly developed and well-known theory of deliberative democracy (cf. Bohman & Rehg 1997). His model is developed in relation to the liberal and the
republican/communitarian traditions, and in his analysis he emphasizes the different citizenship concepts of those traditions. Habermas (1996) also stresses how their usual dichotomized conceptualizations of citizenship rights ‘fail to grasp the intersubjective meanings of a system of rights that citizens mutually accord one another’ (p. 271).
In the contribution to a discourse theory of law and democracy which Habermas (1996) has developed, participatory rights consequently have precedence. In this work, Habermas presents a system of citizenship rights which in many respects reminds us of the classical system developed by Marshall (1949), with civil, political and social or welfare rights coming after each other. However, what Habermas does, in contrast to Marshall, is to see participatory rights as the most fundamental because: ‘Indeed, only rights of political participation ground the citizen’s reflexive, self-referential legal standing’ (Habermas 1996, p. 504). The reason for this is the inner connection between the sovereignty of the people and their political participatory rights, which is seen as the medium for the people’s self-determination and self-realization, implying that the political autonomy of citizens cannot be achieved merely by law, but in the communication processes of discursive opinion- and will-formation (cf. Englund 2002). These rights are described by Habermas as ‘basic rights to equal opportunities to participate in processes of opinion- and will-formation in which citizens exercise their
political autonomy and through which they generate legitimate law’ (Habermas 1996, p. 123, cf. Eriksen & Weigård 2000).
In this sense, Habermas (1996) also refers to Ulrich Preuss, who justifies welfare rights by the purpose of securing an autonomous citizenship status:
[Today] the inescapable starting point for citizenship qualifications is the equal freedom of each citizen regardless of his or her quite differentnatural talents,
capacities, and capabilities ….. Not only does each individual have interest in this, …. But democratic society as awhole depends on the citizens’ decisions having a certain quality, however that quality is defined. For this reason society also has an interest in the ood quality of enfranchised citizems; specifically, it has an interest in their being informed, in their capacity to reflect and to consider the consequences of their politically relevant decisions, in their will to formulate and assert their interests in view of the interests of their fellow citizens as well as futire generations. In short, it has an interest in their “communicative
competence” ….. The unequal distribution of basic goods diminishes the quality of civic virtues and thus, as a result, the rationality that can be attained by collective decisions as well. For this reason, a policy of compensating for the unequal distribution of social goods can be justified as a “politics of
qualifications for citizenship” (Habermas 1996 p 417-418 with reference to Preuss).
However, the consequences for education are not spelt out by Habermas himself, but an authoritative commentator suggests that the perspective put forward in Habermas 1996
‘must, looking to the possibilities for change, lead to the development and encouraging of structures within the system of law and to education of deliberative capacities and attitudes among the citizens who will perform this communicative power’ (Reese-Schäfer 1995, p. 82).
Within education, I and others have made use of the concept of deliberation, and I have proposed (Englund 2000b, 2006) deliberative communication as a model whereby schools can develop a democratic deliberative attitude and a
judgemental capacity among students. I distinguish five characteristics of
deliberative communication: (a) different views are confronted with one another and arguments for these different views are given time and space and are
articulated and presented, (b) there is tolerance and respect for the concrete other and participants learn to listen to the other person’s argument, (c) elements of collective will formation are present, i.e. an endeavour to reach consensus or at least temporary agreements and/or to draw attention to differences, (d)
authorities/traditional views (represented, for example, by parents and tradition) can be questioned and there are opportunities to challenge one’s own tradition, and (e) there is scope for students to communicate and deliberate without
teacher control, i.e. for argumentative discussions between students with the aim of solving problems or shedding light on them from different points of view. An assumption underlying this proposal is that education always has moral implications or, more precisely, that different ways of teaching and
communicating between teachers and students shape different conditions for the development of students’ moral reasoning etc. This does not imply that different models automatically lead to different consequences, but rather that there is always a moral dimension of teaching at hand, a moral dimension that reflects
how complex issues are treated in the classroom, both substantively and relationally. My basic idea in proposing deliberative, meaning-creating communication as an educational idea(l) is that I look upon deliberation as a way of developing the (students’) capacity to make moral judgements and thus contributing to the development of their political autonomy and of a deliberative attitude. At the same time I would argue that displacing the internal activities of schools in the direction of (more) deliberation also implies a higher quality of learning. In that respect, the proposal can in addition be seen as a parallel to the sociocultural perspective on learning, with its emphasis on the need for more mutual communication but, in the case of my proposal, using deliberative communication also for the formation of judgemental ability.
A preliminary conclusion is that deliberation might be a concept that can be used to deepen democracy and that, in particular, it has a potential to change the meaning, the rationale, of education. As might also be shown, I would say that there is some support from the philosophy of education and from moral
educators for the development of a communicative rationality in education and for deliberation as a way of elaborating it. However, this rationale is of course at odds with the historically and currently dominant instrumental and technological rationale of schooling, a rationale that stresses the persistence of teacher
recitation and the learning of established knowledge, which is tested in different ways, evaluated by grades and so on.
Crucial to whether or not we will have a deliberative school in the future is a future general discussion of the internal work of schools and of how the preconditions for it are determined – is it possible that the educational researchers’ calls for communication will be heeded, or will the strong, still dominant, technological rationale be sustained?1
Perhaps it is time to talk about the development of deliberative capacities through the educational system as a kind of cultural welfare right because it is this kind of capacity that might be needed for “the free and unconstrained public deliberation” .
1What we have learnt from recent research on learning is that mutual communication is effective, that pupils
learn – create meaning and learn – when they communicate with their teachers and with each other. To me, meaning-creating deliberative communication in schools implies two mutually integrated dimensions, learning and a capacity to make judgements (formation of judgemental ability). Needless to say, however, the
international pressure for schooling via test procedures (TIMMS, PISA etc.) is very authoritative and leaves little scope for anything other than traditional schooling.
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