Introduction to the Suite: Political Education for Human Transformation

This short text introduces a first suite of papers selected from an East‐West project funded jointly by the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). In an attempt to address the concrete social and educational issues that are faced in so many parts of the world, the project engages classic American philosophy (including transcendentalism, pragmatism, and the work of Stanley Cavell) in interdisciplinary exchange with Japanese thought (including the philosophy of the Kyoto School), feminist studies, and the ethics of care. In contemporary tragedies of exclusion, no less than in corresponding anxieties of inclusion, it finds a deepening crisis in democracy, and it suggests limitations in dominant conceptions of citizenship education as well as in the turn to therapy. It seeks to define the conditions for the generation of a politically mature citizenship within democracy recreated as an equality of voices. Political education thus comes to be understood as an education of one.s experience. in which the humanities and the arts assume new prominence.