The Enlightenment conceptions of pedagogy and global citizenship education: A Canadian case study

Introduction: the Enlightenment and education

The Enlightenment was an 18th century intellectual movement through which such prominent thinkers as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Hume, d’Alembert, Diderot, Wollstonecraft, and many others worked tirelessly to transform the human condition by way of their philosophical, social, and political scholarship—and activism. The result was a masterful cultivation of an age of criticality and illumination that started from the English Revolution of 1688–1689 and heavily influenced the American Revolution of 1775–1783 and the French Revolution of 1789. This age of ‘splendid illumination’, to use d’Alembert’s concept, started out as a multifaceted European/Western phenomenon. Nevertheless, its light soon reached various corners of the globe, manifesting itself in an uncompromising devotion to public schooling, scientific inquiry, individuality, criticality, respect for human liberty and the social contract as the foundation of political society (Gay, 1967, 1978; Hampson, 1968; Israel, 2001, 2011).

The philosophes of the Enlightenment sought to study the world critically, persuasively and independently from the authority of religion or state. In a Kantian sense, they dared to know, to think critically, and to expose ignorance by the light of their reason. Critical inquiry was thus seen as the core of the Enlightenment thought, particularly in combating absolute monarchy, organized religion, prejudice, and ignorance. As the historian and Enlightenment scholar Peter Gay (1967) aptly puts it, ‘The Enlightenment may be summed up in two words: criticism and power’ (p. xi). Its criticism entailed a critical examination of all existing knowledge, from traditional to religious, hegemonic and official—including the ideas put forth by many Enlightenment savants themselves. The ‘power’ component manifested itself in two major areas: a re-examination of all sorts of power relations in society and an understanding of the Enlightenment itself as a source of power, that is, a source of empowerment capable of transforming both the individual and society.

Many scholars have rightly argued that the Enlightenment was not a unified and coherent movement; it was highly fragmented, disunified, and asymmetrical depending upon geography, class, religion, gender, and status. No one in their right mind can challenge this observation. However, many critics fail to mention that the Enlightenment’s disunity was a result for a large part of its unified emphasis on free speech and freedom of expression, a phenomenon that opened up the space for the emergence of dissenting views, a spirit of criticism and inquisitiveness. Voltaire, a major philosopher of the French Enlightenment, has immortalized this venerable respect for dissention and fragmentation through his well-known maxim: ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’ (Knowles, 2006: 55; Tallentyre, 1907).

Immanuel Kant (2009 [1784]), a major figure of the German Enlightenment, in his famously memorable essay titled ‘Was ist Äufklarung?’ defined the Enlightenment in 1784 as

man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of the Enlightenment is therefore: Sapere Aude! [Dare to be wise!] Have courage to use your own understanding. (p. 1)

Kant’s brief definition contains many important elements of the Enlightenment movement that are extremely relevant to our contemporary situation: the ability to think independently, to break from the influence of fundamentalist and absolutist thinking, to dare to question, critique and interrogate. Based on Kant’s definition, the Enlightenment teaches us to think independently. It tasks our education systems to promote independent thinking and critical reflection. It urges our societies to produce autonomous citizens: individuals who are free from mental constraints, so that they can think for themselves and can make up their own minds; individuals who have the courage to speak truth to power and face the consequences of their conviction. Independent thinking produces autonomous human beings, and when our social systems deny us the opportunity to become autonomous beings, they diminish our chance of becoming fully human. The road to becoming fully human passes through critical thinking: acquiring habits of daring and challenging thoughts, inquisitive reasoning skills, reflexive thinking, skepticism, rationality, transformative thinking/action, critical responsibility, self-reflexivity, adopting of an ethical/activist stance, the ability to expose power relations, and to show connections between power and knowledge (Asgharzadeh, 2008; Glaser, 1941; Halpern, 2003; Paul, 1995).

