ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the role of deliberative educational traditions (i.e. Bildung-centred Didaktik and curriculum theory) in the context of the challenges faced in educational and civic practice in the post-truth society. Starting with Bernstein’s work on pedagogic rights, it is argued that in order to sustain democracy, societies require educational systems that foreground inclusion, participation, and individual and collective enhancement. However, our conceptions of enhancement are impoverished if governments choose to focus policy on outcomes-based curriculum frameworks that prioritise standardised testing. The impoverishment of enhancement is accompanied by forms of exclusion and marginalisation that deprives citizens of their pedagogic rights and leads to greater opportunities for those who seek to manipulate citizens through ‘post-truth’ fake news and alternative facts. Unfortunately, empiricist and scientistic trends in educational research and teacher education reforms are exacerbating these developments, by marginalising the deliberative educational traditions and reducing what they can offer in terms of meaningful individual and collective formation within educational institutions. It is only through a reinvigoration of the deliberative educational traditions that an authentic educational practice can be reasserted, and alternatives found to the slide into a post-truth society, and the chapter concludes with some discussion of what that reinvigoration might entail. The argument is briefly illustrated with examples, primarily from the UK and the United States.
