Reading Notes: Cultivating sprouts of benevolence: a foundational principle for curriculum in civic and multicultural education
Key Points:
Goal of civic and multicultural education is to prepare youth to participate in deliberatively informed action on important social issues
Central citizenship question of our time: ‘How can we live together justly?’
Helping students make just decisions about societal issues, in conditions of unequal power relations, is one of the key challenges
To do so, we need to cultivate youths’ innate but partial ‘sprouts’ of benevolence - rooted in feelings of empathy and compassion
Curriculum related to public issues should begin by engaging students with knowledge of other people’s lives and concrete circumstances
By encountering rich and emotionally compelling accounts of the lives of others, students’ sense of benevolence can be extended beyond the people and situations they know best
Curriculum
Most civic and multicultural issues revolve around creating conditions that would enable all people to lead full and rewarding lives (e.g. having the freedom and agency to make choices about how to pursue their own visions of ‘the good life’
E.g. issues related to the provision and distribution of basic resources, as well as capacities for freedom of expression, a role in societal decision-making, and other aspects of human dignity.
Such issues involve difficult choices about how to prioritise the rights and obligations of different members of society, as well as how to maintain balance and harmony among groups and their potentially competing interests.
Such choices can be particularly complex in multicultural societies, where the range of ideas, interests, and practices can be wide, especially when some groups have been marginalised and oppressed.
While knowledge is not an end in itself – not a body of content to be learned – knowledge of other people and their circumstances is crucial for developing the benevolence necessary to consider and act on public issues.
Deliberation
Deliberation means considering how to bring about a desired world, and that involves caring about something – whether wealth, family, friends, the environment, freedom, or other material realities or abstract ideals.
When we discuss what the world should be like, we focus on those things we care about; without such desires or ‘passions’, there would be nothing to deliberate
Deliberatively informed action refer to public activities that are shaped by deliberative processes and collaborative decision-making
Help students learn how to collaborate with diverse others in order to find public solutions to shared problems
Importance of reasoning together, through dialogue, to examine and refine arguments related to a given problem and its possible solutions:
Result in better solutions than those proposed by any individual or interest group
Provide political legitimacy by allowing individuals and groups to assert greater control over decision-making
Students must therefore be able to approach these issues in an open-minded way that takes such diversity into account, and learn how to discuss potentially difficult and controversial topics with those whose views differ from their own.
Students must be willing to devote the energy necessary to:
Engage in deliberations meaningfully (e.g. through researching policy issues, considering multiple perspectives, and evaluating evidence);
Be open to policies that may seem contrary to their own interests (e.g. income redistribution); and
Take action in support of those policies (whether by engaging in public protest, influencing the legislative process, or attempting to guide actions within civil society).
Benevolence
Benvolence: the willingness to make an effort to improve the circumstances of others by enhancing their ability to lead full and rewarding lives and by removing sources of harm and oppression
Role of Emotion in Reasoning
Emotions often have been portrayed as ‘unwelcome intrusions to the rational judgments of moral agents; impediments that cloud what otherwise might be more reasonable, unbiased assessments and choices’
Civic education tends to adhere to a similar view of public decision-making, one that focuses on principled judgement rather than emotional considerations
In many settings around the world, civic and multicultural education emphasise fair and equal interpersonal behaviour, the use of government policy to meet the needs of citizens, or both. Emotional considerations rarely play a role in such curricula.
Teachers are likely to consider emotions either irrelevant or distracting to careful reasoning in the public sphere
But, people feel first and reason second.
In fact, in political decision-making, anxiety (not fear) leads people to be more open and deliberate in their judgements, and to seek out more relevant information, with less confirmation bias.
With regard to social issues generally, emotions often result in sounder and more logical conclusions.
Emotional attachments are especially important in order to motivate action, because deliberation does not simply involve speculating about some ideal state of the world but deciding what should be done to bring that world about.
Strong emotional arousal motivate people to become more engaged in politics, including participating in forms of collective action such as protests and social movements
Role of Emotion in Learning
We often view emotions as something to be tamed, controlled, or repressed, in order to proceed with what is often considered the ‘real,’ emotion-free work of learning.
Instead, we should harness the motivating power of emotion to engage students in learning, especially when confronting people and experiences that differ from their own lives; the reactions to the lives of others can inspire students to want to learn more, and even to apply what they have learned to issues of immediate relevance
Curricula can make use of specific emotions to enable students’ learning, and particularly their deliberation of social issues
Compassion: the Foundation of Benevolence
The emotion of compassion is especially important when we consider how to draw upon and develop the benevolence necessary to meet the needs of other people – the central concern of public deliberation.