In her pioneering work titled Kant’s Conception of Pedagogy, Felicitas Munzel (2012: 5) has fittingly identified the 18th century as ‘a Pedagogical Age’. In effect, the entire project of the Enlightenment may be considered as a complex and multifaceted process of formal, informal, and non-formal education. The intellectual movement of Enlightenment as a whole unleashed an unprecedented spirit of learning, questioning, interrogating, experimenting, and constant articulation and rearticulation of scientific, sociopolitical, economic, and cultural issues. The existing formal educational and pedagogical formulas were critiqued and scrutinized by thinkers like Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Wollstonecraft, Condorcet, and others. Some enlighteners, following Locke’s notion of ‘tabula rasa’, advocated a closely monitored and controlled form of schooling; others, inspired by Rousseau, followed a more relaxed, informal, and open-ended form of education and socialization. And still there were those like Kant who favored a synthesis of the two methods. As a result of all these variegated debates and discussions, the Enlightenment brought to light the inevitable necessity of education and public schooling for the improvement of the human condition and construction of a fair and democratic society.

In his celebrated 1792 speech to the French General Assembly in Paris, Marquis de Condorcet was among the first to define the nature of education in the era of Enlightenment:

Thus education must be general, and include all citizens … it should include the whole range of human knowledge and ensure that people at every stage of their life have the facilities to preserve and extend their own knowledge. (Jolibert, 1993; Steele, 2010: 109)

Condorcet’s statement echoes the demands of many members of the Enlightenment community, from France to England, Italy, Russia, Germany, Scotland and elsewhere for a fully fledged public education: education that is accessible to everyone irrespective of their gender, race/ethnicity, class, age, and so on; that is secular; and that includes various bodies of human knowledge as objects of inquiry, learning, and teaching (Browning, 1979; Bygrave, 2009; Palmer, 1985). Thus, alongside its immense contribution to the realms of criticality and individual autonomy, the Enlightenment shed considerable light on the very meaning and definition of education in general and ‘schooling’ in particular. It is in this sense that the entire movement of Enlightenment can be viewed as an important process of formal, informal, and non-formal education with its relentless emphasis on empiricism, experimentation, questioning, critiquing, problem-posing, learning, unlearning, and relearning. As a major movement for intellectual, sociopolitical, and scientific transformations, the Enlightenment cannot be detached from the variegated processes of education. It was a major attempt to throw light on the existing order of things, dominant ideas, and hegemonic forms of knowledge, while daring to challenge their biases and oppressive tendencies. The emphasis was placed not only on the construction through education of a good society for one’s own community, but also the building of a peaceful and democratic world for the entire human race. ‘How then is this perfection to be sought? Wherein lies our hope? In education and in nothing else’ (Kant, 1963: 252).

The Enlightenment brought about a culture of political literacy and a revolutionary sense of intellectual activism. This happened in places where the majority of the populace were illiterate, and at a time when critical discussions of politics, religion, and state were not encouraged. Through all this, the Enlightenment immensely contributed to the building of a culture of scientific orientation, political literacy, inquisitiveness, and critical imagination. Simultaneously, the Enlightenment unleashed an unprecedented attention to formal education, heralding a period of persistent scientific inquiry into the nature of things, from the natural environment to the social world, from the human body to medicinal and technological innovations. It gave birth to what David Hume called ‘moral sciences’: sociology, psychology, political economy, modern education and what Osterhausen called ‘medical Enlightenment’ (Gay, 1978: 17). It opened up afresh questions around the state of the individual and the state of nature and how these could be studied as diverse and interconnected areas of knowledge.

With a renewed and reinvigorated interest in education, questions and concerns around ‘the nature of education’ intensified. Among other things, such concerns raised issues of accessibility and equitability in education. Was the new education to be open to all, or should there be some restriction, and if so, to what extent and in what areas? Should boys and girls study under the same roof and use the same curriculum, or should their education be different based on their sex/gender? Did the individual possess the capacity for perfectibility and self-improvement? If so, how could this be achieved through education? Was there such a thing as an ‘educable’ and ‘ineducable’ child? What were the major requirements for careful education of the young?

Many thinkers and activists, from Locke to Rousseau to Kant to Mary Wollstonecraft (1792) and Maria Edgeworth (Edgeworth and Edgeworth, 1855 [1798]), passionately engaged these and similar questions. Their responses culminated in the construction of a rich body of knowledge pertaining to educational issues and pedagogical questions that are as fresh and challenging today as they were in the 17th and 18th centuries. All these questions reemphasized the importance of the need to plan for the future through education and an enlightened socialization. They also paved the way for various educational practices that are nowadays identified as liberal education, secular education, public schooling, common schooling and, more to our point, Global Citizenship Education (GCE).

