LLinE Lifelong Learning in Europe

abstract Peter Kemp

Ethics and politics in education

Peter Kemp
Professor of Philosophy and Head of the Department of Philosophy of Education at the Danish University of Education, Copenhagen
Executive Director of the Centre for Ethics and Law, Copenhagen
President of FISP (Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie)

My aim is to reflect on the connection between ethics and politics in education.
The first part of the paper discusses the idea of the connection on ethics and politics in education in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy and presents his view of the citizen of the world as an ethical-political ideal for the education of Mankind.
The second part considers how this cosmopolitan education is possible today and claims that it can be neither pure self-education, nor authoritarian State-education

I Kant
1. From ethics to politics
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804):
Über Pädagogik (On pedagogy),1803
His idea of education is an ethics of care
Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
The social contract, 1762 and
Émile or On Education, 1762

2. The cosmopolitan
Cicero (106–43 BC) and Seneca (4–65 AD) developed the idea of a societas generis humani, a society of the Humankind as the most extensive society to which human beings belong.
Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–180 AD): Meditations
Kant: The Metaphysics of Moral
The law of people – das Völkerrecht – is a law of states in relation to one another
In contrast, the cosmopolitan law – das Weltbürgerrecht (Section 2) – presupposes that every human being has the right to be treated as a member of the same human community
Today we must apply this idea of the cosmopolitan to the concrete context of the great problems:
First, the problem of financial globalization
Second, the problem of intercultural coexistence
Thirdly, the problem of the physical sustainability of the Earth.

II Education today
The question now is who can manage to cultivate humanity to be a cosmopolitan community? Is it the State, the particular individual or someone or something totally different?
We find today two contradictory discourses about “cultivating” human beings – in German: Bildung:
The first is the ethnological discourse of the political scientist
The other is the liberal discourse of the human scientist or humanistic
Both are outdated in relation to the crisis in which we find ourselves.
None of these two discourses can express the ideal of a cosmopolitan adapted to our era.

1. The State as Educator
G. W. F. Hegel: “Philosophy of Right”, 1821
a) Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) L’éducation morale (1902–03)
It is from the society that all authority derives.
b) The scientific State today
c) The State in disreput
2. The Individual as Educator of the Self
a) Anthony Giddens
Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age
b) Against Giddens
Giddens reduces the moral intention to the emancipatory intention, i.e. liberation is accorded a value in itself
However, such an emancipation is
1) Empty
2) Dangerous

Conclusion
The citizen of the world is the ethico-political ideal for our new century.
The citizen of the world will always remain such an ideal
In the XXIst century, our individual Self has not only to be a social Self but a cosmopolitan Self.

The presentation is going to be published in LLinE 4/2004.