To be part of a public means precisely to transcend self (and even family and friends) in order to make decisions that benefit a larger public
To be benevolent means more than simply feeling compassion. It means recognising the suffering of others and acting accordingly, so that feeling, reasoning, and behaviour come together in a unified whole
Students will willingly take part in civic deliberation only if they cared about the issue at hand.
Only students who perceived that something was unfair, or that it affected themselves or those they cared about, would be willing to participate actively in discussion.
Among those who did participate, their empathy towards others was the strongest predictor of their willingness to persist and take action, and the stronger their attachment towards others, the more committed they would be.
It is students’ feelings of connection that decentre them and allow them to focus on the needs of others.
Extending Benevolence as a Principle of Curriculum
Schools cannot create compassion, or develop general and universal compassionate feelings
The role of curriculum is to help students extend their innate sense of compassion to new situations, ones which they might not take seriously without formal instruction.
Only by learning about the circumstances of others will students come to feel compassion and, it is to be hoped, deliberate with a sense of benevolence.
Moreover, such knowledge cannot consist only of abstract generalizations or statistics; it must provide compelling insight into the lives and circumstances of other people
Principle for selecting curriculum content is that it must help students understand people’s concrete circumstances:
Only by knowing about the situations of others can we develop regard for their feelings
Knowledge does not create compassion but it can enable people to extend that compassion to new people and situations. People are still free to choose whether they act benevolently or not; clearly there are some people who know about others’ suffering and take no action on it. But without knowledge, this choice is impossible.
Curriculum must begin by engaging students with knowledge that consists of words, images, stories, and sensory experiences that convey others’ realities in concrete and emotionally compelling ways.
When information about the issue focuses only on governments, politics, demographics, and the economy, there may be little reason to feel the compassion necessary to activate benevolence.
Literary works such as realistic fiction can play an important role in providing students with concrete knowledge of the lives of others, but perhaps even more important are nonfictional narratives and other accounts.
These include journalistic representations, personal narratives, photo or video documentaries that convey others’ circumstances in emotionally compelling ways.
Compared to abstract statistics or generalisations, students’ compassionate responses are much more likely to be stimulated by seeing other people, hearing their voices, reading what they have written, engaging with the art they have produced, and even interacting with or meeting them.
An additional curriculum principle would then require that students not only learn about others from an outsider’s standpoint but also that they listen to the perspectives of those involved.
Drawbacks of a ‘superficial, voyeuristic approach’ – sad stories that move others to pity but that remove agency from sufferers, ignore material and structural conditions that lead to suffering, and ultimately fail to motivate action.
Accounts created by journalists and other outsiders, no matter how sympathetic to the subjects of their attention, may nonetheless fail to convey important perspectives and may even misrepresent the nature of people’s lives.
In order to avoid interpreting social issues solely through their own frames of reference, students must come to understand other people’s perspectives on the issues they face and how to respond to them.
Applying our own lenses to the experiences of others may lead to inappropriate, and even harmful, actions; if we identify too strongly with others, we may simply project our own hopes and fears onto them, as though they are no different than ourselves
Listening to those with different backgrounds and experiences can enable us to move beyond our conventional ways of seeing the world and thus ‘may help us achieve a fuller – and fairer – understanding’
Those affected by an issue are likely to bring relevant information to bear on deliberation – information that may be lacking in other sources.
Those who seem ‘distant’ may be directly affected by their decisions, and thus deserve to be part of their deliberation (even when this only involves listening to their voices rather than engaging with them directly)
Another curriculum principle would engage students in considering the structural forces that influence the social issues they are deliberating, as well as the potential consequences of the actions they decide on.
Curriculum must draw connections between the circumstances that inspire benevolence and the broader social forces that have created those situations.
One danger of focusing too exclusively on compelling emotions and experiences is that it can draw attention away from the causes or those circumstances, or inspire simplistic solutions that do not account for what is known about social and political forces. [prompt us to dig deeper to address the root cause(s)]
In part, this would involve treating specific topics as cases of general phenomenon.
Students must gain experience contextualizing specific social issues and policies with regard to broader and more general structural forces and explanations, so that they develop a more comprehensive understanding of how to address a range of social issues.
E.g. Even though learning about Rohingya refugees cannot make students more compassionate about all social issues – nor even all refugee issues – studying the topic should not be limited only to developing their understanding of the situation of one specific population. Rather, it should provide insight into the material and emotional consequences of displacement and migration (e.g. discrimination, separation of family members, lack of security or a recognized home) that are broader than any one instance.
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