This book explores the role of the university in upholding democratic values for societal change. The chapters advocate for the moral virtue of democratic patriotism: the editors and contributors argue that universities, as institutions of higher learning, can encourage the creation of critical and patriotic citizens. The book suggests that non-violence, tolerance, and peaceful co-existence ought to manifest through pedagogical university actions on the basis of educators’ desire to cultivate reflectiveness, criticality, and deliberative inquiry in and through their academic programmes. In a way, universities can respond more positively to the violence on our campuses and in society if public and controversial issues were to be addressed through an education for democratic citizenship and human rights.

In recent years a greater emphasis has been placed on how nation states socialise and prepare the next generation of citizens. This book presents three themes: Democratic Schooling, Teaching Controversial Issues and Accountability. The scholars and school leaders who have contributed to this volume do so from a wide international perspective.

Education affects these two dimensions in distinct ways, influencing democratic enlightenment through cognitive proficiency and sophistication, and political engagement through position in social networks. For characteristics of enlightenment, formal education simply adds to the degree to which citizens support and are knowledgeable about democratic principles.

This important volume provides a comprehensive study of the concept of democratic citizenship (including its conditions and pre-requisites), which has an established place in higher education courses in politics, social policy, sociology and social philosophy. The contributing political philosophers and educational theorists collectively provide a critical commentary on the assumptions, principles and presuppositions associated with the idea of education for active democratic citizenship. This book presents an invaluable combination of original essays from established authors and previously published seminal articles specially revised for the volume.

Introduction -- American dreams : access, mobility, fairness -- Free minds : educating democratic citizens -- Hard facts : knowledge creation and checking power -- Purposeful pluralism : dialogue across difference on campus -- Conclusion.

This book uses international collaboration between nine European countries to explore how teacher education systems across Europe perceive and act upon devolving democracy and democratic citizenship. Understanding these countries’ cultural approaches to individual and national priorities in education is essential in perceiving similarities and differences in the meaning of ‘democracy’. The book offers debate on the prospects for teacher education and the development of democratic citizenship in Europe based on historical, political, economic and cultural contexts and the Council of Europe’s (CoE) competences for democratic citizenship. With critical analysis and evaluation around the common theme of teacher education and its role in developing democratic citizenship, the book provides awareness and understanding of how teacher education responds to the Council of Europe’s (CoE) conceptual model of competences for democratic culture. 20 competences categorized as Values, Attitudes, Skills, and Knowledge and Critical Understanding are defined so they can be taught to enable learners to practice them in their daily lives as democratic citizens. This book will be of key interest to academics, researchers and post-graduate students in the fields of teacher education, educational policy and politics, and citizenship education.

Citizenship under Fire examines the relationship among civic education, the culture of war, and the quest for peace. Drawing on examples from Israel and the United States, Sigal Ben-Porath seeks to understand how ideas about citizenship change when a country is at war, and what educators can do to prevent some of the most harmful of these changes. Perhaps the most worrisome one, Ben-Porath contends, is a growing emphasis in schools and elsewhere on social conformity, on tendentious teaching of history, and on drawing stark distinctions between them and us. As she writes, "The varying characteristics of citizenship in times of war and peace add up to a distinction between belligerent citizenship, which is typical of democracies in wartime, and the liberal democratic citizenship that is characteristic of more peaceful democracies." Ben-Porath examines how various theories of education--principally peace education, feminist education, and multicultural education--speak to the distinctive challenges of wartime. She argues that none of these theories are satisfactory on their own theoretical terms or would translate easily into practice. In the final chapter, she lays out her own alternative theory--"expansive education"--which she believes holds out more promise of widening the circles of participation in schools, extending the scope of permissible debate, and diversifying the questions asked about the opinions voiced.