Liberalism, Pluralism, and Political Education: Paradox or Paradigm?Author(s): Meira LevinsonReviewed work(s):Source: Oxford Review of Education, Vol. 25, No. 1/2, Political Education (Mar. - Jun., 1999),pp. 39-58Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1050699 .Accessed: 03/05/2012 00:03

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Oxford Review of Education, Vol. 25, Nos. 1 &2, 1999

40 Oxford Review of Education

Kymlicka, 1995) correctly presume the need to teach toleration, and some also emphasise teaching mutual respect (Gutmann, 1995; Macedo, 1995). But additional facets of civic education are generally only vaguely referred to, with the content of such education usually being casually assumed rather than carefully described [1]. To put it bluntly, liberal political education is left to drift.

This state of affairs would not matter so much if liberal theory-and, concomitantly, liberal educational theory-were irrelevant to modern politics and education. But, to the contrary, they are extremely relevant. I suggest this is so for three reasons. First, I would hazard that most readers of this article currently live in states that are more or less liberal democracies. None matches the ideal liberal state, of course, which I describe below in 1.1. But Britain, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Holland, etc., all display in significant (albeit non-ideal) ways most of the attributes of liberal democracies. To this extent, the relationship between education and the reigning politics of liberal democracy should matter to readers of this article. Second and relatedly, education theory, policy, and praxis are all undergoing increasing scrutiny and criticism in many of these states. Schools and educators are being challenged to justify their aims and effectiveness, to reorient to a market-driven conception of education, to address and implement new or revised national curricula, to set higher standards, to reconceive in some cases the relationship between state and private schools, and so forth. In so far as the states in which these debates are taking place are (or believe themselves to be) liberal democracies, citizens' conceptions of the nature and practice of liberalism play an important role in shaping the political and educa- tional debate. It is thus important that both liberalism and liberalism's relationship to education be understood correctly.

Third, and possibly most importantly, many states across the world aspire to be- come-and/or to be publicly acknowledged as-liberal democracies. With the collapse of the USSR and the Iron Curtain, the democratisation of Latin America, the continu- ing transformation of East Asia, and the increasing development and democratisation of many African nations, liberal democracy has become a touchstone that many countries, politicians, and citizens seek to give them legitimacy both internally and on the world stage. As is evidenced by the many American and Western European politicians and law professors who have been invited to write constitutions for new countries, or for old countries getting on the liberal democratic bandwagon, theoretical conceptions of liberalism-and of liberal education, which is frequently being written into new constitutions-have enormous practical import for many people and coun- tries. For this reason, too, it is important that as both theorists and practitioners we fully understand and are able to evaluate recent liberal thought on liberalism and education. This article aims to contribute to this effort.

In Part I, I discuss the defining characteristics of the liberal state and develop a portrait of the kind of education necessary to maintain this state. The conception of education that I develop, however, is thought to succumb to a deadly paradox: namely, that by merely educating future citizens-i.e. children-in the attitudes, skills, and habits of character necessary to maintain a healthy and vibrant liberal democracy, liberal political education simultaneously fosters two significant illiberal outcomes. These are: (1) the imposition of the capacity for autonomy on future citizens, and (2) the reduction of social diversity via the transformation and/or destruction of many traditional communities. I conclude Part I by presenting the argument for this paradox.

Parts II and III are devoted to clarifying, analysing, and refuting this purported paradox in order to establish the conception of education presented in Part I as a new

Liberal Political Education 41

paradigm for liberal education. In Part II, I show that liberalism is coherent only if it values (and therefore promotes) children's development of the capacity for autonomy. Liberal political education fosters outcomes that may be extra-political, I argue, but are nonetheless intrinsically-and paradigmatically-liberal. Correlatively, I argue in Part III that in so far as children's development of the capacity for autonomy is a proper goal of liberal political education, the resultant reduction of social and cultural diversity is not an improper outcome of liberal political education. Maximal pluralism is not the hallmark of maximal (or maximally desirable) liberalism; rather, liberal education (political and otherwise) should preserve the political community but otherwise focus on protecting individual rather than communal freedom. Ultimately, therefore, I argue that liberal political education not only does not spell a 'paradox' for liberalism, but actually illuminates a paradigm both for liberal education and for liberal thought as a whole. I conclude with a brief discussion of the relationship between political education and political culture and identity.

I. THE CHARACTER OF LIBERAL POLITICAL EDUCATION

1. What Characterises the Liberal State?

I mentioned at the beginning of the Introduction that although many liberal theorists have written recently about the value-even necessity-of liberal political education for the maintenance of the liberal state, they have said little about its substance. I suggest that this is because few writers take the time in articles about liberal political education to discuss what commitments liberalism itself entails. Although theorists such as Galston, Macedo, and Kymlicka (Kymlicka, 1989; Macedo, 1990; Galston, 1991) have all written significant works about liberalism itself they strangely do not connect their writings specifically about liberalism with those about education. The former only vaguely inform the latter. As a result, since liberalism is itself left fuzzy, with its general shape occasionally outlined but its content rarely filled in, liberal political education is left equally indeterminate, floundering somewhere among respect for others, promotion of diversity, and low-level toleration for others. I argue, by contrast, that in order to characterise liberal political education clearly and carefully, we first need to characterise liberalism itself clearly and carefully. In this section, therefore, I describe liberalism by addressing the following question. How can we distinguish a liberal state from another type of state? In other words, what do we mean when we say that a state is liberal?

I suggest that we generally mean five things when we characterise a state as being liberal [2]. First and foremost, a liberal state has a characteristic set of legal, judicial, and social institutions. Liberal states are democratic, and ideally are constitutional democracies, where the function of the constitution is primarily to limit the power of the state. Some states that we would generally identify as liberal, such as Great Britain, do not have a formal or codified constitution, but in such cases common law or judicial precedent has gained the normative or legal force usually attributed to a more formal constitution. (Some reformers in Britain, too, argue for the adoption of a codified constitution precisely in order to bring it more in line with liberal political ideals.)

Second, liberal states guarantee (constitutionally or via legislation) a number of characteristic liberties, including: freedom of speech; freedom of religion, association, and conscience; freedom to own a certain amount of private property; freedom over one's own body; freedom from undue coercion by the state or by others; and far more vaguely, freedom to do anything that does not violate some version of a Millian harm

42 Oxford Review of Education

principle [3]. Liberal states' obligation to protect these various liberties has frequently been interpreted also to bind the state to providing citizens the means positively to exercise their liberties, as opposed simply to safeguarding negative liberties. This, however, is contested, and is currently falling into empirical disfavor as the welfare state is coming under attack in the USA, Australia, Britain, and much of the rest of Europe.

