Thus the rich and powerful become seen as rebels while the opposition is cast as stodgy protectors of the status quo. And while his lyrics may contain wisdom, his tweets do not. You are using an outdated browser. Please upgrade your browser and improve your visit to our site. Jeet Heer HeerJeet. Jeet Heer is a contributing editor at the The New Republic.
The idea of a constitutional government with three separate branches of the state would later become essential in the writing of the American constitution. To get any official new legislation passed into law, the U.
President must always work together with Congress. This is a legacy of Montesquieu's political philosophy in practice today. Jean Jacques Rousseau believed that human beings are basically good by nature, but historical events have corrupted them and the present state of civil society. Although "he did not go to school for a single day and was essentially self-taught, his writings included a political theory that deeply influenced the American Founding Fathers and the French Revolutionaries.
In Rousseau's ideal world, people would live in small communal farming communities and make decisions democratically. Rousseau believed that people could regain their lost freedom by creating a society where citizens choose to obey laws they themselves created, giving up some personal self gains in exchange for a wider common good.
To read more, explore an interactive transcript for the "Introduction to Rousseau: The Social Contract" video using VidReader , a tool that creates interactive transcripts for YouTube videos.
Her personal life, that included an illegitimate child, love affairs, and suicide attempts, was considered scandalous at the time. She died at age Her daughter was Mary Shelley, author of the novel, Frankenstein. Mary Wollstonecraft believed that women should have the same rights as men including life and liberty.
In A Vindication of the Rights of Man , she opposed monarchy and aristocracy. In , she published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in which she asked:. She was the author of The Declaration of the Rights of Women and Female Citizen , a powerful call for gender equality and political change. She was subsequently beheaded during the Reign of Terror, the only woman executed for her political writing during that time.
Although women did not have many rights and privileges, de Gouges used ideas from the Enlightenment to advocate for greater rights for women and enslaved Black people. She is considered the first computer programmer. Ada Lovelace did not conform to traditional gender roles and expectations, focusing on mathematics and coding in a time when women were not taught math. She became a correspondent to mathematician Charles Babbage who was in the process of creating the plans for the Difference Machine, the world's first calculator.
She created notes on the machine and its step sequences and those notes became the first computer "code. Katherine Johnson was a mathematician and physicist at NASA National Aeronautics and Space Administration who was one of the African American women whose math and science work were essential to the success of early United States space exploration, including the flight when John Glenn became the first American man to orbit the earth.
Katherine Johnson was a pioneer in civil rights as well. She was one of the first Black students to integrate graduate schools in West Virginia; the third African American to earn a doctoral degree in mathematics; and a Presidential Medal of Honor recipient. Knight to modern-day scientists and innovators. There is historical background for women in math and science at the wiki page Women of the Scientific Revolution.
Women, whose work in philosophy, science, and politics is often neglected or marginalized in history textbooks and curriculum framework, made change-producing discoveries and advances during the Enlightenment and in every era since.
However, still in today's digital age, the most well-known figures are men: Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. In the following activities, you will explore the accomplishments of 21st century women innovators in the media and think about how to encourage more girls to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math STEM :.
Uncover focused on the French feminist Olympe De Gouges who in published the Declaration of the Rights of Women and Female Citizen, a stirring call for the equality of women during the French Revolution. Engage asked what women in history and current society were important trailblazers, innovators, and change-makers in math, science, and politics. Building D emocracy for All Cover Introduction for Edu cators Topic 1. Misleading speech is the essential element of despots, because despots need the support of the people.
That record is why Socrates — before being sentenced to death by democratic vote — chastised the Athenian democracy for its elevation of popular opinion at the expense of truth. Festival of Social Science — Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire. Edition: Available editions United Kingdom. While the student-teachers acknowledged the fact that any opinion has the potential to offend someone, they did not clearly understand the discourse that everyone has the right to freedom of expression even if what is said is untrue, and that freedom of expression can be limited the minute what is said defames another:.
She was just honest in saying how the school really is. So, when do you truly have freedom of speech, when you say something about yourself? I mean, I will criticise myself, sometimes, but I will not talk bad about myself when I am with other people. So I will open my mouth when something is not right and if you want to punish me for it, then I feel where is that right, because then that right doesn't count? And then I get angry, Many of the student-participants argue that as long as what you say is the truth, it would be acceptable.