Defining global citizenship

Notions of citizen, citizenship, cosmopolitan(ism) and the like that emerged in the ancient Greece were taken up with a renewed interest and intensity by the Enlightenment thinkers. Enlightenment savants like Kant (1899) in their educational treatises emphasized the importance of a cosmopolitan perspective, global vision and universal values:

There exists something in our minds which causes us to take an interest (a) in ourselves, (b) in those with whom we have been brought up, and (c) there should also be an interest in the progress of the world. Children should be made acquainted with this interest, so that it may give warmth to their hearts. They should learn to rejoice at the world’s progress, although it may not be to their own advantage or to that of their country. (p. 121)

This Kantian observation resonates very closely with the discourse and practice of many critical educators who promote the values of global citizenship through education. It was through the Enlightenment discourse and the French Revolution of 1789 that the concepts of citizen and citizenship emerged as political ideas and inclusive identity categories, linked to a discourse of social and political rights and the status of individuals vis-à-vis the State. They functioned as a form of identity, based on a sense of loyalty to a political community or state (nation state). Simultaneously, citizen/ship became a marker of difference, a site of inclusion and exclusion, a form of cultural and political capital that determined one’s degree of belonging to the nation state and having access to its various resources.

The concept of global citizenship is both complex and contested. In recent years, a plethora of literature has emerged from numerous scholars in various fields that indicate the variety of perspectives, philosophies and meanings associated with the term (Bashir and Phillip, 2015; Gaudelli and Fernekes, 2004; Ibrahim, 2005; Lewin, 2009). Despite this variety in the literature, however, there are cross-cutting themes that illustrate the characteristics of what it means to be a global citizen. As Guo (2014) has aptly observed, a global citizen is one who demonstrates some or all of the following features:

1) Respect for fellow humans, regardless of social differences or political views; 2) Appreciation for diversity and multiple perspectives; 3) A view that no single society or culture is inherently superior to any other; 4) Cherishing the natural world and respecting the rights of all living things; 5) Practicing and encouraging sustainable patterns of living, consumption, and production; 6) Striving to resolve conflicts without the use of violence; 7) Be responsible for solving pressing global challenges in whichever way they can; 8) Think globally and act locally in eradicating inequality and injustice in all their forms. (p. 2)

Contemporary notions of global citizenship reflect the idea of cosmopolitanism associated with the Enlightenment and particularly with Kant’s views on this topic. What broadly emerges from the scholarship on global citizenship is that it is about membership in a community that extends beyond local and national boundaries. This membership is accompanied by new articulations of rights and responsibilities, self-perceptions and senses of belonging that are based on global perspectives and universal sensibilities. Global citizenship is not solely a way of thinking but must be accompanied by action and the ability to challenge existing relations of power and privilege based on class, geography, language, citizenship, nation state, gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, dis/ability, and so forth. Global citizenship is a way of thinking and being which embraces the idea that we can make a positive difference in the world and empowers us to act on this belief.

GCE

Ever since the Enlightenment, public schooling has remained one of the most powerful institutions of/for socialization and as such a place to prepare citizens for the world they inhabit. Since the 18th century, there has been a strong relationship between and among education, citizenship and the nation state where a key task of education has been to prepare citizens to become functioning members of the nation state with its attendant rights and responsibilities. However, the progressive global and cosmopolitan dimensions of education have been declining in recent decades and particularly more so from the 1980s onward—a period associated with the rise of corporate capitalism and neoliberal globalization. The focus of education has dramatically shifted from the Enlightenment notion of ‘developing the mind and character’ to preparing the students for a global economy that would require them to ‘compete and innovate’ in order to survive. Pupils are no longer simply seen as citizens/students but as consumers or clients. While neoliberalization policies continue to push education more and more toward commodification, progressive teachers, students and other educational workers have been calling for the inclusion of topics on global perspectives, social justice–oriented education, and GCE.