Third, it is empirically (rather than normatively) true that contemporary liberal states are, and will continue to be, highly diverse. Pluralism, of course, is a characteristic of the population of many states, liberal and illiberal alike. Modem, industrialised nations generally have an extremely diverse set of citizens when measured by race, ethnicity, age, religion, culture, socio-economic status, beliefs, conception of the good, and general way of life. How the state and its citizens confront and/or accommodate such pluralism, however, is in many ways what distinguishes liberal from other political orders. Thus, the third defining normative characteristic of liberal states is that they both tolerate and respect citizens' differences, and ensure that their citizens tolerate- and preferably respect-each other's differences as well. (I discuss the relationship between toleration and respect in the next section.)

Part of accommodating deep and irremediable pluralism is guaranteeing the afore- mentioned liberties to all people within the liberal state, regardless of their differences from the mainstream. But liberal toleration of difference is also taken to mean more generally that difference should not be linked with opportunity. Individuals' back- grounds-be they distinguished by race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, sex, religion, culture, or conception of the good-should be independent from their life-chances. Thus, a commitment to equality of opportunity is a fourth characteristic of modern liberalism-even though it is highly imperfect in the real world, and even its meaning is highly contested in theory and practice.

Finally, it is at least theoretically characteristic of liberal states that they be able to justify their actions, legislation, and even very existence, on non-sectarian grounds. As part of respecting citizens' many differences, the liberal state and its representatives should not make laws or engage in other action that can only be justified on sectarian religious, cultural, or other contestably value-laden grounds. In addition, the very constitution of the liberal state (where 'constitution' refers to the state's basic institu- tions and make-up as well as to the more formal, written document) is intended to be equally free of bias; its justification, too, should be based on reasons that can appeal to all reasonable people. This last requirement is famously difficult to achieve even in theory (the impressive contortions of some brilliant political philosophers notwithstand- ing), and sets a standard that no actual state meets in practice-at the very least, historical contingency gets in the way. But the idea that current legislation and political institutions, at least, should be justifiable in this way is still rightly significant for liberal theory and practice.

2. What Type of Political Education is Required to Maintain the Liberal State?

Liberal states are thus quite demanding both of their public servants (who comprise at any one time the contemporary instantiation of the state) and of their citizens more generally. To summarise the previous discussion, liberal political orders must be democratic, limit state power via a formal or informal constitution, protect a wide range of individual liberties, tolerate and respect individuals' differences over a vast array of measures, promote non-discrimination and equality of opportunity, and

Liberal Political Education 43

be consistently justifiable on grounds that can appeal to all reasonable citizens. In addition, as with all well-functioning states, they should be economically and politically stable.

Many of these characteristics are built into the structure of the liberal state, but their realisation will always depend on the character and commitments of its citizens. For example, as I will discuss further, even the most stringent anti-discrimination laws in service of equality of opportunity, applied conscientiously and consistently by politi- cians and other employees of the state, cannot overcome the insidious but lethal effects of private prejudice and discrimination. Likewise, as American history amply demon- strates, for example, democratic structures do not guarantee democratic outcomes if some segments of the population are routinely marginalised, or if many citizens are simply disaffected and uninvolved. Public accountability and decision-making require that the public be involved, and that they hold the representatives of the state accountable. To put it another way, the liberal state is a collective good, sustained via the collective practices of active citizens. It depends for its stability and preservation on there being a sufficiently high percentage of citizens who behave in public and private in ways that advance democracy, toleration, and non-discrimination. By contrast, if too many people take a passive or anti-democratic stance toward politics or towards their fellow citizens, then the social order may quickly become illiberal and the political order become dominated by an unrepresentative, often fanatical few who compete to shape the state to their own, illiberal ends. In such a case, the stability and sustainability of the liberal state will be threatened.

As a result, the characteristics of the ideal liberal state discussed earlier have important consequences for the character of liberal citizens, and thus for liberal political education. First, in so far as liberal states are democratic, future citizens (children) of a liberal state must learn to participate in and uphold democracy. This means not only that they must learn about their democratic rights, but also develop the skills and habits of character to exercise their democratic responsibilities. On the rights front, students should learn that as citizens of a liberal state, they possess (or will at the age of majority possess) the following rights: to speak freely; to associate with whomever they choose; to follow their own religious beliefs; to blaspheme and/or reject their own or other people's religion; to marry whom they wish; to accept any legal job offer they wish; to own private property; to develop their own sets of values and conceptions of the good; and so forth. They should also learn about their rights to campaign and vote freely for their favorite candidate or party, or even to become candidates for public office themselves.

Democracy brings obligations, however, as well as rights; students thus need also to develop the skills, attitudes, and habits that will make them effective defenders of their and others' liberal democratic rights and responsibilities. In part, this means that children should be taught to respect the democratic process, the constitution, and the constitutionally or legislatively protected liberties that help establish the basic structure of the liberal state. Although they will rightly become more critical over time, future democratic citizens should also develop an intuitive, seemingly natural, inclination in favor of democracy and liberal constitutionalism. They must accept liberal consti- tutional democracy as a legitimate and valuable form of government. In order to become effective liberal citizens, children should also develop democratic habits such as paying attention to public issues, voting, and exercising their rights as citizens. As I have noted, liberal democracy weakens with disuse, and one of the best antidotes to disuse is producing more citizens who take democracy seriously and have developed the habit

44 Oxford Review of Education

of public involvement. Finally, children must learn to evaluate the arguments made in a democratic and political world. They should be able to evaluate different candidates or political platforms, and to distinguish between solid and misleading arguments. From welfare policy to campaign finance reform, industry privatisation to funding for the arts, and local bond issues to global environmental treaties, citizens are faced with an enormous number of complex issues. In practice, this means that children need to learn to read and write, to understand at least basic history, economics, civics, political science, mathematics, and science, to separate style from substance, and overall to think critically and carefully. If they cannot do these things, then they will not be able to analyse and take thoughtful positions on these (and many other) issues as adults, and therefore will not be ideal democratic citizens (although they will be citizens-with the powers accorded to them-nonetheless). In sum, if children are to develop into adults who both fulfill the responsibilities and take advantage of the rights of democratic citizenship, they must be given a good, formal education that teaches them to value the liberal, constitutional democratic process while reading, writing, understanding, and reflecting critically about political complexities from historical, economic, scientific, political, ethical, and other perspectives.

This is a tall and complex order for liberal political education-but even more is to follow. In addition to learning about their democratic rights and responsibilities, coming to value liberal constitutional democracy, absorbing a broad range of traditional academic knowledge and skills, and developing critical thinking skills, students also need to learn to tolerate and respect other citizens and their differences. As I noted earlier in I. , toleration is one of the defining hallmarks of a liberal state. But it cannot simply be built into the laws and constitution of the state. If a state is truly going to realise 'the principled refusal to use coercive state instruments to impose one's own views on others' (Galston, 1995, p. 528) as Galston defines toleration, then its citizens must adopt such principles as their own.

