Beyond Democratic Citizenship Education

• In Event: Democratic Citizenship in Education 2016

Abstract

Contemporary literature on democratic citizenship education accentuates the enactment of duties, rights, responsibilities, and a sense of belonging. Inasmuch as such rights and responsibilities are not necessarily pernicious to the discourse of education, it does seem to curb students’ aspirations to become ‘whatever being’ (Agamben, 1993) – meaning, whatever liberatory stance students might assume in university classrooms. This apparent minimisation of risk-taking in a university classroom vis-à-vis the cultivation of democratic citizenship education is likely to be compounded by the initiation approach to education, as articulated by Peters (1966), Rorty (1999), and Biesta (2014). It is our contention that democratic citizenship education has a more promising opportunity to be realised if the notion of initiation were to be undermined.

Authors

• Yusef Waghid, University of Stellenbosch

• Nuraan Davids, Stellenbosch University