Sarah Stitzlein

In this brief essay, I respond to four critics of my most recent book, Teaching Honesty in a Populist Era: Emphasizing Truth in the Education of Citizens (Oxford University Press, 2024). I attend to their concerns regarding who is included in the “we” of the fundamental civic question, “What should we do?” That discussion urges me to consider Black pragmatists and feminists who draw attention to the deep impact of injustice and the many ways in which bodies complicate epistemological accounts of truth and civic reasoning. I also take up some of the more applied concerns of teachers who may struggle to employ my suggestions within deeply partisan contexts and amidst heightened punishments for taking up challenging matters of democracy in schools.

The field of philosophy of education is diverse and evolving. I focus here on one particular way in which some philosophers of education have been doing philosophy of education—by working as public intellectuals addressing political issues, especially in contexts related to school practice and policy. I showcase how they do this work and what benefits it offers to the public, to the scholars themselves, and to the field of philosophy of education. Some key contributions of these scholars include clarifying explicit and underlying values, aims, and political ideologies at play in educational situations, engaging the public in inquiries into them, and facilitating efforts to address related problems. Scholars of this sort also guide the public through dissent against problematic policies and practices while imagining alternatives. They build hope by collaborating with the public on solutions. Throughout the article, I raise questions regarding approaching philosophy of education in this way, pointing toward tensions that may need to be addressed or resolved as the field moves forward.

Honesty matters. Seeking and telling the truth impacts our ability to thrive in the world, physically, socially, and politically. Recent struggles in democracy, especially those related to the rise of populism and post-truth, have jeopardized the role of honesty in civic and political life. In a world swirling with competing political groups spouting conflicting facts, citizens are left unsure whom to trust and which facts are true. Honesty fosters the sorts of relationships between citizens that enable civic reasoning as we solve shared problems and figure out how to live together. Despite its importance, honesty receives very little attention in most schools. This book seeks to clarify the relationships between honesty, truth, trust, and healthy democratic living from the philosophical perspective of pragmatism. Situating citizenship education within that pragmatist framework, it describes how we might better cultivate honesty, thereby reviving democratic life, especially our ability to engage in civic reasoning about shared problems well. This book describes what honesty is, how it is connected to truth, why both are important to and at risk in democracies today, and how we should teach honesty and truth in schools. The book offers an improved path forward within our schools by detailing how to cultivate habits of truth-seeking and truth-telling. Such honesty will better enable citizens to navigate our difficult political moment while also increasing the likelihood that citizens can craft long-term solutions for democratic life together.

In this brief essay, I respond to four critics of my most recent book, _Teaching Honesty in a Populist Era: Emphasizing Truth in the Education of Citizens_ (Oxford University Press, 2024). I attend to their concerns regarding who is included in the "we" of the fundamental civic question, "What should we do?" That discussion urges me to consider Black pragmatists and feminists who draw attention to the deep impact of injustice and the many ways in which bodies complicate epistemological accounts of truth and civic reasoning. I also take up some of the more applied concerns of teachers who may struggle to employ my suggestions within deeply partisan contexts and amidst heightened punishments for taking up challenging matters of democracy in schools.

While the teaching of controversial issues has generally been supported by schools and education scholars, new laws and public outcry have impacted whether and how controversial issues are taught. Calls to ban or limit teaching of controversial issues have largely been spurred by conservative parents, policymakers, and political groups. Some teachers and many education scholars are deeply concerned and want to preserve teaching about controversial issues. This situation suggests that inquiry is needed into changes in the educational aims held and practices endorsed by various stakeholders. This article reconsiders the aims used to justify teaching controversial issues and situates them within larger understandings of good citizenship, revealing important differences in the explanations and values endorsed by opposing groups. It categorizes the aims more generally held by teachers, philosophers of education, and citizenship education scholars as: reasoning, engaging, communicating, and sustaining democratic communities. Then, those aims are compared to aims circulating within the discourse of opposing parents, policymakers, and political organizations. Finally, this article argues that pragmatic adjustments to educational aims held by many teachers and education scholars are both warranted and wise. It provides potential ways to better justify the teaching of controversial issues, including through approaches that more strongly ground teaching in American principles, historical examples, and a commitment to living together well.

Populists employ truth as a tool for aligning the people against the elite. Citizenship education rarely takes up critiques of liberal democracy, discussions of populism, or conversations about what truth is. This paper provides an alternative pragmatist vision of truth that builds on the populist call for democracy to better reflect the will of the people, while also pushing back against the harms potentially caused by populism. Students today need to learn how populism works performatively and through discourse. But more importantly, they also need to learn how to engage with populism by taking up some of the real challenges it poses in their communities today. Citizenship education that overtly talks about how truth operates and demonstrates how inquiry can be used to determine “what works” better prepares students for the flawed democracy we see at play today and provides pathways for improving it in the future.

In this paper, Sarah Stitzlein considers the consequences of honesty on our democracy, especially for citizens' ability to engage in civic inquiry together as they face shared problems. Honesty is a key component of a well-functioning democracy; it develops trust and fosters the sorts of relationships among citizens that enable civic dialogue and reasoning. Post-truth attitudes and truth decay pose serious obstacles to good civic reasoning as citizens struggle to draw clear distinctions between fact and opinion, weigh personal beliefs and emotions over facts, and increasingly distrust traditionally respected sources of information. Stitzlein employs a Deweyan pragmatist account of truth and a distinctly social account of democracy to build a case for foregrounding honesty in the development of citizens. She describes how schools can employ communities of inquiry to cultivate habits of honesty within citizenship education. She explains how a better democracy — one grounded in a wider understanding of social life and relationships — might head off the temptation to be dishonest for self-serving reasons, focusing on how dishonesty jeopardizes our relationships to each other as citizens and our ability to engage in civic reasoning together to fulfill shared goals.