Furthermore, Amy Gutmann makes a compelling argument that political education cannot stop at teaching toleration, but must also extend to teaching 'mutual respect-a reciprocal positive regard among citizens who pursue ways of life that are consistent with honoring the basic liberties and opportunities of others' (Gutmann, 1995, p. 561). Toleration may help guarantee that individuals or groups do not try to use state power (including legislative power) to impose their conception of the good on other citizens. But as Gutmann points out, it does not guarantee that individuals or groups will not discriminate against each other in the private sphere, or that people will experience equal opportunity. Tolerant people, under Galston's characterisation, may still dis- criminate against individuals or groups from different backgrounds, religions, races, or cultures in job hirings, housing, club memberships, and other spheres. The state may not engage in such discrimination, because that would be tantamount to using 'coercive state instruments' to push one view, way of life, or racial, cultural, or ethnic group over another. But even private action can have extremely deleterious public and political consequences. If white and black people (or Protestants and Catholics, long-time residents and recent immigrants, etc.) tolerated but did not respect each other, for example, then they would 'live and let live', but presumably not hire each other, attend similar private schools [4], or socialise together. Any pre-existing social, economic, or other inequalities would at best remain, and more likely be exacerbated, by such a situation. Public life would become stratified as well, and while equal opportunity might remain theoretically institutionalised, it would be stripped of any meaning in practice. As Gutmann persuasively argues:

Liberal Political Education 45

A government cannot effectively enforce nondiscrimination in hiring in a social context of widespread disrespect among members of different races, ethnicities, religions, or genders. Even the minimalist understanding of fair equality of opportunity as nondiscrimination in hiring is therefore unachievable without mutual respect among citizens. (Gutmann, 1995, p. 561)

Thus, liberal political education must include education for mutual respect as well as toleration. This, in turn, means that students need to learn about other people's ways of life: it is hard to develop true respect for something one knows nothing about. Whether this means that students should attend purposefully integrated schools (as I think they should, but will not argue for here), or simply study the history, culture, and achievements of individuals and groups different from themselves even while attending relatively segregated schools, children do need to be taught that there are many valuable ways of life that differ substantially from their own. In order to develop respect for these other ways of life, furthermore, these future citizens must also develop some measure of detachment from their own personal commitments. Individuals can accept other people's conceptions of the good as reasonable-and therefore as worthy of toleration and respect-only if they are able to see their own background and commitments as in some way contingent. This sense of contingency demands in turn a level of intellectual, if not emotional, detachment from their own cultures, group affiliations, and concep- tions of the good. This detachment is also useful for maintaining the non-sectarian nature of the liberal state. In so far as the fifth characteristic of liberal states is that they rely on non-sectarian justification for their institutions and actions, citizens should learn to respect and preferably to use such justifications themselves.

3. Tracking the Consequences of Liberal Political Education

Liberal political education, therefore, is far-reaching. In order to support and maintain liberal states' core commitments to constitutional democracy, toleration, non- discrimination, equality of opportunity, and non-sectarianism, future citizens must learn to read and write, to see their own backgrounds and commitments as contingent, to respect people who hold beliefs or ways of life that are antithetical to their own, to recognise their and other citizens' rights within a liberal democracy, to understand and analyse political issues from historical, economic, scientific, ethical and other perspec- tives, to think critically, to treat people from different cultural, religious, or racial backgrounds equally, to value the liberal political order, and generally to fulfill their responsibilities as citizens of a liberal constitutional democracy.

In the past few years, many authors have suggested that this far-reaching conception of liberal political education has equally far-reaching, and illiberal, consequences beyond education. In this section, I will introduce two of the most significant, appar- ently illiberal, consequences of the political education that I have described: namely, children's 'forced' development of the capacity for autonomy, and the reduction of diversity within the state.

First, it is true that if instituted fully, the aforementioned system of liberal political education would teach children more than just how to be effective citizens within the civic sphere. It would also have significant effects on the development of children's characters as a whole. This is in part because, as I have argued, the liberal political order depends on more than the establishment of a basic institutional and legislative structure populated by rule-followers. Liberal polities need active, thoughtful citizens

46 Oxford Review of Education

who possess and act upon a variety of habits, skills, attitudes, and other characteristics. The character of its citizens rightly matters to the liberal state because the personal often has political ramifications (such as in cases of non-discrimination, discussed earlier). Liberal political education also has further consequences, however, that go beyond the political conceived in either the public or the private spheres. Children's development of autonomy is one of these consequences.

Liberal political education teaches children to develop the capacity for autonomy because the skills, habits, values, knowledge, and beliefs that underlie the capacity for citizenship-for example, critical judgement, toleration, mutual respect, the ability to read a newspaper-also underlie the capacity for autonomy. It happens to be the case that 'most (if not all) of the same skills and virtues that are necessary and sufficient for citizenship in a liberal democracy are those that are also necessary and sufficient for educating children to deliberate about their way of life, more generally (and less politically) speaking' (Gutmann, 1995, p. 573). By learning to read widely, to recognise the reasonableness of competing ways of life, to think critically about political issues, to respect such liberal freedoms as free speech and apostasy, and to respect people who hold beliefs opposed to one's own, students learn, in effect, to think critically about their own lives and commitments, and to revise their commitments if they so choose. '[P]romoting core liberal political virtues-such as the importance of a critical attitude toward contending political claims-seems certain to have the effect of promoting critical thinking in general' (Macedo, 1995, p. 477). Thus, liberal political education is in fact liberal extra-political education: education for autonomy. This is not to say that all students will necessarily engage in this kind of autonomous deliberation and choice-making. But it is to say that liberal political education seems to cause students to develop the capacity for autonomy, whether or not they choose to exercise it as children or adults.

Furthermore, the compulsory development of a capacity for autonomy-even if the child is never forced to exercise his or her autonomy as an adult-entails other consequences that may fall outside the state's legitimate sphere of influence. Once children develop the capacity for autonomy, it becomes impossible for them to hold certain conceptions of the good in the same way that would previously have been available to them. Even passively possessing the knowledge and dispositions that underlie the capacity for autonomy radically alters the way that one approaches certain professions of value and belief. Nomi Stolzenberg explains this point powerfully in discussing fundamentalist Christian parents' concerns about 'value-neutral' state education in Tennessee:

[F]undamentalists are not concerned only with the case in which their chil- dren unequivocally reject their values; they are also concerned with the case in which their children remain attached to their parents' views, but only after coming to see those views as such-as subjective, contestable matters of opinion. There is a subtle but important difference between the faith that is innocent of alternatives and that which is not. (Stolzenberg, 1993, p. 597)

She expands this point later: The point is not simply that the objective mode of exposure exhibits options, or even that it encourages rational selection from them. It is that even if the children [continue to] adhere to their parents' beliefs, they do so knowing that those beliefs are matters of opinions This knowledge enhances the likelihood that children will form their own opinions and deviate from at least some of

Liberal Political Education 47

their parents' beliefs. It also transforms the meaning of remaining (or in the case of children, becoming) attached to them. It is one thing for beliefs to be transmitted from one generation to another. It is another to hold beliefs, knowing that those beliefs are transmitted, that they vary, and that their truth is contested (Stolzenberg, 1993, p. 633)

Thus, liberal political education seems to reduce important kinds of social diversity. In contrast to my argument in section I.1 that respect for diversity is one of liberalism's core commitments, liberal political education seems to make a mockery of civic pluralism and toleration. Although it does not specifically educate against particular ways of life, liberal political education teaches children to think about their lives in ways that makes some forms of life impossible to enter or sustain.

