In this chapter, I claim that the central question of global justice in education is which – if any – educational inequalities between citizens and non-citizens in a democratic state are morally legitimate, and which inequalities between them contradict the normative foundations of democratic education. By trying to find a convincing answer to this question, I first briefly recapitulate the controversy between the cosmopolitan and the state-nationalist approaches to it. Then I elaborate on the question, whether special obligations to a privileged treatment of cocitizens over noncitizens apply to institutionalized education. I make the claim that the answer to that question depends on how we understand education – whether we spell it out as a traditionalist-authoritarian, or as democratic social practice. I argue that democratic education necessarily implies moral universalism. It requires not only the recognition of the equal moral status of all students, but also the inclusion of their individual experiences, worldviews, and ideals, regardless of their nationalities, or ethnic or cultural backgrounds, in an open and “diversity-friendly” ethical discourse that should be established in every classroom. I conclude that since democratic education is necessarily cosmopolitan in its essence, democratic educational institutions should be supranationally orientated.

Abstract: Cultivating custodians of democracy requires a deep understanding of the environmental and cultural forces that impel change, as well as the skills to respond to unexpected events in ways that promote inclusive participation. While civics, history, and social studies have traditionally been assigned the task of citizenship education, I will argue that if democracy is to flourish, the education of the new patriot will require the reconstruction of the STEM and expressive (aesthetic) curricula as well. The aim is to create a body of citizens who are committed to maintaining a democratic culture, who are open to change, and can reassess their individual and collective responses to it. Thus, Educating for Democracy holds that today democracy requires a new form of patriotism, one where loyalty and commitment are informed by disciplined inquiry and broad participation. The book shows how different subject areas can contribute to this aim.

What kind of characters might develop in a flourishing democratic culture? What citizen virtues are needed to safeguard democracy against its ever-present enemies? This chapter explores John Dewey’s answers to these questions and illuminates their bearing on his educational philosophy. It argues that Dewey is important not just because of his insights into “progressive” schooling, but also because of his affirming vision of the educative and enriching quality of democratic life. In our day, his conception of education for and by democracy can still serve as a vital antidote to democratic disenchantment.

Chapter 6 unpacks the idea of reflexivity in judicial decision-making and its relationship with coherence. The chapter’s thesis is that coherence in legal reasoning and one’s commitment to reflexivity are intrinsically related notions. Reflexivity in adjudication is conducive towards coherence and, by extension, the degree of a decision-maker’s reflexivity can act as a useful indicator (though not a determinant) of the decision’s overall coherence. The chapter proceeds in two steps in particular. Firstly, it describes reflexivity as an overall desirable disposition for adjudicators to have. It identifies key components of reflexivity in practical decision-making, considers potential critiques, and ultimately establishes reflexivity as an indicator of coherence. Secondly, the chapter attempts to place the discussion in a practical context by way of a case study on the reflective thinking likely at play behind decisions addressing nationality planning activities by foreign investors. In so doing, the chapter also reviews instances where an arguably inadequate process of reflection may have negatively affected the overall coherence of an arbitral decision.

Functional psychology was less a system than an attitude that valued the utility of psychological inquiry. Assuming a philosophical underpinning from the pragmatism of William James and Charles Sanders Peirce, functional psychology fit well into the pioneering spirit of America. From its beginning, functional psychology had a clear emphasis on applying psychology to individual and social improvement, as was evident from the works of Münsterberg, McDougall, and Hall. The tradition of British natural science and evolutionary theory was integrated into psychology in the views on adaptation championed by the Chicago functionalists, such as Dewey, Angell, and Carr. Mental testing and the study of human capacity constituted important areas of investigation among the Columbia functionalists, represented by Cattell, Thorndike, and Woodworth. Although its reaction to structural psychology kept functional psychology from developing a systematic alternative model of psychological inquiry, this phase of American psychology resulted in two critical benefits. First, functionalism firmly entrenched the new science of psychology in America and imposed on it a particular American orientation toward applied psychology. Second, functional psychology provided a necessary transition from the restricted context of structural psychology to more viable models of psychology, permitting the science to progress.

Despite his role in pragmatism’s resurgence, when it comes to classical pragmatism Rorty’s work has blocked the road of inquiry. His selective interpretations spurred sharp lines of demarcation distinguishing “classical” or “paleo” pragmatism from its “neo” and “new” offspring to protect both classical and new pragmatisms alike from Rorty’s distortive readings. This chapter seeks to move contemporary pragmatism beyond these impasses by investigating largely unexamined avenues of shared commitment between Rorty and Peirce, Dewey, and James. I argue that Rorty is best read as reconstructing classical pragmatism rather than misunderstanding it. After establishing Rorty’s underappreciated early engagement with pragmatism, I trace the influence of Peirce on Rorty’s thought, which includes a commitment to language and to a distinct form of realism which was later obscured. Recognizing Rorty’s notion of “philosophy as cultural politics” as a close relative of Dewey’s conception of philosophy as cultural criticism yields complementary insights overshadowed by the experience vs. language debate. I then elucidate the shared ethics of belief that emerges from James’s “unfinished” universe and Rorty’s recognition of contingency to guide their commitments to agency and a conception of knowledge in which humans are active participants in the construction of what is right and true.