As neoliberalism strengthens its grip on education (Apple, 2001, 2006), the need for a sort of ‘GCE’ is felt by progressive educators, students, and others. Fields of study and inquiry such as GCE can be considered arenas where the vocabulary and grammar necessary to engage with a discourse and practice of neoliberalism may be developed. There is general agreement among scholars and organizations concerned with GCE that it should focus on equipping learners with knowledge and understanding of global problems, skills to engage in action for change and relevant values and attitudes. Ibrahim’s (2005) research on GCE in the United Kingdom draws on Oxfam’s work on GCE. According to Ibrahim (2005), ‘a key element of Global Citizenship Education is about developing learners as politically literate global citizens with understanding of how they can influence political processes of decision-making at various levels’ (p. 181). This requires that students and teachers should have a knowledge and understanding of global problems that would enable them to participate on various local, national, and global levels of community building. Politically literate citizens who are willing to engage in social action at all levels must have a commitment to social justice, equity, and recognition of the needs and rights of others. Unlike neoliberalism’s market-driven idea of education, GCE offers a transformational learning process. It does not stop at acquiring more knowledge but rather moves toward engaging with this knowledge in a manner that enables the learner to see the world in a profoundly different way—one that moves them toward social action with the aim of improving the living conditions for the diverse inhabitants of the planet.

Experience and experimentation with GCE: the case of Centennial College in Canada

Centennial College is one of the most diverse post-secondary institutions in Canada, offering bachelor’s degree, diploma, certificate, post-graduate certificate, and apprenticeship programs, across 40 fields of study. Located in Toronto, a major destination for new immigrants, the college reflects the ethnic diversity of Canadian immigration patterns. In fact, there are students from about 100 ethno-cultural groups and 80 different linguistic communities in the College. In addition, the College has increased its intake of international students to the point where today almost 50% of the student population are international students. As an open access college, Centennial also has large numbers of students from lower socio-economic backgrounds. There are also a growing number of Aboriginal and ‘career-changing’ students. Similar to the student population, the teachers, administrative personnel, and other employees come from very diverse backgrounds. Similar to most post-secondary institutions today, large numbers of contract faculty work in the college. Given this rich diversity and difference, it is important to see how Centennial has embarked on the idea of constructing the field of ‘GCE’ and the ways in which the field has been developing in a rich multicultural environment.

In 2004, the incoming president, Ann Buller, saw a different vision for the College, one that revolved around the College’s highly diverse student body. The President’s vision, known as the Signature Learning Experience (SLE), built on the diversity at the College with the aim of offering students a unique learning experience that would prepare them to work in a more global and increasingly diverse world. Similar to the Enlightenment vision of education, issues of equity, global citizenship, social justice, human rights, and critical thinking would serve as the focal points for the SLE. The objective was that every student graduating from Centennial College would have knowledge and skills in these areas. The SLE was also a way of distinguishing Centennial and the programs it offered from other colleges.

Changing the organizational culture: five SLE pillars

The SLE was about changing the organizational culture of the institution to better align with principles of equity, global citizenship, and social justice. Four pillars were crafted through a consultative process with the College’s senior management, employees, and professional equity consultants who were hired to direct and oversee the process. Later, a fifth pillar was added to reflect the College’s interest in service learning. These five pillars serve as the foundation for the College’s SLE.

The first pillar is a mandatory general education course in global citizenship and equity (GNED500) for all students (with the exception of those students in programs that are one year or less). The course introduces students to the theories and concepts of global citizenship, equity and social justice and links them to contemporary social issues in Canada and globally. The course is taught from a critical perspective, and draws from the work of critical social scholars in the fields of feminist, queer, disability, race, anti-colonial and cultural studies. While the course starts with individual self-reflection, it is always tied to structural and systemic aspects of the social life.

The second SLE pillar is a professional development course on global citizenship and equity that is offered to all College employees. This 7-week course is taught by an instructor at the College and is free of charge to all employees. The course introduces employees to theories, concepts, and ideas of global citizenship, equity, and social justice. The course allows employees to critically explore personal, social, and professional responsibility of working in the field of education from both local and global perspectives. Employees are not required to take this course but are strongly encouraged to do so. Centennial’s high regard for this course is demonstrated by adding it as an elective to the College’s Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Program and by recognizing it in the full-time employee hiring process.