Transition

Political education thus seems to pose a paradox for liberalism. On the one hand, it is necessary to teach future citizens to tolerate and even respect each other; to respect viewpoints, beliefs, and conceptions of the good that are different from their own; and to think critically about political matters (often including matters of history, politics, science, the media, economics, etc.). Only in this way will a healthy, stable, liberal state be maintained. On the other hand, these very attitudes and skills that are necessary for the political survival of liberalism result in two seemingly extra-political and illiberal outcomes: (1) the imposition of the development of individual autonomy on all children; and (2) the consequent reduction of diversity or plurality within society as a whole.

One response to this paradox might be selectively to exempt members of certain communities from mandatory liberal political education. The Amish in the USA stand as the classic case of this kind of exemption, although many other groups might also rightly claim similar hardship. There are, however, two problems with this approach. First, unlike the Amish, many if not most groups that might request such an exemption are politically activist. Examples include evangelical Christians in the USA, Chasids in New York, and some fundamentalist Muslims in Britain. If individuals-and especially the communities that might request exemption-are politically active and even activist, it is arguable that they should receive education that not only introduces them to but even inculcates the attitudes, knowledge, and skills characteristic of (and necessary for the preservation of) liberal democracy [5]. Second, as I shall argue in the next section, it is actually intrinsic to a coherent liberal theory (even if rarely understood, let alone acknowledged) that children should be taught, with the assistance and encouragement of the liberal state, to develop their capacities for individual autonomy.

I will argue, therefore, that although these consequences appear to pose a deep paradox both for the preservation and justification of liberalism, they in fact strengthen liberalism's empirical applicability and theoretical coherence. This is because liberalism is a coherent theory only if it commits itself to the development of children's autonomy, and correlatively, because the continued existence of certain ways of life in a liberal state actually bespeak lesser rather than greater freedom for its citizens. This is not, I should hasten to note, because religion is itself freedom-reducing, or because holding strong, life long commitments is suspect or incompatible with true freedom. I do not think (or argue) this in the slightest. Rather, as I will show in section III of this article, to allow communities every way possible to maintain themselves through the next

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generation is to restrict some individuals' (namely, children born into those communi- ties) freedom in an illiberal fashion. Just as any individual's right to yell 'fire' in a crowded theater, or to jam public airwaves, is limited by other individuals' rights to life, physical safety, and free expression, so are groups' rights to transmit their values to children fettered by children's rights to full citizenship and the development of auton- omy. In essence, liberalism and liberal education have a broader purview than liberal politics and liberal political education. The latter are components of the former, but they do not define the boundaries of liberalism and liberal education as a whole. I will discuss this in more detail in the following sections.

II. LIBERALISM AND AUTONOMY

1. The Institutions and Freedoms Characteristic of the Liberal State are Justified Only if it Values Adults' Exercise of Autonomy

The political institutions, freedoms, and commitments characteristic of liberal states as presented in I.1 are not obviously self-justifying. Rather, some further, underlying commitment is needed to justify their presence in the liberal state and to tie them all together. In this section, I address the justification for liberal political institutions and argue for the necessity of grounding liberal politics within the values embraced by liberal philosophy as a whole. Liberal political institutions, I will argue, are coherently justified (in a normative, rather than historical, sense) on the basis of the value of individual autonomy-where autonomy is roughly understood to mean the capacity self-critically to evaluate one's values and ends with the possibility of revising and then realising them. Only because liberalism values individuals' exercise of autonomy, in other words, do the political institutions characteristic of liberal states make normative sense. As a result, I will argue, liberalism and therefore liberal education have a broader purpose than our characterisation just of the political aims of liberal institutions and liberal political education might suggest. As I will show in this and the following sections, the conception of liberal political education I proposed in 1.2 provides a paradigm for liberal education as a whole precisely because of its extra-political-and autonomy-fostering-consequences.

Before turning to the justification of any of these claims, however, I should address one important question about the structure of my analysis of liberalism. Given the centrality I will accord in sections II and III to the value of autonomy's development and exercise, one might plausibly ask why I did not introduce the concept of autonomy earlier in I.1 when I was characterising the ideal liberal state. I delayed autonomy's introduction for two reasons. First, I believe that it is important for us to understand the necessary character of liberal political education independent of all considerations besides sustaining a healthy liberal democracy. It is too easy for theorists (Galston, for example) to dismiss the substantial educational content I described in 1.2-e.g. literacy, history, economics, math, science, ethics, cross-cultural studies, critical thinking skills, etc.-as surpassing the boundaries of what liberalism can require for children's edu- cation if it is thought to rest on a broader and inherently contestable value such as autonomy. By contrast, I wanted to show in section I that even if one takes the political institutions of liberalism on their own terms, with no reference to potential underlying justifications or other liberal values, liberal political education nonetheless encompasses a comprehensive set of educational requirements. Second, I kept autonomy separate because I will argue that while the value of developing and exercising autonomy

Liberal Political Education 49

provides an important (even necessary) justification for the structures and institutions of liberal politics, liberalism does not and should not require the possession or exercise of autonomy as a prerequisite for full liberal citizenship. As a result, while I argue that children's development of the capacity for autonomy is a desirable outcome of liberal political education-since it is consistent with and desirable for liberal education more broadly-I do not wish to suggest that it is a necessary component of educating for liberal citizenship. I will address this in greater detail later.

To return to the focus of this section, the political attributes of the liberal state must derive legitimacy from the (normative, rather than historical) foundations of liberalism itself. This justification is generally (and rightly) found in the importance of humans' capacities 'to form, to revise, and rationally to pursue ... a conception of what we regard for us as a worthwhile human life' (Rawls, 1993, p. 302). This triadic conception of humans' good effectively justifies liberalism's commitments to constitutional democ- racy, guaranteed individual liberties, equal opportunity, and toleration of diversity. It is also thought to provide a non-sectarian justification for liberal institutions (the fifth characteristic of liberalism), although that is a matter of some debate. I will not go through the arguments for each justification individually, as most readers, I imagine, are already familiar with them or can construct them on their own. But, it is worth seeing one example of how different parts of the triad-in this case, how humans' interests in revising and their interests in pursuing their conceptions of the good-may each support institutions characteristic of liberalism.

