Session Information
Session 5A, Democracy, National Identity and Social Minorities
Papers
Time:
2005-09-08
13:00-14:30
Room:
ENG
Chair:
Elaine Ricard-Fersing
Contribution
Today in the age of globalization and under the tide of Americanization, America is faced with a need to question its identity with democracy. In the resurgence of patriotism on a global scale - what Cornel West criticizes as the "mold of a narrow patriotism and revenge-driven lust for a war on terrorism" and the mentality of "with us or against us" (West, 2004, 9, 12) - there are those educators and policy makers who emphasize the need of educating children and young for the pride of one's own country and culture. In opposition to the militant and masculine forms of patriotism, Martha Nussbaum, for instance, claims the need of citizenship education for the cosmopolitan, "the person whose allegiance is to the worldwide community of human beings" rather than "democratic or national citizenship" (Nussbaum, 1996, 4, 11). Here is a tension between love for one's native country and for the globe. In considering education for democracy and citizenship, it is not an easy task to keep the balance between these two poles. Educators may face the following questions. How can they reinforce the concentric force of attachment and love at home, while extending it beyond home? How can they teach children to treasure the familiar and the traditional, while helping them acquire an eye for criticism? What kind of relationship should we build with the strange and the foreign not only outside, but also inside one's own culture? These are the questions that involve a connection between the self, culture and morality, and that ask how citizenship at home and beyond home can be bridged. In order to gain a critical perspective on this issue, and find a way out of a tension between patriotism and cosmopolitanism, this paper discusses the standpoint of American philosophy - especially the ideas of Emerson, Thoreau, Dewey and Cavell. By complementing each other through its difference, they together reinforce the possibilities of American philosophy - the ideas of democracy as a way of life and of criticizing democracy from within, from within the limits of American democracy. By so doing they present us with an alternative standpoint from which to envision citizenship and education - a route that starts at home and expanding beyond home. They let us reconsider the meaning of the political education through a relationship between the self and its culture and native language. I shall conclude that education for citizenship geared towards the foreign and immigrant within home is a key to enhance global awareness beyond narrow patriotism, especially in times when the space of the unknown and the strange has been assimilated into the Americanized form of democracy. West, Cornel. 2004. Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism (New York: The Penguin Press.Nussbaum, Martha C. 1996. "Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism." In For Love of Country? ed. Martha C. Nussbaum. Boston: Beacon Press Books.
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