The educated, deliberative citizen: constituents for a normative model

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to make further use of and develop the idea of deliberative communication (Englund, 2000a, 2000b, 2005, 2006a, 2010, 2015, 2016) as crucial for creating sustainable democratic societies and educated citizens living educationally (cf. Englund, 2019). The more specific and demarcated aim is to present a scaffold of concepts and grounds supporting the development of an education of deliberative citizens. The overall context and reason for further working on the idea of deliberation is the still strong development and diffusion of the idea designated as ‘the deliberative turn in democratic theory’ (Dryzek, 2000, p. 1). There are many advocates that could be referred to concerning this deliberative turn. In US, James Bohman and William Rehg (Bohman, 1996; Bohman & Rehg, 1997) are two among many others. Amy Gutmann (1987), Gutmann & Thompson (2004)) and Nussbaum 1997, 1999, 2010) and in Europe Jürgen Habermas is central. What also might be stressed here is that both Gutmann and Nussbaum are among them who have introduced the deliberative perspective on schools and education (for a short review of deliberative communication and the deliberative perspective on education see Englund, 2000a, 2000b/2005). In my earlier work on deliberation (Englund, 2000a, 2000b) the starting point has often been John Dewey’s Democracy and Education (Dewey, 1916/1985) and his assertion that deliberative education is characterized by mutual, free and open communication within and between groups. Add to that Habermas’ validity claims and his placing of communication and deliberation in a wider context. Habermas places the realization of deliberative policy and decisions in the institutionalization of procedures, where an intersubjectivity on a higher level is expected to emerge; public discourses find a good response only under circumstances of broad participation (Dewey, 1927/1988). This in turn ‘requires a background political culture that is egalitarian, divested of all educational privileges, and thoroughly intellectual’ (Habermas, 1996/1998, p. 490). So, the basic theoretical framework uses ideas from classic and modern pragmatism (Dewey, 1916/1985, 1927/1988, Jürgen Habermas, 1981/1987, 1983/1992, 1985/1990, cf. Englund, 2006a, 2006b, 2010, 2016). In the following, I will, in three sections, make an attempt to deepen and transform the idea of deliberation to a normative model of the educated, deliberative citizen by stressing some visionary thoughts of how to learn to live educationally. But first a general argumentation for the normative model by Seyla (Benhabib, 1996), the perhaps most well known of deliberative theorists of today, for the need of developing ideas and building normative models, arguing that