John Rawls marshals two different arguments in support of the freedoms of conscience and association. In one, Rawls states:

There is no guarantee that all aspects of our present way of life are the most rational for us and not in need of at least minor if not major revision. For these reasons the adequate and full exercise of the capacity for a conception of the good is a means to a person's good. Thus, on the assumption that liberty of conscience, and therefore the liberty to fall into error and to make mistakes, is among the social conditions necessary for the development and exercise of this power, the parties have another ground for adopting principles that guarantee this basic liberty. Here we should observe that freedom of associ- ation is required to give effect to liberty of conscience; for unless we are at liberty to associate with other like-minded citizens, the exercise of liberty of conscience is denied. (Rawls, 1993, p. 313)

Hence we see that humans' moral capacity to revise their conceptions of the good results in a powerful argument in favour of freedom of conscience and association. The weaker grounds of individuals' interest in pursuing their conception of the good can also be used to justify these two freedoms, as Rawls argues in an earlier passage. Given the fact of pluralism, individuals in society will have many, often conflicting, concep- tions of what it means to live a worthwhile life. Freedoms of conscience and association are thus essential to permitting individuals to realise these conceptions without hin- drance (Rawls, 1993, pp. 310-312). Many writers offer similar justifications for other liberal freedoms and institutions based on human beings' interests in pursuing a conception of the good.

Not all liberal freedoms and institutional structures, however, can be justified on the basis of the 'form and pursue' clauses alone. As Will Kymlicka persuasively argues:

It is all too easy to reduce individual liberty to the freedom to pursue one's conception of the good. But in fact much of what is distinctive to a liberal state

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concerns the forming and revising of people's conceptions of the good, rather than the pursuit of those conceptions once chosen. (Kymlicka, 1995, p. 82)

He uses the example of religion to prove his point. While freedom of conscience is certainly necessary for people to be able to pursue their religious faith, he argues, many other traditional liberal freedoms are not; their justification relies on the importance of revising one's faith:

A liberal society not only allows individuals the freedom to pursue their existing faith, but it also allows them to seek new adherents for their faith (proselytization is allowed), or to question the doctrine of their church (heresy is allowed), or to renounce their faith entirely and convert to another faith or to atheism (apostasy is allowed). It is quite conceivable to have the freedom to pursue one's current faith without having any of these latter freedoms ... These aspects of a liberal society only make sense on the assumption that revising one's ends is possible, and sometimes desirable, because one's current ends are not always worthy of allegiance. A liberal society does not compel such questioning and revision, but it does make it a genuine possibility. (Kymlicka, 1995, p. 82)

Thus, liberalism does require all three elements of what Rawls terms our 'second moral power'-to form, to revise, and to pursue a conception of the good-in order to justify liberal freedoms and institutions [6].

The capacity 'to form, to revise, and rationally to pursue' one's conception of the good, however, encompasses the capacity for autonomy-roughly defined as the ca- pacity self-critically to evaluate one's values and ends with the possibility of revising and then realising them [7]. The justification of substantive liberal institutions and free- doms thus relies on the value of autonomy. Rawls and some other self-defined 'political liberals' attempt to circumvent this conclusion by emphasising that it is the existence of the second moral power that is important and not its value or our interest in realising it. As Rawls argues:

'[F]rom the start the conception of the person is regarded as part of a conception of political and social justice. That is, it characterises how citizens are to think of themselves and of one another in their political and social relationships as specified by the basic structure. This conception is not to be mistaken for an ideal for personal life ... much less as a moral ideal'. (Rawls, 1993, p. 300)

Because the second moral power exists, Rawls argues, the state (and individuals in their political capacities as citizens) must accommodate via liberal institutions and freedoms those people who wish to realise their moral capacities. But the state takes no stance on the moral value of revising (and forming and pursuing) a conception of the good.

I assert, however, that we must have a further reason beyond the mere presence of this capacity to regard it as an important part of even the political conception of the person. Human beings have many capacities, after all, not all of which deserve regard from the state or from ourselves as at all worthy of respect or aid-for example, humans' capacity for extreme cruelty. The only reason for the state to acknowledge one capacity over another is if the former is more worth realising than the latter. But this is tantamount to asserting that the particular capacity has worth for all human beings (within the society in which the liberal debate is taking place)-i.e. that the capacity represents a substantive good. Ronald Dworkin asserts as much in his essay 'In defense

Liberal Political Education 51

of equality'. In response to Rawls's claim that '[s]ince citizens are regarded as having the two moral powers, we ascribe to them two corresponding higher-order interests in developing and exercising these powers' (Rawls, 1993, pp. 73-74), Dworkin counters, 'Our higher-order interest is not an interest in exercising a capacity because we find we have it ... but rather we develop and train capacities of the sort that [Rawls] describe[s] because we have a certain interest' in what they have to offer us (Dworkin, 1983, p. 26). I believe that Dworkin is clearly right here, and that one must conclude that if Rawls-or any other liberal-is committed to the liberal state's recognising and pro- moting individuals' fundamental capacity to form, revise, and pursue a conception of the good life, then he must admit the liberal state holds individual autonomy to be a political good (and not just an indifferent capacity). Rawls even admits almost as much (although not quite) in asserting that 'contained in the conception of a person' is the 'possibility' that 'in addition to our beliefs being true, our actions right, and our ends good, we may also strive to appreciate why our beliefs are true, our actions right, and our ends good and suitable for us' (Rawls, 1993, p. 313). He must take the next step and acknowledge that this possibility is a good that the state should uphold; for if it is not, it is totally unclear why individuals should take it, as opposed to any other 'possibility' of empirical human life, into account in justifying the liberal state.

This is not to say that the state should or even can discriminate against individuals who do not fulfill their capacity for autonomous action. Just after making the above assertion, Rawls is quick to note that 'many persons may not examine their acquired beliefs and ends but take them on faith, or be satisfied that they are matters of custom and tradition. They are not to be criticised for this' (Rawls, 1993, p. 314). If one replaces 'criticised' with 'discriminated against', this statement is perfectly true, and is fully compatible with the judgement that individual autonomy is a good that the state should foster. Liberal institutions may be justified only by adopting a political ideal of individual moral autonomy, but liberals need not assert the ideal to be proper grounds for discriminating against those who do not live up to it. So long as people fulfil the basic requirements of citizenship, as discussed in 1.1-2, they deserve to be treated equally as citizens. Individuals are under no obligation to acknowledge that autonomy has value for their own lives. But, they do need to agree as citizens that autonomy is a value which the state should uphold.