The third pillar was to embed global citizenship and equity learning outcomes in all of the College’s programs (with the exception of 1-year programs). This way, when students graduated from their program, they would not only have met their required program outcomes but also the following six GCE Learning outcomes: (1) identify one’s roles and responsibilities as a global citizen in personal and professional life; (2) identify beliefs, values, and behaviors that form individual and community identities and the basis for respectful relationships; (3) analyze issues of equity at the personal, professional and global levels; (4) analyze the use of the world’s resources to achieve sustainability and equitable distribution at the personal, professional and global levels; (5) identify and challenge unjust practices at the local and global systems; and (6) support personal and social responsibility initiatives at the local, national and/or global levels.

The fourth pillar was a mandatory student Global Citizenship and Equity Portfolio that required students to chronicle their understanding and engagement with global citizenship, equity and social justice issues in their program. Upon graduation, students could use their portfolio when seeking employment, to demonstrate their knowledge and experience of global citizenship and equity issues, which they could argue better equipped them to work in a rapidly globalizing environment.

The SLE was formally launched in 2008. However, in 2010, the College added a fifth pillar, the Global Citizenship and Equity Learning Experiences (GCELE), which offers students service learning opportunities to work with established local and international non-governmental organization (NGOs) and communities on social justice issues (e.g. issues around health, food security, water, education, poverty, homophobia). The College’s service learning model focuses on building sustainable long-term partnerships with established organizations and communities that would allow for shared learning opportunities for all parties involved. The underlying rationale of GCELEs is that experiential knowledge accompanied by critical reflections and deep connections with community through service-learning activities will lead to a transformational change in students’ worldviews.

Those who are selected for the program are required to participate in pre-departure training sessions that focus on themes such as issues of power and privilege, distinguishing between charity and social justice, understanding the larger sociopolitical and historical context of the communities, thinking critically about local and global connections, being self-reflexive, thinking about the ways in which knowledge is socially constructed, and challenging various colonial or imperialist tendencies in an interconnected global environment. Students and staff who participate in a GCELE are expected to share their knowledge and experience with the wider College community.

Successes and challenges of GCE

Along the lines of the Enlightenment vision of education, Centennial College has created a space to engage critically with local and global human rights and social justice issues. They have done this by institutionalizing a critical discourse of GCE, one which disrupts hegemonic discourses of economic globalization and uncritical notions of diversity. The College’s SLE is a rare feat given that free speech and critical thinking are under threat in many post-secondary institutions due mainly to the corporatization of education in the era of neoliberalization. Credit must be given to the College’s President and Board of Directors, who not only mandated and financially supported this organizational change but also persevered it despite strong skepticism and impediments resulting from neoliberalization policies.

Since the inception of the SLE in 2004, students and employees have learned the value of a critical education: one that teaches them the importance of critical thinking, reflective practice as well as the responsibilities of working and living in an interconnected and interdependent world. Nevertheless, the program has been facing a number of significant challenges that manifest the difficulty of implementing progressive educational principles in the age of neoliberalism. These challenges range from conceptual/theoretical issues to challenges related to different fields of study, the precarious nature of educational work and the privileges of citizenship. Below we will briefly discuss a number of these challenges.

Philosophical/theoretical challenges

Despite the obvious benefits of the GCE program, there are still those in the College who argue that GCE amounts to moral indoctrination and that it should not be the role of educational institutions to instill a sense of morality in their population. This observation raises a number of questions: Is the teaching of peace, global cooperation, care for the planet, compassion, empathy, responsibility, critical thinking, and reflection synonymous with indoctrination? And if so, how can then one define the task of education? And what would be the right kind of education? As we have seen, these and similar questions were raised and explored by the Enlightenment savants of the 18th century. Just as then, today, we learn from such schools of thought as critical pedagogy, feminist pedagogy and various other perspectives in the fields of sociology and philosophy of education that knowledge are not neutral or value-free and nor are the institutions that transmit knowledge.

Students should learn to question all forms of knowledge, which means that education should impart skills like critical literacy, reflective practice and the idea that there are multiple perspectives and ways of knowing. This goes against any sensible understanding of ‘indoctrination’, that is, an ideology that discourages critical discussions and reflection while promoting absolute and inflexible approaches to knowledge. In the words of Brown and Morgan (2008), ‘the role of educators is not to instruct students in what is right or wrong in absolute terms, but to help them discover truth for themselves through the process of dialogue and enquiry’ (p. 287).

