Civility and Democratic Education

80 Pages·2019·1.333 MB·English

by  Andrew Peterson

SPRINGER BRIEFS IN EDUCATION
CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
Andrew Peterson
Civility and
Democratic
Education
SpringerBriefs in Education
SpringerBriefs in Citizenship Education for the 21st
Century
Series Editor
Kerry J Kennedy, Curriculum and Instruction, The Education University of Hong
Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong
More information about this subseries at http://www.springer.com/series/16233
Andrew Peterson
Civility and Democratic
Education
Andrew Peterson
Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues
University of Birmingham
Birmingham, UK
ISSN 2211-1921 ISSN 2211-193X (electronic)
SpringerBriefs in Education
ISSN 2524-8480 ISSN 2524-8499 (electronic)
SpringerBriefs in Citizenship Education for the 21st Century
ISBN 978-981-15-1013-7 ISBN 978-981-15-1014-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1014-4
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019
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Preface
This book is dedicated to my mother and late father, to whom I owe a debt of grati-
tude for cultivating my interest in the exchange of political ideas and viewpoints.
For a variety of reasons, these formative exchanges were always informal and
occurred on a regular basis in response to given events of the day. The lack of for-
mality and structure meant that ideas and positions could be discussed, reflected on
and explored in open conversation, always with the understanding that exchanging
passionately held differences was a healthy part of family life.
Conversely, my experience of schooling—in particular at the secondary level—
provided very little opportunity for engaging in political discussion. Attending a
high school in a selective system of education in the late 1980s and early 1990s,
politics and social issues were missing altogether from our curriculum and lessons,
and any attempt to even discuss politics in the classrooms was, with very few excep-
tions, met with disdain from teachers. Broadly speaking, little respect, let alone
civility, existed between teachers and pupils and so it is perhaps no wonder that the
school lacked a sense of community and little mutuality existed between pupils and
the school (or, at least, that was my perception). Visiting a range of schools over the
last 15 and more years to learn about their approaches to civic and character educa-
tion has taught me that things can be, and often are, different to those conditions I
encountered at school. Many schools I have had the honour of visiting are places
where political issues and controversies can be discussed and reflected upon.
Moreover, they are organisations in which a culture of civility has been cultivated
between staff and pupils, as well as between pupils themselves.
I have a number of people to thank, all of whom have contributed to my writing
of this book in various ways. First and foremost, I thank my family—Jessica, Oliver
and George—for their love, support and humour. Second, I thank all of my col-
leagues at the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues for welcoming me into a
vibrant, rigorous and collegial academic community. Third, I thank Alison Body,
Laura D’Olimpio, Ralph Leighton and Lucas Walsh for their comments on various
parts of the book as the manuscript was being developed. Their comments were
extremely helpful in identifying areas in need of further clarification or analysis.
Fourth, I thank the three anonymous reviewers who provided kind and perceptive
v
vi Preface
comments on the manuscript. Fifth, I thank the series editor, Professor Kerry
Kennedy, for his support for the book from proposal to publication. Sixth, and cer-
tainly not least, I also thank Lawrence Liu, Lay Peng Ang, Melody Zhang and
Sophie Li at Springer for their support. Without each of the people mentioned here
this book would not have been possible, though as ever any errors are mine alone.
In this book, I offer an exploration and examination of civility as an important
part of democratic life and education. As I hope to show, it comes in the context of
widespread concern about the levels of civility and incivility in Western democra-
cies. As I also suggest, while civility cannot hope to cure all of the issues facing
democracy today, without civility healthy democratic participation will not be
possible.
Birmingham, UK Andrew Peterson
Contents
1 The “Plight of Civility” Today . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Setting the Context: We Need to Talk About Civility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Defining Civility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Civility as a Civic Virtue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
The Structure of this Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2 Civil Conduct: Tolerance, Deliberation and the Possibility
of “Justified Incivility” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Civility and Civil Conduct . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Civility and Tolerance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Civility and Deliberation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
The Limits of Civility: Or When Is It Justified to Be Uncivil? . . . . . . . . . . 25
The Excess and the Deficiency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Justified Incivility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
3 Civility and Mutual Fellow-Feeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Civic Friendship, Fellow-Feeling and Well-Wishing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Civic Friendship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Formative Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
4 Educating Civility in Schools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Situating Civility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Experiencing Civility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Enacting Civility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
vii
viii Contents
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
5 M oving Beyond the “Plight of Civility” and Future Research
on Civility and Democratic Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Chapter 1
The “Plight of Civility” Today
Abstract This introductory chapter situates the focus of the book in the context of
the (real or perceived) “plight of civility” affecting western democracies. Drawing
mainly on the UK and the USA, examples of this plight are given. The chapter out-
lines the core approach to civility taken in the book, and does so in two ways. First,
the distinction between everyday civility and political civility is drawn. Establishing
the book’s focus on the latter, it is argued that the concept of political civility com-
prises two components—civil conduct and mutual fellow-feeling. Drawing on
Curzer’s (Curzer, In: Civility in politics and education, Routledge, New York,
2012a; Curzer, Aristotle and the virtues. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012b)
understanding of civility as an Aristotelian virtue, it is argued that civility can use-
fully be viewed as an intermediate mean between an excess (unfailing civility) and
a deficiency (incivility). Some broad reasons are offered for conceiving civility as
an important civic virtue and as a key marker of the health of democratic life. The
chapter also sets out the structure and focus of the remainder of the book.
Keywords Civility · “Plight of civility” · Civil conduct · Fellow-feeling · Virtue
For a number of reasons, civility and incivility have come under much scrutiny in
recent years across western democracies (which are my focus in this book1).
Whether it is calls for greater civility in public life, the bemoaning of a lack of
civility in political discourse or the assertion that everyday life has become increas-
ing rude, there seems to be a general consensus that civility is both important and
necessary for a healthy democracy and society. Yet, and as any academic discus-
sion of civility usually starts, civility is not altogether easy to define. While it may
be the case that, strictly speaking, “civility is a relative newcomer to the virtues”
1 I am aware that other cultures and traditions have rich lines of thought about civility, but these are
not the focus of this book.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte 1
Ltd. 2019
A. Peterson, Civility and Democratic Education, SpringerBriefs in Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1014-4_1