2. Children have an Interest, under Liberal Theory, in Developing Autonomy; resolving liberalism's first 'paradox'

In II.1, we saw that the liberal state is properly shaped by a commitment to establishing and protecting the conditions necessary for citizens to exercise autonomy. I suggest, therefore, that it is also proper for a liberal state to attempt to establish the conditions necessary for individuals-and especially children-to develop the capacity for auton- omy. The argument for this is straightforward, based on an extension of Dworkin's argument (see earlier). I have contended that the simple fact of possessing the capacity for autonomy (our 'second moral power') does not in itself give us any reason to exercise it, i.e. to act autonomously. We all have many personal capacities that we choose to leave undeveloped or even to suppress-capacities for anger, for jealousy, for advancing our social standing at the expense of others, for self-absorption, and so forth. Our merely possessing these latter capacities does not give us a reason to exercise them. What does give us reason to exercise a capacity is our belief that its exercise has a certain worth and value-that is, that the capacity represents a substantive good. Thus, the

52 Oxford Review of Education

argument went, the liberal cannot merely invoke the human possibility for autonomy and argue for liberal freedoms on that basis alone; rather, he must treat the capacity for autonomy as an actual human good that the liberal state must value and foster. The extension of this argument regarding the development of autonomy is quite simple. If the exercise of autonomy is valuable, then its development must also be a good. Mirroring this contrast, it does not make sense to admit that there is value in exercising autonomy, but to deny that there is value in developing it (which development is, obviously enough, a precondition to its exercise) [8]. As Amy Gutmann argues, 'The same principle that requires a state to grant adults personal and political freedom also commits it to assuring children an education that makes those freedoms both possible and meaningful in the future' [9]. Thus, if the liberal state so values autonomy that it works to promote individuals' exercise of it, the state should also aid people in developing their capacity for it.

This has some potentially disturbing implications for many liberals (and non- liberals). If the state should aid people (and specifically children) in developing their capacities for autonomy, then state control over education and the interference of liberal education in children's and their parents' lives may be much more substantial and intrusive than many liberals commonly think-in part because some parents would normally resist their children developing the capacities for autonomy, and in part because the conditions required to develop a skill or disposition such as autonomy are both logically and empirically different from the conditions required for its exercise. Adults' exercise of autonomy may be best protected by safeguarding a variety of traditional liberal freedoms. But children's development of autonomy may be best promoted by coercing children (and their adult caretakers to allow them) to attend particular schools with defined, even inflexible, educational aims (such as the develop- ment of autonomy). I have made arguments for as much elsewhere, in fact, although there is not room to present them here [10].

Regardless of liberals' and non-liberals' difficulties in accepting the political and educational implications of these arguments, however, the fact remains that liberalism is only coherent-on both a theoretical and an empirical level-if children's rights to develop their capacities for autonomy are recognised in tandem with adults' rights to exercise their capacities for autonomy (if they so wish and their capacities are so developed). The characteristics that define a liberal state only make sense in this context. Thus, an educational approach that simultaneously teaches children the variety of habits, attitudes, beliefs, knowledge, and skills to be effective liberal citizens and helps them to develop their capacities for autonomy (as liberal education happens to do) is actually paradigmatic of liberal education, rather than in any way inimical to the liberal order.

III. LIBERALISM AND PLURALISM

1. Maximal Pluralism Maximal Liberalism

As I discussed at the end of Section I, liberal political education of the sort described in 1.2 inevitably reduces social diversity by transforming and/or destroying many traditional communities. In learning to think critically, respect other points of view, value their political rights, read widely, and participate in democratic decision-making, for example, individuals develop in ways that necessarily transform the character of their membership in tradition-bound or illiberal communities. Women given a liberal

Liberal Political Education 53

political education as girls may become less willing to accept patriarchal structures in their personal or religious lives; children who learn that beliefs and values can legiti- mately be questioned may turn that questioning attitude on their own beliefs; young adults realise that their ways of life are not the only reasonable ones and thus start to explore others; people learn to analyse political-and then personal-questions from alternative economic, historical, and/or cultural perspectives, thus potentially abandon- ing or at least reducing their reliance upon the single, given approach (or answer) to the problem that they had previously learned to adopt. Ultimately, communities that rely on undemocratic and/or unequal structures give way to more liberal communities; likewise, communities that previously were characterised and preserved by members' unthinking adherence to a set of given beliefs and/or practices are transformed into communities that are consciously chosen from a variety of alternatives and potentially become more flexible as a result. At the same time, ways of life that draw upon the same values as liberal democracy grow and become stronger, further widening the gap between traditional and more liberal communities' survival as a result of liberal political education.

We may agree that this set of outcomes is unfortunate for traditional communities, and that it represents a reduction in civic diversity over the long term. But is it illiberal? I can discern five possible arguments supporting the idea that liberal political edu- cation's disparate effect on individuals' ways of life is illiberal. Four of these arguments are easily refuted, which I do in this section. The final argument is more complex, and I deal with it in the next and final section.

First, adults may argue that as a result of the transformative effect that liberal political education has on their own value communities, their abilities to pursue their own conceptions of the good are unfairly restricted. On this reading, children are needed to perpetuate certain ways of life so that adult adherents are not forced to change their own practices. I suggest that while it may be unfortunate for adults to have to adjust to changing times, including adjusting to the transformation or decline of their own valued ways of life, it is impossible to see how this can take much precedence from a liberal perspective. Future citizens' effective participation in and perpetuation of the liberal state-ensured by giving children a liberal political education-must be more important than adults' dislike of change.

Second, it is argued that adults' ability to pass on their own ways of life to their children is restricted by the imposition of liberal political education. While this is certainly true, I do not see why anybody should find this illiberal. Children are not the property or even servants of their parents. And again, children's rights to full citizenship (including knowing about their rights and being able to take advantage of democratic structures) in a stable liberal state must trump adults' 'rights' (?) to inculcate their beliefs in their children. As Stephen Macedo puts it: 'The basic question of principle is, Do families have a moral right to opt out of reasonable measures designed to educate children toward very basic liberal virtues because those measures make it harder for parents to pass along their particular religious [or other] beliefs? Surely not' (Macedo, 1995, p. 485).

Third, and potentially more compellingly, critics may protest that children's potential range of ways of life is limited or restricted by liberal political education. This seems clearly true, since as the quotation from Stolzenberg pointed out earlier, liberal education will prevent children from being able to adopt conceptions of the good or ways of life in the same way as they could have in the absence of such education. Joseph Raz effectively counters this argument, however, by suggesting that 'while autonomy

54 Oxford Review of Education

[or even liberal citizenship] requires the availability of an adequate range of options it does not require the presence of any particular option among them' (Raz, 1986, p. 410). It is true that 'denying a person the possibility of carrying on with his projects, commitments and relationships is preventing him from having the life he has chosen'- a denial that is significant in contradicting liberalism's aim to help people form, revise, and pursue their own conceptions of the good. But this problem does not apply to children, whose opinions and choices are still being formed.

A person who may but has not yet chosen the eliminated option is much less seriously affected. Since all he is entitled to is an adequate range of options the eliminated option can, from his point of view, be replaced by another without loss of autonomy [or of his rights as a liberal citizen]. (Raz, 1986, p. 411)

Fourth, it may be argued that diversity is a good in and of itself, and therefore liberal political education should be restricted or modified in so far as it limits diversity. It may be true that diversity is intrinsically good-although the claim would need to be justified using different arguments from the three already discussed. But even so, I can hardly imagine that diversity is a greater good, at least according to liberal theory, than individual freedom is. Children's rights to develop their capacities for full citizenship (let alone autonomy), plus the need to preserve the liberal state via liberal political education, must trump any claims of diversity for diversity's sake. Ultimately and necessarily, 'Liberal diversity is diversity shaped and managed by political institutions' (Macedo, 1995, p. 470)-regardless of diversity's intrinsic value.

