Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy

What is the role of political education in liberal democracies? This question, which is at the heart of recent debates in the US over federal funding of private schools, forms the core of this book. The problem of political education is to ensure the constitutive ideals of liberal democracy while remaining open to a diversity of conduct and beliefs that may threaten those ideals. In Creating Citizens, Eamonn Callan, one of the world's foremost philosophers of education, identifies both the principal ends of civic education and the rights that limit their political pursuit. This timely new study sheds light on some of our most divisive educational controversies, such as state sponsorship and regulation of denominational schooling, as well as the role of non-denominational schools in the moral and political development of children.