**3. Ideological uniformity, emancipation and the plural community**

would undergo a complete shift of paradigm: education for values would be replaced by the development of obligations towards the law and rules. We could characterise this is a paradox: school-based education for values without values, since legal norms form the field of constraint (discipline) and values the field of freedom (vzgoja – *Bildung*). Instead of awakening the internal voice of the conscience, school would reinforce the fear of punishment. When education does not reach deeply into the interior of a person, it disappears as education (*Bildung*). But fear of punishment is already traditionally understood by pedagogy as *disciplining*, not as educating. To paraphrase Kant: discipline is a condition of freedom; it is only a condition, but freedom is only enabled to the subject by cultivation. Without education (*Bildung*), the process of humanisation of a human being is not possible. An alternative announces itself in the development of the school: education or discipline? Successful education (*Bildung*) for values can of course be maintained if the school is based on a clear value system, which, with regard to criteria in public life, clearly means that ethical standards in the school must be higher than in civil society and commercial transactions. Immorality must not be permitted among students.

76 New Pedagogical Challenges in the 21st Century - Contributions of Research in Education

It should be pointed out that a lower tolerance of evil and the demand for higher ethical standards in schools and in public life trigger an enormous mass of problems. The question that raises itself is that of how to present higher life preferences to young people in schools when public experience shows them that envy, greed and shamelessness are becoming everyday emotions. How are young people supposed to accept higher ethical standards when they are constantly faced, in everyday life, with the facilely narcissistic ideology of a modern society that cultivates the belief that the individual should not be frightened of difficulties because the opportunities for social success and advancement are unlimited? Neoliberalism further strengthens narcissistic ideology, in that it satisfies ambitious interests and encourages the idea that every individual can create a position for themselves and acquire wealth, and that opportunities for advancement and social ascent will offer themselves spontaneously. In this logic, even education as a factor of upward social mobility has lost much of the lustre it still possessed during the expansion of education in the middle of the last century. This introduces further disquiet into schools. As Beck says, formal education may still be necessary, but it is no longer a sufficient condition to guarantee better employment and more prestigious jobs for all sections of the population. Modern society really does tell the individual that they can achieve everything, that everything is possible, but on the other hand, warns Beck, even the simplest glance at social reality, as revealed by simple statistics, shows that we are living in a risk society where opportunities for growth and prosperity are always matched by the equal possibility of collapse and destruction [6]. If we follow the idea of *Risk Society*, we find that the expansion of education is merely a product of neoliberal logic. Society offers opportunities for education to everyone, which strengthens the idea of the success of the individualistic society more than it provides realistic life prospects. In the end, however, the individual is also to blame for collapse and unfortunate circumstances in life. The "society of possibilities" is thus at the same time a "society of risk." This is a consistent derivation of neoliberalism. The individual is ultimately to blame not only for their social rise but also for their fall. The state offers fewer and fewer guarantees and there is increasing indifference towards citizens' rights. Social rights are somehow pushed to the margin, including the right to education. Expressions of cynical indifference include non-binding constitutional provisions that are The more frequent questions of the modern theory of education and educational practice are those deriving from difficulties related to pluralism. In one way or another, all the dilemmas of education, in particular, those that revolve around values and, consequently, authority, are tied to pluralism. Pluralism has always represented a problem for pedagogy. In traditional pedagogy, which derived from religious and philosophically and ideologically unitary views, pluralism was "guilty" of educational ineffectiveness, since this pedagogy believes that the more uniform the education (in terms of views and values), the stronger its educational effect. Cultural pluralism and, in particular, the pluralism of values and views, was believed to create a confusion that reduces the clarity of the educator's messages and preferences and thus dilutes the effectiveness of the educator's endeavours.

The question is: can pedagogy theoretically justify pluralism as its ideal? This would have been impossible even in the middle of the last century. Education (*Bildung*) in the spirit of the historically tried and tested 2000-year tradition and classical European culture was the only framework that filled teachers with confidence in the effectiveness of education (*Bildung*). The provocative new elements born of the art of the first half of the last century could not get through the school door. Not even critical pedagogy accepted the idea of pluralism, in the sense of cultural pluralism, as its central aim. Critical or emancipatory pedagogy (both terms were used by mid-twentieth century German theorists such as Wolfgang Klafki, Klaus Mollenhauer and Herwig Blankerz) was in fact tied to the critical theory of society and defined the goals of education as the formation of the mature, critical and emancipated subject [2]. Within critical theory, however, Horkheimer's investigations showed that emancipation can also be a mistaken educational goal. Horkheimer developed the concept of emancipation in two mutually incompatible senses. First, he defined emancipation as a behaviour (*Verhalten*) oriented towards the liberation of the human being from dependence on irrational social mechanisms and pressures. In this interpretation, emancipation is the central positive message of the critical theory of society. The aim of emancipation is to rearrange the irrational and ideological mechanisms of social cohesion into a free arrangement of the life of society founded on reason [7]. Emancipatory pedagogy did not highlight this social dimension of emancipation in its interpretation of the aim of education, as may be understood from the above quotation from Mollenhauer. Instead it understands emancipation individualistically, as the opportunity for

