Symposium Introduction: Discourse Ethical Perspectives on Education in Polarized Political Cultures

Abstract

When the game of reason-giving and reason-taking is supported by broadly shared norms of civic morality, trust in public deliberation tends to follow. It is far more difficult to practice (and defend) deliberation when these norms, including deliberative norms themselves, are in dispute.

Is the contemporary situation of liberal democracies more akin to the former or the latter? The jury is still out on the nature, causes, and seriousness of what is sometimes called “political,” “affective,” or “civic” polarization. What does seem clear is that polarization has had an effect on the deliberative dimension of liberal democratic life. One worrisome development is the increasing pressure put on the Supreme Courts of liberal states, such as Canada and the United States, to resolve contentious policy differences as opposed to working them out through deliberative legislatures and informal public spheres.¹ (As many Canadian and UK readers might point out, the word “parliament” means “speak” or “dialogue.”) But education systems also seem to be pulled into the vortex. Many schools and universities have found themselves in the unenviable position of weathering a number of controversial public and political events, be those events real or manufactured by social media actors. And while partisan stirring of the civic pot is by no means new, a polarized political environment has clearly changed public perception of these controversies and the institution's response to them. What was once a “tough call” is now reframed as “picking a side.” But not picking a side is also “picking a side.” The upshot is that schools and universities are shouldering a lot of civic stress (not always well, one might add), and one consequence is a troubling decline in public trust in them. Polarization also has pedagogical costs, especially in terms of classroom deliberation. Consider teaching “controversial issues” as an approach to civic education aimed at fostering better public reasoning and civic tolerance. The framing of some issues as “controversial,” and not others, now seems to risk accusations of partisanship, or even professional misconduct.²

Polarization seems to fit the very practical situation that the discourse ethical project aims to address: when basic interpersonal norms and norms of political morality are in fundamental dispute and epistemically uncertain. As Jürgen Habermas puts it, discourse ethics “provides an answer to the predicament in which members of any moral community find themselves when … though they still argue with reasons about moral judgments and beliefs, their substantive background consensus on the underlying moral norms has been shattered.”³

Yet, the civic appetite for reason-giving, perspective-taking, tolerance, and intellectual charity seems to ebb exactly when it is most needed. How, then, can discourse ethics guide citizens in dealing with problems of educational policy and practice under polarizing conditions? Are certain accounts, emphasizing some aspects of a discourse ethic over others, better able to capture the philosophical dimensions of these problems? To what extent can/should a discourse ethic provide practical guidance for individual educators and schools working in a polarized culture? Can it motivate deliberation? And what if the institutions themselves are similarly divided? The papers in this symposium take up these practical and conceptual challenges, assessing the educational merits of inclusive deliberation under conditions of moral, epistemic, and educational polarization.

As mentioned above, polarization seems to undermine civic trust in liberal civic norms and its basic institutions. The first two papers undertake a discourse-theoretical analysis of this phenomenon and how it bears on liberal democratic educational goals.

Julian Culp offers a comprehensive description of the broader epistemic environment of what he calls “digitized societies” and the challenges that this environment poses to civic education. On his account, a civic education that targets specific pathologies such as “fake news” downplays the economic and technological backdrop that makes productive deliberation (im)possible. Consequently, an education for deliberative democracy should equip future citizens to understand the extent to which, and ways in which, media that we might have once assumed would be conducive to public reasoning and argumentation (social media, for example) in actual fact thwart reasoned agreement and increase hostile, polarizing feelings about our fellow citizens.

Christopher Martin undertakes an analysis of “indoctrination,” attempting to separate the concept from its increasingly partisan usage as a term indiscriminately applied to entire educational institutions. He claims that “institutional” indoctrination must refer to an alleged failure by that institution to responsibly promote deliberative norms. One characteristic failure is institutional tolerance for “closed” deliberative norms, such as the norm that a demand for reasons in support of some belief P, just because P, is sufficient to justify the discursive exclusion of those making such a demand. Being clear on the concept of indoctrination, Martin argues, can help citizens distinguish legitimate worries about indoctrination from partisan rhetoric.

Polarization seems to have both a moral and an epistemic dimension. Conflating the two dimensions may further compound the polarization problem. Anniina Leiviskä adopts Habermas's distinction between the justification of “rightness” and “truth” claims in order to better understand recent debates over the nature, scope, and justification of “decolonizing” university curriculum. For Habermas, the validity of “rightness” claims is constructed in the sense that arguments in support of those claims must be publicly available, contestable, and acceptable by all. But truth-claims — claims about what is — are not constructed in this way. Leiviskä argues that a discourse ethical perspective warrants “decolonizing” the university in the sense that its institutional norms and pedagogical practices would greatly benefit from a more inclusive justification. However, epistemic standards are not themselves “de-colonizable” in the sense that such standards are fundamentally incommensurable with, and rival to, different cultural traditions. Universities therefore ought to pursue decolonizing policies on moral grounds while maintaining epistemic standards, such as impartiality and fallibility, that are constitutive of knowledge and understanding.

Krassimir Stojanov focuses on a constituency often neglected in discourse ethical accounts: children. Stojanov defends a demanding conception of epistemic respect for children in the sense that even very young students should be treated as credible and independent sources of reasons about justice and fairness. This especially matters since, as he puts it, “[p]recisely because of their otherness and strangeness, these perspectives and beliefs, if adults treat them seriously and with epistemic respect, could transcend established norms, and so they could contribute to their further development, revision, or modification as well as to the articulation of new norms and new reasons supporting them.”⁴ While children may be in some ways uninformed and naïve about various normative issues, they are also liberated from the prejudices and assumptions that are often carried along with them. Stojanov's analysis suggests that young students have the potential to articulate claims about justice and fairness that put the civic acrimony of adults into childish relief.

I opened with the idea of trust in public deliberation. We can include here pessimism about the effectiveness of ethical deliberation. The last two papers aim to demonstrate how the philosophical project of discourse ethics motivates empirical insights that have real benefits for educational policy and practice.

None of the contributions in this symposium frame their argument as a panacea for the conflicts and tensions that currently occupy our public sphere(s). However, they demonstrate the extent to which, and ways in which, reaffirming an educational commitment to deliberative inclusion and tolerance is necessary if we are to have a public sphere, and public reason, at all.