In keeping with Immanuel Kant’s understanding of Sapere Aude, we ought to have the courage to know and to question. ‘Man can only become man by education’, wrote Kant (1899) in his treatise on education. ‘He is merely what education makes of him’ (p. 3). Kant went on to advise teachers not to lose sight of the future of humanity as they educate their pupils:

… children ought to be educated, not for the present, but for a possibly improved condition of man in the future; that is, in a manner which is adapted to the idea of humanity and the whole destiny of man. (p. 14)

The Enlightenment thinkers saw the major task of education as development of the mind and cultivation of critical humane qualities. These humane qualities could not be cultivated by mere schooling unless they were a part of the curriculum and included in the pedagogical responsibility of every teacher. Care for oneself, one’s community, and the planet constituted the backbone of the Enlightenment sense of morality. An effective cultivation of such morality required continuous interrogation, questioning, criticism, and skepticism—notions that go against any form of indoctrination and close-mindedness.

Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Kant, and others urged teachers to educate their students in a manner that they could see the world as a cosmopolitan community. They urged students to develop a sense of responsibility to personal, local, and global conditions, to be able to care not only for themselves and their communities but also to the world and other human beings. Kant’s notion of Sapere Aude entailed a sense of courage not only to question and learn but also to act to make the world a more sustainable place and to take responsibility for one’s actions. For it is only in a just and sustainable world that all of us may be able to fulfill our potentialities.

Different fields of study

Some schools in the College have embraced the SLE and the idea of GCE more wholeheartedly than others. For example, programs where human welfare is central (e.g. community development, nursing, early childhood education) have been quick to see the importance and relevance of the SLE and have worked more easily with the global citizenship and equity advisors to integrate the GCE outcomes into their programs. However, in other programs, there have been reluctance and/or resistance toward the SLE and GCE. Most notably, resistance has come from schools where there is a focus on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) and in male-dominated professional and trade-based programs like Automotive and Aviation. While the number of employees in these programs who see the value to the SLE has increased, there are still many in these schools who do not see the relevance of GCE to their discipline or, if they do, it is in a very limited way and mainly only with respect to environmental issues. Subsequently, GCE advisors’ work to integrate GCE learning outcomes in these programs has been somewhat of a challenge.

It is also noteworthy that when there is resistance to GCE, particularly by faculty, students are less likely to see the value in this kind of education. As such, a lot of the success of GCE hinges on the positive participation of faculty. But what happens when there is a lack of knowledge and appreciation regarding global perspectives in certain fields of study that are located outside the social sciences and humanities? It is not enough for students in social sciences and humanities to be educated as global citizens. It is important that students in all disciplines, particularly engineering, natural sciences and business, be exposed to a GCE that allows them to understand the benefits accrued from patriarchy, heteronormative masculinity, citizenship, class, and race/ethnicity among other systems of power and privilege. A GCE that enables students to understand the importance of care for self, community, and others can also help them challenge the boundaries and hierarchies of gender, class, race, and other markers that are embedded in the education system and the wider society. The Enlightenment savants did not address their educational theories to a particular group of students or certain fields of study. They focused on all students and every learner, regardless of what one learned.

Precarious educational work

Similar to other post-secondary institutions, for Centennial College, the use of contract or contingent labor has become the norm, which is a reflection of the larger neoliberal trend in current labor markets. Correspondingly, the avalanche of neoliberal ideologies, policies, and practices that have infiltrated higher education offers competing narratives to GCE. Many of these narratives run counter to social justice–oriented progressive approaches advocated by the College. This begs the question: ‘how can institutions expect to instill values of equity and social justice in an environment that does not reflect these same values?’ It is not easy to speak of social justice and equity when unions are under constant threat and increasing numbers of faculty are contract educational workers, including those who teach the over 100 sections of the GNED500 course (Global Citizenship and Equity: From Social Analysis to Social Action).

