Education and the Democratic Public Sphere a Neglected Chapter of Political Philosophy

CHAPTER 1 Education and the Democratic Public Sphere A Neglected Chapter of Political Philosophy

Axel Honneth

Ever since its beginnings in the nineteenth century, the history of the public education system in democratic constitutional states has been a history of conflicts over the structure, form, and content of the instruction provided in schools. Neither the stratification of the school system nor the teaching methods or the curricula remained unaffected by the acrimonious disputes between state agencies on the one side and representatives of social groups and parents’ associations on the other. The state’s recognition of a right on the part of each citizen to receive an education had an explosive potential which Immanuel Kant may have anticipated in the following sentence from his lectures on pedagogy: “Two human inventions can probably be regarded as the most difficult, namely the arts of government and education; and yet there is still controversy about their very idea”.1 For Kant, the parallel between the art of government and the art of education was suggested by the fact that both are socially created practices fulfilling the same function, albeit in the distinct dimensions of species history and individual history, phylogeny and ontogeny. Through the prudent choice of means and methods, which is to say, in an ‘artful’ way, both are meant to instruct us on how to effect a transition from a state of ‘minority’ to a state of freedom: be it with regard to a whole people, consisting of individual subjects, or be it with regard to a child still subjected to the rule of nature within himself. What initially looks like a mere analogy is developed far beyond that in the course of Kant’s lectures, where he points out that education and a republican political order mutually presup- pose each other. The young human being, governed by nature, has to undergo

* The manuscript is translated by Felix Koch, and was originally published in German. See: Axel Honneth, “Erziehung und demokratische Öffentlichkeit: Ein vernachlässigtes Kapitel der politischen Philosophie”, in Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, Vol. 15, No. 3, pp. 429– 442, 2012. It had previous been given as a keynote lecture at the opening of the 23rd congress of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Erziehungswissenschaft in 2012. 1 Immanuel Kant, “Lectures on Pedagogy”, (1803), in Anthropology, History, and Education, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 434–485, p. 441.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��5 | doi ��.��63/9789004287341_003 18 Honneth an educational process aimed at freedom before he can become a member of a self-governing political community; conversely, only autonomous citizens are able to institutionalise a system of public education that enables their children to attain political maturity. Good upbringing and a republican political order require each other because the former, in the form of public education, first produces the cultural and moral capacities that make it possible for the latter to exist and thrive in such a way that the active citizens even take an interest in the political emancipation of the lower orders of society. As in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, Kant’s Pedagogy draws on the idea of the ‘good citizen’ as a link between pedagogic theory and the theory of government, between a con- ception of education and political philosophy.2 Neither could exist without the other, since both spell out inseparable preconditions of a democratic political community. It is this very close, internal interrelation that explains why within the political and philosophical discourse of modernity virtually no notable theorist of democracy has failed to offer a systematic contribution to educational theory. Beginning with Rousseau and Kant, through Friedrich Schleiermacher, and up to Émile Durkheim and John Dewey, numerous important thinkers found it natural to devote entire books to the subject of public education.3 They thought of pedagogy, conceived as the theory of the standards and methods of the adequate teaching of children, as the twin sister of democratic theory. Without proper reflection on how to render a child both capable of coop- eration and morally independent, it seemed to them impossible to explain what it could mean to speak of the project of democratic self-determination. The idea of the ‘good citizen’ was not an empty phrase or an ornament for political speeches but a practical challenge calling for the theoretical elabo- ration and even the experimental testing of suitable school types and teaching methods. Thus, when it came to the challenge of re-habituating an entire population—the German one—to the practices of democratic politics that had been systematically eradicated under National Socialism, the American occupying forces found it natural to draw on the pedagogical writings of Dewey.4 The ties between democratic theory and pedagogical practice were still so close, and the internal relation between them still appeared so obvious,

2 Ibid., p. 484. 3 Friedrich Schleiermacher, “Über den Beruf des Staates zur Erziehung”, in Texte zur Pädagogik: Kommentierte Studienausgabe (Vol. 1), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2000, pp. 272– 290; Émile Durkheim, Moral Education, Mineola, ny: Dover Publications, 2011; John Dewey, Democracy and Education, New York: Free Press, 1997. 4 On ‘re-education’, see: Walter Gagel (2005): Geschichte der politischen Bildung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1945–1989/90, Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Ch. 2.