Kasvatusfilosofian seminaari kokoontuu kasvatustieteiden laitoksella Helsingin yliopistossa 25. toukokuuta klo 14:00-16:00. Demopolin väitöskirjatutkijat Iida Pyy ja Tarna Kannisto esittelevät tutkimustaan tulevassa tapaamisessa.
Seminaari on pääasiassa tarkoitettu tutkijoille, jotka työskentelevät kasvatusfilosofian teemojen parissa helsingin yliopistossa, mutta myös tutkijat toisista yliopistoista ovat tervetulleita osallistumaan.
Lisäinformaatiota ja seminaarin zoom -linkin voi kysyä Anniina Leiviskältä (anniina.leiviska@helsinki.fi).
25.5. session abstraktit:
Iida Pyy: Martha Nussbaum's theory of political emotions in democratic citizenship education
The scale of the recent political movements, such as Black Lives Matter and Fridays for Future, illustrates that especially young people are capable of and willing to unite and to march for causes that they regard important. Young people’s political mobilisation bears significance to education and to the role of educational actors. We are obliged to address questions such as: How can education contribute to a more constructive democratic culture? How should education address political polarization and global crises to prevent anti-democratic developments and social injustice? What is the role of political emotions in these developments? What type of democratic citizenship education would be needed, and how should this type of education be taught in schools?
These are some of the many questions my doctoral dissertation has focused on, in the form of three interrelated journal articles. In my short presentation, I summarize how I have attempted to connect theory to practice using, for instance, philosophical analysis and case study as methods. Utilising Martha Nussbaum’s political philosophy, particularly her theory of political emotions, as my point of departure, I have explored the possibility of cultivating democratic citizenship through education. Hypothesising that emotions provide the motivational force needed in order for people to commit to normative principles, such as human rights, I propose that Nussbaum’s work on political emotions could inform the theory and practice of citizenship education, especially in the era of increasing political polarization.
Tarna Kannisto: Public or private school institution? Basic education as a fundamental good.
In the paper, I argue that the more fundamentally valuable children’s formal education is considered, the stronger moral reasons there is to normatively conceptualize the school as a public social institution. Social organizations are goods producing teleological entities where the good in question provides a powerful framework for an institution's normative evaluation. The intrinsic value of fundamentally valuable human goods morally obliges both their collective availability and collective production that, in a large scale, is possible only via public social institutions. On contrast, private social institutions are disposed to produce goods whether instrumentally or exclusively, and thus within private institutions, the production and distribution of the fundamental goods is easily compromised for private purposes, such as for monetary profit, ideological gain, or the internal coherence of a social group. Private social institutions are also morally required to bring forth the aggregated interests of their members that have only an arbitrary connection to fundamental goods, whereas the public institutions are morally and politically responsible for the general public for the collective availability of the goods that they produce. Privatization of fundamental goods thus brings about a logic of conduct that endangers their collective availability. Therefore, if children’s formal education is considered a fundamental good, it should be understood primally a good that ought to be publicly produced.