Teacher workload is a growing concern in educational institutions worldwide. The neoliberal policies of educational institutions such as a continual attack on unions have resulted in larger class sizes while diminishing the status, time, wages, security, and autonomy of teachers. Global citizenship pedagogy aims to inspire transformation and must include elements like creating an open and safe space where learners can engage critically with a diversity of perspectives. They ought to be encouraged to think independently and make informed and responsible decisions based on critical literacy and self-reflexivity. How can such safe spaces be constructed and maintained when and where teachers do not have job security? How can teachers challenge dominant ideas and practices if they worry about student complaints and fear that they may not be hired again if they speak their minds? And doesn’t this go sharply against the Enlightenment notion of Sapere Aude—the courage to know and to question?

In the spirit of Enlightenment thinking, becoming fully human passes through critical thinking, which includes the ability to expose power relations and to show connections between power and knowledge. As such, instructors must be able to facilitate difficult conversations, engage in conflictual and emotional discussions, and inevitably risk being seen as unpopular by some students. Having disagreements and opposing viewpoints is a normal part of today’s classrooms with highly diverse and heterogeneous student bodies. This calls for educators who are able to teach the values of dialogue, criticality, democratic decision-making and democratic-dialogical means of handling conflict rather than erasing differences. Contract faculty who lack stable employment and union membership may be less willing to take these risks for fear of student complaints being perceived as an inability on their part to teach professionally or to handle difficult situations. In a precarious work environment, students’ complaints can easily be translated into teachers’ incompetence which can in turn result in teachers’ not being rehired. In short, it can result in teachers’ unemployment. Subsequently, a course like GCE that is meant to name and challenge systems of power and privilege, and encourage critical thinking and free speech, may be watered down to one that reinforces neoliberal notions of diversity, commodification of education and corporate globalization.

Social class and economics of schooling

The overall reduction of public expenditure in education coupled with the greater influence of the private or corporate sector is marked by an emphasis on standardization, offloading of education to online methods of delivery, increasing class size and workload for faculty. It is also marked by rising tuition and emphasis on revenue-generating initiatives like the competition for international students because of the high fees they pay. All of these trends offer significant challenges for GCE. For example, the rising cost of tuition and the fact that many of the College’s students come from lower socio-economic backgrounds have made it difficult for them to accept having to pay for the mandatory GNED500 course, which is included in almost every program at the College.

The reduction of public expenditure in education has led most post-secondary institutions to seek ways of generating revenue, which has in turn led to the commodification of education. Naturally, the College has not been immune to this. As a result, there has been increased commodification of the SLE and GCE. The College’s success of the SLE has led to the branding and marketing of Centennial College as a Global Citizenship and Equity college as a way to attract students. In particular, the marketing of the most recent SLE pillar, the GCELE, has attracted the attention of many students seeking to participate in a GCELE as part of their educational experience. While participation in GCELEs is aligned with the College’s approach to GCE, the fact that there is greater pressure to market it as a way to attract students means that there is the potential for the original goal of the GCELEs to become diluted or overshadowed by the goal of generating revenue for the College.

There is research that attests to the value and importance of service-based learning, citing benefits of greater critical thinking, empathy, understanding of the structural nature of social problems and advocacy (cf. Kellogg, 1999; Rhoads, 1997). However, a large body of research has raised questions about the kind of transformation that results from service learning and its sustainability (Chaput and O’Sullivan, 2013; Eyler and Giles, 1999; Giroux, 2009). Chaput and O’Sullivan (2013) found that students who participate in international service learning trips have a hard time challenging dominant forms of neoliberal thinking. In their experience with Canadian students on a service learning trip to Cuba, the authors observed that cultural liberalism produced stumbling blocks for a deeper democratic educational experience, that is, one that challenges students to reflect on their largely unquestioned values and attitudes. Observations like this contrast with one of the main goals of GCE: to create citizens of the world who see the unjustness of all forms of inequality and develop a more humane understanding of the global landscape.

The global division of labor and power imbalances

Perhaps the most glaring example of the shortcomings of GCE that the GCELEs highlight is the fact that those in the Global North have the opportunity and freedom to traverse borders, while those in the Global South do not have the same privileges. This reflects the reality that the concept of citizenship is still confined to the nation state and that global citizenship may not be possible in the real practical and legal sense. Our world is divided into a hierarchy of rich, poor, developed, developing, and underdeveloped nation states that give rise to a hierarchy of citizenships, whereby some countries and their citizens are seen as more desirable than others. ‘Desirable’ and wealthy states like Canada set high barriers to citizenship.