In this article, I will begin by describing recent divisive concepts legislation, which bans teaching about aspects of racism, sexism, and equity, speculating briefly on the motivations behind it and the implications resulting from it. I will then describe how discussing divisive concepts in classrooms may be a helpful way for students to better understand the particular concepts and for students to take a stand on them. While I will briefly argue for the importance of classroom discussion of divisive concepts, my central claim will be that we must do more than merely discuss these concepts. Instead, we should engage in classroom inquiry about them. Inquiry positions students to not be silent regarding divisive concepts, as some legislation may cause, and inquiry positions students to not just talk about divisive concepts, but to solve social problems related to them in our world today. In other words, inquiry enables us to do something about divisive concepts, rather than just learning about them, as some educators currently advocate in calls for discussion. And inquiry is certainly more effective than banning divisive concepts or pushing them to the background, as recent legislation attempts to do. I argue that rather than excluding divisive concepts or the divisions they may provoke from our classrooms, we need educative spaces where we inquire into what divides us, why we are divided, and how we might respond to such division. Within that inquiry, we can better attend to our divisions while also taking up the specific concepts prohibited in recent legislation.

as covid-19 set in, many people struggled to find or hold onto hope. TIME magazine devoted its entire annual TIME 100 Most Influential People issue to the very topic, offering up suggestions on how to find hope, from religious leaders, politicians, and celebrities. While some presented helpful ideas, I found myself seeking more satisfying and sustaining answers. I turned to pragmatist philosophers, both old and new, to help me understand what hope is, why it matters, and how to foster it.Intriguingly, classic American pragmatists seem to have much to contribute to discussions of hope and yet have actually said very little explicitly about it. Even as pragmatism complemented the late nineteenth- and...

Free, open access book from Oxford University Press at link below. Democracy is struggling in America. Citizens increasingly feel cynical about our system and doubt they can influence public policy. Distrustful of other Americans and elected officials, some are even turning to authoritarian alternatives. Hyperpartisanship and recent contentious presidential elections have deepened political despair. While some citizens get swept up in optimism during campaign cycles, they often later find themselves frustrated with elected leaders as they wait for change. This book seeks to revive democracy by teaching citizens how to hope. Hope animates life in a democracy, moving citizens forward through new challenges, new ideas, and new experiments. The form of hope described in this book is more than just a campaign slogan or a self-help program, it is an informed call to citizen engagement that opens new possibilities for our country. Drawing on examples from life in America today and pragmatist philosophy, this book explains how schools can cultivate hope through our habits and how action in our communities can sustain hope. It shows how we can build trust, grow political agency, and shape an improved American identity through hoping together. This book provides guidance for learning how to hope in schools, universities, and civil society. It describes what hope is, why it matters to democracy, and how to teach it.

One central aspect of a healthy democracy is the practice of democratic dissent. For the first time in many years, dissent is being widely practiced in town hall meetings and on street corners across the United States. Despite this presence, dissent is often suppressed or omitted in the prescribed, tested, hidden, and external curriculum of US schools. This article calls for a realignment of these aspects of curriculum with both a guiding vision of ideal democracy and a realistic interpretation of democracy as it is currently invoked in order to maximize this historic moment and work toward more robust democracy as a whole. This article will define dissent, show why it matters for healthy democracy, describe its role in the conscious social reproduction of citizens, reveal implications of the current more consensus-oriented forms of democracy portrayed in US schools, and call for new work on consensus and dissent in schools given changes in the present environment.

Most Americans and many residents of other democratic countries hold public schools to the social and political goal of preparing children to be good citizens. This goal is being challenged by some new forms of schooling promoted through popular education reform movements, especially in the US. This article reveals potentially insurmountable conflicts between the beliefs and practices of one of those forms of schools, for-profit charter schools, and their public task of educating for citizenship. This study begins by exploring the public nature and purposes of public schools, especially their role in creating particular types of citizens. This understanding of public schooling and good citizenship, then, becomes the theoretical lens for analysing the practices of for-profit charter schools. A critical discourse analysis was conducted of school materials such as websites, curricula, investor relation materials, proposals for new charter schools, and interviews with charter school founders. That analysis was used to indicate aspects of support for and incompatibility with quality citizenship education and to assess the overall likelihood that for-profit schools can educate citizens well.

Every day teachers encounter moments of racial and gender tension in their classrooms. In the most drastic cases, these situations erupt into overt conflict or violence, while in other instances they go largely unnoted. Such incidents reveal that despite equality legislation and the good intentions of many teachers, racial and gender problems persist. How can teachers more effectively handle these moments? How can they prevent them in the future? This book is the first to unite two major schools of educational philosophy, traditional American pragmatism and contemporary poststructuralism, to offer both theoretical and concrete suggestions for dealing with actual classroom race and gender related events. While schools are one of the most common settings of race and gender discord, this book upholds schools as the primary location for alleviating systems of oppression. For it is within schools that children learn how to enact and respond to race and gender through the cultivation of habits, including dispositions, bodily comportment, and ways of interacting. In a spirit of social transformation, this book argues that when students learn to inhabit their races and genders more flexibly, many classroom problems can be prevented and current social structures of identity-based oppression can be alleviated.