2. Children's Cultural Coherence Will not be Destroyed Even if Liberal Political Education Threatens the Communities in Which They Are Raised.

The fifth, and most interesting, objection to liberal political education from the perspective of pluralism is that the reduction of certain forms of diversity (and correlative loss or transformation of certain communities) via political education will hinder children's acquisition of cultural coherence. Because of the minority status of their community, or because of the fragmentation and discontinuities in families, neighborhoods, and communities characteristic of modern life in contemporary indus- trialised societies, this argument goes, not all children will achieve cultural coherence without the active support and aid of their schools. Children who grow up within fragmented and unstable households and communities may have no available source of identification beyond that provided by the school, because no stable and/or coherent source of identification exists in their world. In addition, children from minority communities may also be at risk of cultural disenfranchisement, as they try unsuccess- fully to mediate between the conflicting assumptions, values, and ways of life repre- sented by their families and home community on the one hand, and by the school on the other. According to this argument, therefore, liberal political education should not be forced upon all students, because human beings' need for cultural coherence takes priority over their inculcation into the habits, knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed for full exercise of citizenship in the liberal state.

Although this is an important and complex objection to the expansive vision of liberal political education that I developed in 1.2, I suggest that it ultimately falls short. This is because liberal political citizenship itself will generally offer a coherent identity that at best builds upon, and at worst replaces, children's other cultural or personal identities. States are cultural as well as political constructs. Civic identification

Liberal Political Education 55

inevitably includes a cultural component-usually including a common language, conception of history (or at least of significant historical markers), literature and music, myths and self-characterisation. Schools which offer children a liberal political edu- cation, therefore, can naturally and simultaneously help children achieve a sense of cultural membership. In the best case scenario, depending upon the way in which civic identity is constructed at the local level, children raised in minority cultures but given a liberal political education may be able to achieve simultaneous cultural coherence in both their home culture and the civic culture. If the civic culture values multilinguality (e.g. Canada or Switzerland), incorporates the experiences of minority groups into the national historical narrative (as the USA is increasingly doing), and/or simply values social and civic diversity, then a liberal state may be able to reinforce children's development of cultural coherence while encouraging their identification with the liberal polity. In this case, liberal political education could serve minority children's interests in developing cultural coherence even while educating for liberal citizenship and autonomy. This synergy may be possible only in particular states whose construc- tion of liberal civic identity incorporates, or is at least compatible with, minority cultures' constructions of their own identities. But at least in those liberal states that exhibit these characteristics, children who learned in a school that was structured by dominant civic and autonomy-based norms might simultaneously be able to develop their capacities for choice, cultural coherence, and liberal democratic citizenship [11].

Even in states whose civic self-conception is not so inclusive, civic identification can potentially provide a replacement for other forms of cultural and social embeddedness. Again, this is because of the cultural construction of civic institutions. Thus, even children who grow up in the fragmented or culturally impoverished environments mentioned earlier can achieve cultural embeddedness within a liberal school. Their membership will be in the public culture taught by the school, rather than in a private, ethnic, or religiously based cultural community. But as I discussed in III.1, the source of this cultural identification does not matter; so long as public cultural membership provides children with the necessary prerequisites for developing, revising, and pursuing a conception of the good, it is satisfactory within a liberal framework.

Finally, I suggest that even if these two arguments fail in some way, education for citizenship within the liberal state is at least as important an aim as education for cultural coherence within a non-public culture. This is because members of minority groups who cannot reconcile cultural with civic membership will inevitably be both marginalised and disenfranchised within the liberal state. Such a situation is a great loss for the majority as well as the minority community; it turns children within such communities into 'internal exiles within the state' (Miller, 1995, p. 145) whose oppor- tunities for any kinds of choices are extremely limited, and increases prejudice and misunderstanding between the majority and minority groups. In addition, if there are more than a few such minority groups, then their presence fundamentally weakens the state; as this article has emphasised throughout, liberal democracy can be preserved only if future generations learn to identify themselves with and act according to the virtues of citizenship as well as with their more local communities. Ultimately, groups which cannot reconcile cultural socialisation with liberal education cannot and should not maintain themselves unchanged in a liberal state.

'What must happen ... is that existing national identities must be stripped of elements that are repugnant to the self-understanding of one or more compo- nent groups, while members of these groups must themselves be willing to

56 Oxford Review of Education

embrace an inclusive nationality, and in the process to shed elements of their values which are at odds with its principles'. (Miller, 1995, p. 142; see also Macedo, 1996)

In conclusion, liberalism is a socially activist and transformative philosophy (despite some political liberals' claims to the contrary), and liberal political education, as well as liberal education more broadly conceived, is consequently an activist and transforma- tive education. Rather than shying away from the social and cultural (as well as political) outcomes of liberal political education, we should instead embrace them as the proper and desired results of a mutually reinforcing liberal educational and political order.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to thank Elizabeth Frazer and an anonymous reviewer for the Oxford Review of Education for their critical reading of and helpful comments about this paper.

NOTES

[1] One exception to this trend is Eamonn Callan (1997), whose book Creating Citizens addresses civic education in a careful and systematic manner.

[2] There is, of course, nothing magical about the number five. I could have divided the following list into six or 10 different characteristics, or perhaps collapsed them into four or three. I simply wish to highlight the following characteristics, which happen to fall into five categories, as being significant determinants in distinguish- ing liberal from illiberal political orders.

[3] This is, of course, merely a representative sample of traditional liberal freedoms, not a systematic or exhaustive list.

[4] Or attend the same state schools, for that matter, if choice of school is determined by choice of residence and residential segregation becomes the norm-as is currently the case in the USA and presumably would be likely in a state that was devoid of mutual respect.

[5] This is especially significant in so far as these groups are increasingly within the center, rather than at the margins, of society. Research indicates that in the 1994 elections in the USA, the Christian Right mobilised about 4 million activists and distributed over 40 million voters' guides. Additionally, one-quarter of delegates to the 1992 Republican National Convention identified themselves as 'members' or 'supporters' of the Christian Right, while self-defined 'evangelicals'-e.g. people who share at least some of the beliefs of the plaintiffs in the Mozert case cited earlier-made up 26% of all voters in 1994 (Green et al., 1995).

