Human Rights and the Reinvention of Freedom by Nick Stevenson

Author:Nick Stevenson [Stevenson, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317585541
Google: FOdRDQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 32817478
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

Learning to sympathise with others gives rise to three important maxims. The first is the ability to put ourselves in the place of those who are ‘more pitiable’ than ourselves (Rousseau 1991: 223). This is an explicit sympathy not only with the poor and down-trodden, but also with the rest of humanity who have a shared capacity to suffer sickness and death. This leads to the second maxim whereby we tend to sympathise with those who are suffering in ways that we might also suffer at some point in our lives. Finally, what matters in respect to our sense of sympathy with the other is not the quantity of suffering, but our sense of understanding of those who suffer. The understanding of suffering requires that we take a deep interest in the complexities of the lives of people with whom we are seeking to identity. Rousseau’s work here argues that education is naturally concerned with what we might call the moral imagination. For Rousseau (1991: 249), it is not enough simply to live for the self without sympathy for the wider community. Hence Kant and Rousseau taken together offer a number of guiding themes that are important in discussing some of the features of a more globally orientated education. Both were concerned that citizens become virtuous and live in accordance with a number of universal rules and laws. However, there is at least a difference in emphasis upon the importance of developing citizens who can be empathetic with others.

This debate should not detract from the contributions made by other figures such as Locke and Mill (1924) who were both concerned to preserve the liberty of the individual in matters of education (Gay 1964). It was, however, Mill (1924: 125) who was concerned that education should be experienced as ‘a source of joy, and sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared by all human beings’. The problem is, as Hardt and Negri (2009) argue, that the philosophy of the Enlightenment simultaneously questions the existing relations of power while reaffirming the status quo. Indeed, viewed more sociologically, missing from much of the philosophy of education from the Enlightenment is a concern with how education would become associated with schooling within the context of an industrial society. As Ivan Illich (1971: 31) argues, it is a paradox to suggest that a liberal society can be founded upon compulsory schooling, given the often unquestioned status given to the state, educational institutions, teachers and the general passivity required by the pupils. However, as Chomsky (2003) suggests, Enlightenment principles on education remain valuable the extent to which they open up the possibility of a humanistic education that is critical of more traditional approaches that failed to consider the importance of the autonomy of the learner. What is missing is the argument that the progressive aims of the Enlightenment could end in attempts to regulate, discipline and control the bodies of the population (Donald 1992; Foucault 1977). The paradox left unaddressed by Enlightenment-based approaches to education

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