<sup>2</sup> The constitutional provision that put an end to the fierce political debates about social selection in the Gymnasium system of upper secondary education is a true caricature: "A child's aptitude, interests, performance and inner calling shall be authoritative for his/her enrolment in a school rather than the economic and social position of the child's parents" (Constitution of the Free State of Bavaria, Article 132). This is reminiscent of the caricature of justice and equality expressed long ago by Anatole France: in a democracy, it will be forbidden for both rich and poor to sleep under bridges.

individuals to freely realise their life prospects. Horkheimer later observes this goal in the context of the study of negative dialectics and distances himself from it. Because individualistic emancipation really means, first of all "an enormous extension of human control over nature … which finally becomes an obstacle to further development and drives humanity into a new barbarism that ends in an irrational system of division of human domination over nature, in which, within the social organism, man's domination over nature is reproduced as man's domination over man" [8]. Horkheimer thus understands emancipation as an ambivalent phenomenon that is realised in opposing value dimensions, and thus talks about "benign" (*gutartige*) and "malign" (*bösartige*) emancipation. The process of emancipation in society always contains the risk of "benign" emancipation being reduced to "malign" emancipation.

with Elster that "the moral obligation in such cases may be quite different from what it would

Education (*Bildung*) for Values

79

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.72450

Deriving from Elster's question is the currently extremely widely held opinion that it is simply not possible to understand a value correctly if we do not place it into a real context. The importance of real context for moral decision-making is greater than an abstract moral principle or value. That is why moral education today cannot close itself in the safe framework of the tradition of 2000-year-old values. Much has changed even in the way we talk about morals and moral education. Even in everyday speech and theoretical discussions, a certain discomfort can be sensed when we talk about "morals" or "moral education." The very phrase "moral education" sounds patronising and archaic. It contains no hint of the autonomy that, for the morally mature individual, is something as self-evident as the universality of moral principles or values. That is why, rather than about "moral education," we prefer today to talk about "formation of the moral self-image," in this way hoping to express the point of our previous reflection, namely that we understand the formation of the moral self-image far more broadly than moral instruction or a moral lesson. In the foreground, we place the educator's task of awakening in the child an awareness of the context of moral action, so that they become sensitive to the feelings of others, make independent and considered decisions about their actions and, finally, create and define their own personal ideals. This, however, requires a change in the way we view the importance of the content of values. As we will see later, formal moral principles (for example, the Golden Rule, Kant's categorical imperative, Aristotle's doctrine of the mean) are more important for the development of moral self-image than the content of values. The formal moral principle, in the words of Renata Salecl [11], is a substantively "empty universal idea… that can perform an affirmative and critical function" in the moral decisionmaking of the individual. Because of its "emptiness," it has a universal character and in every context enables a judgement that is the basis for a duly weighed moral decision. It might be better to talk about the "self-formation of the moral image" than about formation of the moral self-image. Here the emphasis on the activity of the individual is even greater and induces pedagogical reflections on our willingness to completely change our view of the process of socialisation and to talk instead about self-socialisation or self-education. It is of course worth being cautious about this idea, since it verges on the known phenomena of those free schools which the environment has proved unable to accept because they have slid into an anarchic educational style when teachers have been unable to respond productively to the freedom of the children. The schools that have been able to do this have been successful, as demonstrated by, among others, the classic case of Summerhill, the boarding school founded by A. S. Neill. Among the attempts to enable pedagogical theory to go beyond the paternalistic orientation of moral education is the substitution of the expression "moral" with the expression "prosocial." Prosociality brings three important advantages to the theory of socialisation: (a) it highlights the importance of social situation or context, (b) it places the learner in an active relationship and, most importantly, (c) it places the *experiential learning of moral relationships, practices and values* in the foreground [5]. Compared to moral instruction, persuasion, example and other methods of traditional paternalistic moral education, prosociality is a highly complex phenomenon. For example, it also inherently includes the practising of various virtues such as participation, tolerance, cooperativeness, support for common goals and sensitivity in interpersonal relations.

be on the assumption of universality of moral behaviour" [10].

A critique of the individualistic understanding of emancipation is also offered by Hannah Arendt. I cite her because she shows how emancipation can oppose pluralism. In her opinion, the autonomy of the individual is the myth of the atomised modern society, since "sovereignty, the ideal of uncompromising self-sufficiency and mastership, is contradictory to the very condition of plurality. No man can be sovereign because not one man, but men, inhabit the earth" [9]. Arendt accepted pluralism as a fundamental characteristic of human existence and action, since "to be" means "to be among men" [9]. In her opinion, a unitary ideological system represents the same threat to plurality as an atomised modern society and moral individualism. We will encounter this question once again when considering the problem of individual morality (which we shall analyse in the context of the implementation of human rights within the legal order) and will arrive at similar conclusions. Arendt's *vita activa* is conceived as an anthropology that defines the three key aspects of the human condition: labour, work and action. It is *action* that is the essence of human existence. Within it, we might also seek important implications for the modern understanding of education. For an individual, as Arendt puts it, can live in society without ever doing anything or even creating anything, but cannot live without acting [9]. Action for her means a sign of integration between people, and it is in integration that the essence of pluralism lies. That which takes place between individuals always points to their uniqueness, diversity and difference. Pluralism is a substantive point of human existence. Plurally understood interpersonal integration is the core of all other integrations, including the integration of customs and values.