[6] It is worth noting that this argument is not put forth merely for the sake of argument, as might be thought given that few people currently living in liberal states question the political rights of apostasy, heresy, etc. If it were true that, as Stephen Macedo believes, 'There does not seem to be any reasonable disagree- ment about the core meaning of the constitutional basics: the good of basic democratic procedures and core civil liberties' (Macedo, 1995, p. 495, fn. 78.), then one might not require the 'revise' clause to justify core civic liberties: they could simply be assumed by reasonable people. It is wrong, however, to think that the 'core meaning of the constitutional basics' is undisputed. The best evidence

Liberal Political Education 57

for this is the careful Rowntree Reform Trust 'State of the Nation' poll in England, conducted in 1995. In this study, over 2000 people were interviewed about what they would include and exclude if Britain were to adopt a bill of rights. In order, the five highest vote-getters were: (1) Right to hospital treatment on the NHS (National Health Service) within a reasonable time (88% in favour); (2) Right to a fair trial before a jury (82%); (3) Right to privacy in your phone and mail communications (75%); (4) Right to know what information government departments hold about you (74%); (5) Right to join, or not to join, a trade union (71%). Right to practise your religion without state interference ranked seventh, with 60% of respondents in favour. Right of free assembly for peaceful meetings or demonstrations, by contrast, ranked eleventh, with only 59% in favour; the rights of the press to report on matters of public interest and of a defendant to remain silent followed behind with 53 and 32% in favour, respectively. It is notable how ambivalent the support is for many of the supposed 'core civil liberties' (Dunleavy & Weir, 1995).

[7] I assume in this section that Rawls (and others) mean 'revise' to indicate an ability to engage in internally motivated revision as opposed to simple reaction to adverse events. For if the revision is supposed to be self-generated in some way, then Rawls's definition of individuals' capacity for the good definitely seems to presup- pose autonomy. If, on the other hand, the second stipulation merely means that individuals should not experience an utter downfall of their personality if any event occurs (either inner-generated or externally imposed) that forces them to revise their conception of the good, then autonomy may not be involved. This latter case is simply a condition of what it means to be fully human-that one does not have a breakdown in the face of change. While this is an essential distinction, I presume on the basis of further statements he makes in the text (see Political Liberalism, pp. 30-31, 313-314) that he means the revision to imply what we would refer to as autonomous action. I suggest this is true of other liberal thinkers, as well.

[8] This might not be the case if the exercise of autonomy were merely an instrumen- tal good needed to satisfy an end or need that was generated only by the possession of autonomy itself. For example, it could be argued that if one has the capacity for autonomy, one will be unhappy if the capacity is frustrated and unhappiness is intrinsically bad, so people with the capacity for autonomy should be able to exercise it. But the argument for autonomy was never made in this way-nor should it have been. It is autonomy itself that is viewed as a good, not its exercise as a means to satisfying the burden of its possession.

[9] Gutmann (1987), p. 30. Eamonn Callan puts the same point in slightly different terms: '[I]f the range of liberal rights that currently commands an extensive moral consensus does indeed presuppose the doctrine of revisability, and if that doctrine entails the desirability of an education that fosters imaginative sympathy, then a powerful case emerges for acknowledging a right to an education of that kind' (Callan, 1992, p. 23).

[10] See Levinson (1997, forthcoming 1999). [11] I explore these arguments in greater detail in Levinson (1997, 1999, chapter 4). REFERENCES

CALLAN, E. (1992) Tradition and integrity in moral education, American Journal of Education, 101, pp. 1-28.

58 Oxford Review of Education

CALLAN, E. (1997) Creating Citizens (Oxford, Oxford University Press). DUNLEAVY, P. & WEIR, S. (1995) It's all over for the old constitution, Independent, 30

May, p. 13. DWORKIN, R. (1983) In defense of equality, Social Philosophy and Policy, 1, pp. 24-40. GALSTON, W. (1991) Liberal Purposes (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). GALSTON, W. (1995) Two concepts of liberalism, Ethics, 105, pp. 516-534. GREEN, J.C., GUTH, J.L., KELLSTEDT, L.A. & SMIDT, C.E. (1995) Evangelical

realignment: the political power of the Christian Right, Christian Century, 112, pp. 676-679.

GUTMANN, A. (1987) Democratic Education (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press). GUTMANN, A. (1995) Civic education and social diversity, Ethics, 105, pp. 557-579. KYMLICKA, W. (1989) Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford, Oxford University

Press). KYMLICKA, W. (1995) Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford, Oxford University Press). LEVINSON, M. (1997) Liberalism versus democracy? Schooling private citizens in the

public square, British Journal of Political Science, 27, pp. 333-360. LEVINSON, M. (1999) The Demands of Liberal Education (Oxford, Oxford University

Press). MACEDO, S. (1990) Liberal Virtue (Oxford, Oxford University Press). MACEDO, S. (1995) Liberal civic education and religious fundamentalism: the case of

God v. John Rawls? Ethics, 105, pp. 468-496. MACEDO, S. (1996) Community, diversity, and civic education: toward a liberal

political science of group life, Social Philosophy and Policy, 13, pp. 240-268. MILLER, D. (1995) On Nationality (Oxford, Oxford University Press). RAWLS, J. (1993) Political Liberalism (New York, Columbia University Press). RAZ, J. (1986) The Morality of Freedom (Oxford, Clarendon Press). STOLZENBERG, N.M. (1993) 'He drew a circle that shut me out': assimilation

indoctrination, and the paradox of a liberal education, Harvard Law Review, 106, pp. 581-667.

Correspondence: E-mail. < meira.levinson@aya.yale.edu >.

Article Contentsp. [39]p. 40p. 41p. 42p. 43p. 44p. 45p. 46p. 47p. 48p. 49p. 50p. 51p. 52p. 53p. 54p. 55p. 56p. 57p. 58

Issue Table of ContentsOxford Review of Education, Vol. 25, No. 1/2, Political Education (Mar. - Jun., 1999), pp. 1-288Front Matter [pp. 1 - 3]Introduction: The Idea of Political Education [pp. 5 - 22]Constructive and Reconstructive Political Education [pp. 23 - 38]Liberalism, Pluralism, and Political Education: Paradox or Paradigm? [pp. 39 - 58]Political Education in the Early Years: The Place of Civic Virtues [pp. 59 - 70]Political Education: Relevance of the Humanities [pp. 71 - 87]Education as Politics: University Adult Education in England since 1870 [pp. 89 - 101]'England Expects Every Man to Do His Duty': The Gendering of the Citizenship Textbook 1940-1966 [pp. 103 - 123]What Has Happened in the Teaching of Politics in Schools in England in the Last Three Decades, and Why? [pp. 125 - 140]'A Fraught Path': Education as a Basis for Developing Improved Community Relations in Northern Ireland [pp. 141 - 153]Foreign Language Teaching to Adults: Implicit and Explicit Political Education [pp. 155 - 169]Young People, Politics and News Media: Beyond Political Socialisation [pp. 171 - 184]Young People's Voluntary and Campaigning Activities as Sources of Political Education [pp. 185 - 198]Rights, Identities and Inclusion: European Action Programmes as Political Education [pp. 199 - 215]Making 'Good Citizens': The Social and Political Attitudes of PGCE Students [pp. 217 - 230]Citizenship Education: An Empirical Study of Policy, Practices and Outcomes [pp. 231 - 250]Politics: The Education Effect [pp. 251 - 273]Changing the Political Culture: The Advisory Group on Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools [pp. 275 - 284]Back Matter [pp. 285 - 288]