Deliberation of empirical legitimation of educational systems in the western cultures and the meaning of human rights as a reference for justice in education in a democracy

Education is a state-structured institution that, in a democratic state, move between different structures for legitimation. Historically education has strong ties to the movement of enlightenment. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant made a strong testimony writing an essay in Berlinische Monatsschrift, December 1784, titled: ‘Answering the question: What is Enlightenment?’ The first sentence in his answer was: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity” (Kant 1989, p 27). In his testimony Kant writes that most people of his time were satisfied following the guidance of the central societal institutions, the king, and the church. Kant, on the other hand, wanted people to do the work entailed in thinking themselves. He urges the reader through a formulation in Latin from the Roman poet Horace: “Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding” (Kant 1989, p. 27). This Kantian expression became a program for self-liberation through public discourse that is at work. The courage of the individual person to express her/his will public as reason, is the main resource for a democratic society. Education is, in this perspective, the public institution that builds democracy.

With the development of universal human rights, through the United Nations, the historicity of human rights ceases to exist. On the 10^th of December 1948 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the international document named ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’. This document states the universal character of human rights, that human rights are rights for all human beings, everywhere, and for all time. From this moment on education was given a reference to two different sources for legitimation. First, the universal right to education. Second, the policy of education of the nation-state.

When a government, want to legitimate their program for education through a value-theoretical approach they understand value as an instrument for the state. Education becomes, in this perspective, like all other values, just a tool for the power of the state. Nation-states in Western culture often recognize education as an important instrument for the development of the value of the state in line with other value-systems like economics. What did I want to show with this? Mainly that nations legitimate their power to construct educational institutions, without any reference to their inhabitants’ rights.  Teacher education is not different. However, teacher education is part of an academic community, with reference to the responsibility of academic autonomy. Teacher educators must think and act themselves and do this thinking and acting critically. Through education teacher students learn to teach. In these learning-acts teacher students, among other things, learn to assess and to decide, and keep pupils aware of, what is not acceptable behavior. This is acts of teaching that is in tension with the rights to education.

This paper uses time and space as its methodological references. Both the reference for time and the reference for space is doubled with reference to the body-mind relation. To read ‘now’ or ‘today’ means time as we experience it through our body and through our mind. The time expressed through the ‘now’ is lived time constituted through consciousness. The time of ‘today’ is the time of historicity. The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur has shown how calendar-time mediates between lived time and historicity. Between the sensing body and the expressions of texts mediating the history from the past. Space is expressed as body and places. ‘Here’ is the position of the body in space constituted through the senses. The places are in this paper experience inside western culture. Places constituted as a system of places that dominates bodies’ experience in western culture. John Dewey wrote about the process of experience and thinking in his work, “Democracy and Education” (Dewey 1916): “In determining the place of thinking in experience we first noted that experience involves a connection of doing or trying with something which is undergone in consequence. A separation of the active doing phase from the passive undergoing phase destroys the vital meaning of an experience” (p. 178). I interpret this citation as if Dewey exemplifies that ‘I here’ and ‘you there’ are different places and that the relation between these different places are a way of understanding experience as a meaningful practice. This theoretical methodology is used as a tool for understanding experiences of teaching and learning in a class of experienced teachers working on their master’s degree.

In a democratic state, the legitimation of education ought to refer to the students’ rights to education. When OECD makes a program for comparing the outcome of different educational systems, they risk that the science of testing becomes the reference for educational success. How then can we teach teachers to teach so all students refer their acts of teaching to the rights to education? In this study a group of experienced teachers refer their language about teaching and learning onto a framework of transcendental logic. It is within such a framework of transcendental logic, according to the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, “… that the coordination … enters the plane of the sensibility through which objects are given and that of understanding by which they are sought and thematized” (Ricoeur 2005, p. 42). As a teacher trainer I try to give these teachers a distance to their own practice of assessment. The teachers understand themselves as representatives of an education and as bearers of rights. At the same time, through forms of testing and assessment they are responsible for normative constraints. Their final assessment will show what resources these teachers are able to express through their understanding and use of language from a transcendental logic.

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