How do cultural artifacts influence the ways we experience and act? In this chapter I propose that cognition is cultural tout court and that habits provide a central link between human organisms and the sociocultural environment. I will defend an enactive account of habits that sees them as expansive in the temporal (they relate us to a history of sociocultural interactions) and spatial sense (they are co-constituted by our brains, bodies, and cultural artifacts). This account is based on Dewey's pragmatist–organicist concept of habits that rigorously anchors experience in culture. I will trace cultural factors in Dewey's philosophy and 4E (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended) cognitive science with a focus on pervasive artifacts – such as architecture, pictures, and moving images. Such artifacts have become part of our habits of perceiving. I finally situate artifactual habits within recent predictive processing theories that claim to provide the corresponding neuroscientific theory to our cultural minds.

This chapter examines habit across the human lifespan to develop a Deweyan account of aging and old age. After explaining Dewey's notion of habit in terms of growth and plasticity in youth, I extend Dewey's account of habit to old age. A Deweyan understanding of aging contests lay person understandings of old age that equate it with decline and an end to growth, and it offers an alternative to the implicit biology–culture dualism that can be found in the contemporary field of gerontology. As I develop this account, I challenge Dewey's racially problematic association of “civilized” habits with mature adulthood and “savage” habituation with immature children. The result is a useful Deweyan appreciation of habit in old age that neither glosses over the difficulties of being elderly nor condemns elderliness to inevitable decline.

I propose an ethics that is based on stories rather than rules. The things we do in our daily lives (our motor routines) do not require articulatable goals expressible in language. We develop the “good habits” that make us good people by developing/inheriting a set of prototypes, then responding to each life situation by comparing it with those prototypes. Such a multidimensional prototype system could be realized in a connectionist network embodied in a brain/body and embedded in a world. It would not require logical reasoning as such, but rather a form of skilled coping very different from anything else considered by ethical theory. Once we realize that ethical judgments are based on prototypes and stories, rather than rules and justice, we can rethink how best to empower the revolutionary changes that are now taking place in our concepts of ethics and courtesy.

Do nonrepresentational habits display intentionality, in the sense of aiming at, pointing to, or targeting some specific objects? I will here tackle this question from the resources of Dewey's pragmatism, and more precisely from his theory of habits and his functionalist theory of meaning. Meaning, for Dewey, is a normative phenomenon, only occurring in social and linguistic practices. The fact that utterances and thoughts can be about states of affairs does not require a specific mental property of pointing to or targeting for to be explained. Similarly, if behavior and habits can be described as being directed toward objects, this directedness is nothing before or beside the way our actions are normatively framed and organized in certain forms of organism–environment transactions, such as inquiry.

Chapter 7 locates the ethical dimension of education within the students’ lived experiences in schools. It maintains that ethical education is concerned with providing relevant, intended and continuous direct experiences to enable young people to grow with a sense of respect and empathy for others and to engage, think and act ethically. It considers what changes in educational institutions would be essential in helping students to become more ethically aware, sensitive and motivated. These include engaging in peer and adult relationships characterised by care and reflection; and encounters with ethical issues and the relating topics of justice, fairness and equality. Reflecting on such practices in a variety of educational contexts such as in Ghana, Swaziland and Kenya, this chapter proposes a number of steps and practices towards ethical education in schools, including mapping out relational and ethical spaces in schools, integrating the ethos of building schools as ethical communities, consolidating curriculum activities and so forth. Examples can teach us principles to base our educative practices upon. It concludes that in doing so, students and teachers will not only learn about relationships but more importantly they will learn in relationship.

Deep learning changes one’s perspective on how the world works and, by extension, how one should be in the world. Thus, whenever new knowledge threatens to disturb the existing political equilibrium, learning becomes a political act. This chapter considers the work of Paulo Freire, Myles Horton, Michel Foucault, and John Dewey, and ends with four recommendations for making political dynamics more conducive to deep learning: identify existing systems of power relationships, surface hegemonic assumptions, speak truth to power, and cultivate procedural justice.

Aesthetic experience is a compelling tool for social change. The arts can serve to create constructive disorientation in ways that probe our innermost values and bring them to the surface. The arts offer paths that are closed to logic and argument, and as such have enormous potential for promoting deep learning. The chapter includes examples from both visual and performing arts to show how, by inviting a vision of how things could be different, one is empowered to imagine how things might be different.

“Paris Compounded” argues that the text of Finnegans Wake prompts readers to engage in sentient thinking. Joyce’s last work stages a heterogeneous and potentially limitless profusion that resists any preconceived order and disallows the passive reception associated with the commodity and with authoritarian discourse. The chapter situates the Wake’s textual assemblages within the literary practices of Paris of 1910 and 1920, showing that Joyce’s problematization of value and meaning are indebted to Apollinaire’s verbal montages but also, and more particularly, to Alfred Jarry, whose pataphysics deploys scatology, Lucretian materialism, and coincidentia oppositorum in an avant-garde mode. The chapter draws on the aesthetic theories of Benjamin, John Dewey, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas to argue that, as the Wake compounds the city under capitalism, it calls for ideal communities that respond to its material features with imagination, spontaneity, and joy.