Date of Award
2019
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Education
Abstract
In this dissertation, which relies on philosophical inquiry, I use the case of rampage school gun violence to explore democratic education. Drawing a distinction between liberal-foundational democratic education, which aims to educate the individual on how to become an autonomous rational agent and pragmatic-antifoundational democratic education, which looks to help individuals to understand agency as shared, I argue antifoundational democratic education teaches individuals how to affect their environment and take responsibility for the renewal of their democratic society. Rather than allocating blame in the singular individual, antifoundational democracy teaches citizens how to share the blame, take responsibility for unacceptable violence, and participate in the renewal of a democratic society. Specifically, I claim antifoundational democratic education distributes responsibility for rampage school gun violence to various human and nonhuman actors and teaches individuals how to make sense of each agent's actions. In so doing, antifoundational democratic education prepares individuals and communities to leverage their understanding of complex causal networks to enact changes that will to stop the rampaging.
Recommended Citation
Deane, Samantha, "Liberal Democratic Civic Education and Rampage School Gun Violence: Why We Need an Alternative Theory of Democracy to Guide Contemporary Civic Education" (2019). Dissertations. 3329.
https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/3329
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Copyright Statement
Copyright © 2019 Samantha Deane
