Carol Gould's Rethinking Democracy

Great Essays
In Rethinking Democracy, Carol Gould points out the dearth of philosophical attention given to the question of what character traits people need to participate effectively in a democracy. Gould calls this constellation of traits the democratic personality. She provides one of the few serious analyses of the subject, identifying the following list of traits as significant for a democratic personality: initiative, a disposition to reciprocity, tolerance, flexibility and open-mindedness, commitment and responsibility, and a cluster of traits traditionally associated with women such as supportiveness, sharing, communicativeness, cooperativeness and a concern for community (Gould 1988, 289-294). I find that philosophical work of this kind, in conversation with educational research on democratic education, could help illuminate the future for democratic education theory and practice. Following Gould’s lead, I would like to point out what I perceive to be a shortage of research on a specific subset of democratic education, namely, education for convivencia (roughly translated as harmonious coexistence) in the context of social unrest and politico-economic crisis. There is, of course, a substantial literature on education in conflict and post-conflict societies. Yet there is little philosophical or theoretical work on democratic education for convivencia, much less work that addresses the issue in the context of Latin America. Perhaps this theoretical lacuna can be explained in terms of the political stability of global north countries wherein a majority of educational theory is produced, along with a somewhat narrow case-study pool of conflict and post-conflict societies (countries like Northern Ireland, Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the like). To counterbalance this trend, I propose here to … 1. Venezuela and the Law Against Hatred and for Peaceful Coexistence The Law Against Hatred and for Peaceful Coexistence (LAHPC), which mandates peace education initiatives in Venezuelan education from kindergarten to university, was drafted in reaction to Venezuela’s political and economic crisis. To critically evaluate the LAHPC’s educational proposal, we must first familiarize ourselves with the crisis that produced the law itself. My hope is that understanding the Venezuelan context will give us a sense for the general challenges that afflict peace-oriented educational efforts in convulsed countries. 1.2 General context To illuminate the current situation in Venezuela, I will summarize the most up-to-date analysis that I am aware of: Edgardo Lander’s “The long-term terminal crisis of the Venezuelan oil rentier model and the present intense crisis facing the country,” which he presented at the CUNY Graduate Center in October 2017. Lander begins: After more than a decade of profound political and social transformations, Venezuela is facing today its most severe crisis since the civil wars of the 19th century. The significant accomplishments of the Bolivarian Revolution are all at risk. The economy is collapsing; poverty, undernourishment and death rates are increasing. Political polarization and violence could lead to a civil war. All this is seriously aggravated by increasing international isolation due, among other things, to the turn to the right of the governments of Brazil and Argentina, and imperialist actions like the recently imposed financial blockade and threats of military intervention made by Donald Trump. (2017, 1) Venezuela’s is a crisis on stilts, both in terms of its poignancy, as it is the most severe since the 19th …show more content…
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the current Venezuelan crisis has old roots. What’s happening, as Lander puts it, is “the terminal crisis of the oil based extractivist model and clientelistic rentier state that has characterized Venezuelan society since the second decade of the last century” (2017, 1). A cursory look at Venezuelan history will reveal the nefarious effects of overdependence on oil exports given the cyclical nature of oil booms and crashes. Today’s crisis is related to oil, too, as Lander explains:

[I]n 2013 and 2014 the two main pillars that sustained the Bolivarian process, Chavez´s extraordinary charismatic leadership and historically high oil prices were no longer there. Chávez died in March 2013. A year later the average price of Venezuelan oil exports had collapsed from over a hundred dollars a barrel to less than twenty five dollars. Thus the deep structural terminal crisis of the oil rentier state and society that had been in a certain sense postponed for a few years reemerged with greater, even dramatic

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