Despite the College’s attempt to ensure that the needs of marginalized communities are taken into account, the reality is that the resources (financial and other) that come by way of the GCELEs to marginalized communities strongly influence these communities to favor rich countries like Canada, so much so that they easily open their communities to those from the Global North seeking to enhance their educational experience. This is not to say that marginalized communities do not benefit (in terms of knowledge, economics, labor, etc.) or that the College’s students do not come away transformed. However, the existing capitalist system, the nation state, and intergovernmental organizations (e.g. United Nations (UN), International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank) keep firmly in place the unequal relations of power so that those in the Global South are locked into their places of marginality. The glaring global inequality and North–South power imbalances raise a fundamental question regarding the efficacy of progressive educational work in various community colleges, universities, and other institutions of higher learning: To what extent are these institutions able to cope with structural forms of inequality and power imbalances within which they are embedded?

All this goes to show that there is an urgent need for dialogues and multilogues that engage with the possibilities of new ways of thinking, acting and being in the world—ways that transcend the current constraints of the nation state, the intergovernmental organizations, issues around borders, securitization, greed, senseless competition, and commodification of human life which have become a defining character of contemporary ‘banking model’ of education (Freire, 1970). While liberal education still emphasizes a degree of intellectual development, in the post-Cold War era and the concomitant emergence of corporate globalization, attention increasingly has been shifting toward credentialism, commercialization, privatization, and commodification of education in line with policies and practices of neoliberalism and free market ideology. The Enlightenment savants of the 18th century saw the detrimental effects of close-mindedness, greed, and competition—and warned us against these. It seems as though Rousseau’s (1979 [1762]) fear of the dominance of the bourgeois personality has finally materialized in our contemporary environments. Allan Bloom (1979 [1762]) has characterized this Rousseauian bourgeois personality as ‘the man motivated by fear of violent death, the man whose primary concern is self-preservation … the man who, when dealing with others, thinks only of himself’ (p. 5). Current corporate capitalism has not only brought to the forefront such a ‘man/creature’ and his insatiable greed, but it has also given birth to major transnational corporations who in effect think of nothing but competition and maximization of profit. ‘We only excite envy in a child’, observed Immanuel Kant (1899) in regard to competition,

by telling him to compare his own worth with the worth of others. He ought rather to compare himself with a concept of his reason. For humility is really nothing else than the comparing of our own worth with the standard of moral perfection. (p. 105)

Conclusion

It goes without saying that in an article of this length, we could not hope to capture all the nuances and complexities associated with the Enlightenment (this must await a book-length work now in progress). Nor has this been an attempt to offer a full portrayal of the Enlightenment and its various interpretations. What this article offers is an evaluation of certain educational and pedagogical legacies of the Enlightenment in light of our current challenges and struggles in educational domains. We presented an earlier version of this paper at the 2015 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Canada, at the University of Ottawa, in a Canadian Sociological Association (CSA) seminar titled ‘The Enlightenment after Postmodernism: Implications for Education, Social Theory, and Social Inequality’. Our aim has been threefold: (1) to show the Enlightenment’s immense contribution to what has come to be known as liberal education, (2) to highlight the gradual erosion of liberal education’s Enlightenment legacy under current neoliberalization policies and practices, and (3) to emphasize the importance of revisiting relevant Enlightenment narratives and practices for the purpose of strengthening current progressive educational and pedagogical struggles around such issues as free speech, critical thinking, transformative learning, improvement of human condition, and attainment of a global perspective.

By way of a concrete example, the article has explored a Canadian college’s institutional vision of ‘Global Citizenship and Equity Education’ to critically examine the possibilities and challenges for social justice initiatives in contemporary institutions of higher learning. We have chosen the example of Centennial College in Canada for two main reasons: to study the way in which the critical spirit and creative vision of the Enlightenment are reflected in College’s endeavors and to see how similar are the challenges, criticism and difficulties faced by the College to those faced by the Enlightenment savants in their quest for critical reflection and global understanding.