You should investigate and see whether the learner is speaking the truth. If the learner is not speaking the truth, then you are allowed to give some sort of punishment. This indicates that these student-teachers might not yet have comprehended the nature of the market place of ideas. The fact that they thought that unpopular or untrue views would be "punished would prevent creativity, the formation of ideas, individual development and the flowering of a true democracy".
In contrast with the notion that untrue expression might be punished, some participants were aware that the right to freedom of expression guarantees that there will be no punishment even if what one says differs from the opinions of others: "You should not penalise me if I say that I am not in support of this thing and provide valid arguments on it".
We need professionalism in the working environment" s1y4m2 - and that learners should not be indoctrinated when speaking out: "So I think they were wrong because they cannot channel my thinking". S1Y4M2 Some student-teacher participants acknowledged the fact that freedom of expression implies the possibility of change:.
Yes, how does change happen if something like this does not happen? So maybe she just wanted The participating student-teachers understood that the right to freedom of expression would be balanced by the right to human dignity and that it was internally limited in terms of Article 16 2 if the expression boiled down to defamation or hate speech:.
I did not bad mouth him. I did not use unpleasant words. I only gave my opinion. But freedom of expression, you can only stop it when it's about racism or hatred or when it hurts people, but this didn't hurt anyone. The latter quotation clearly illustrates that although the participants were aware of the inherent limitation to the right to freedom of expression if hate speech is used, the notion that any opinion does have the potential to hurt is not comprehended by everyone.
This right is also viewed by South African courts as central to a constitutional democracy to the extent to which it supports other rights. As custodians of democracy, schools are the places where all children, but particularly vulnerable learners, should be steered and guided in the process of critical thinking to develop the skills and competencies they need to fulfil their role as fully developed citizens.
Learners should therefore be trained to think critically and to speak their mind if they disagree, even if what they say is not the truth. Unfortunately, so much emphasis is placed on the image of the school that the hidden curriculum or unintended message is that free expression needs to be limited in order to preserve the image of the school:.
Most of the schools, it is about the school's image and the image that should be portrayed Outside is clean, but it should only stay inside and people are not allowed to hear what is going on inside.
Then I tell them but there is violence; there is so much violence there that no one is allowed to say what is happening, and that is what it is all about. Some of the student-teachers were therefore of the opinion that learners should first talk about negative things at school before revealing these in public media. They stressed loyalty to the school as a positive quality, thought the image of the school enjoyed priority, and failed even to raise the question of whether the expression would boil down to hate speech or not:.
But the first thing she should have done is to go and speak to someone at the school, and if they were doing nothing about it, then go to the press. On the other hand, some student-teacher participants understood that schools should not indoctrinate learners as this would work against the whole notion of critical thinking in a democracy. In this regard, one participant felt that the school could not punish learners if the school had asked for their opinion: "So I think they were wrong because they [the school] cannot channel my thinking.
Some student-teachers are aware of the fact that the school's reaction would depend on the platform that is used for free expression. The fact that they say that as a citizen one may speak one's mind but as member of the school not is an indication of how children at school are still indoctrinated into believing that the image of the school is supreme to the Constitution.
This finding echoes the results from a study where learners' understanding of their right to freedom of expression was investigated. Schools then are surely working against the development of the skills and competencies essential to the exercise of the right to freedom of expression, and this phenomenon is a death knell for democracy and its developments:. The learner wrote the article as a member of the community and she wrote the assignment as a member of the school.
And one other thing - we should take into consideration if they say this thing the learner crossed the line. If we can go to reality. We know that the teachers and the principal's conduct in the school is superior to that of the learners. You know, the learners are inferior. Think back to when you were still a student -you will be afraid to say something in school.
For example, I could not challenge my teachers and say: you are misconducting because of this and this. There will be a lot of things happening around that but if maybe she did this thing by intention, because she knew the community and the members of parliament, the minister will protect the child.
But if this was a situation happening or dealing in the school level only. There will be a problem there Seemingly, student-teacher participants still experience a tension between speaking out as critical thinkers enhancing democracy and protecting the image of the school. There is also a fine line in praxis between "washing" factual "dirty laundry" and defamation.
This tension in itself is the poison killing our democracy and is clearly visible when this participant states: "So that the dirty laundry of this school, the so called perfect school, has been revealed.
But it is like I said: It gets applied when it wants to be applied. It is like when I am in a powerful position, I will apply the rights I want to apply, disregarding what you feel.
From the data presented it is evident that student-teachers have a superficial knowledge of the right to freedom of expression. They are aware of the fact that this right is not absolute and may be limited. It seems as if they have a sense of the importance of the right to freedom of expression in a democracy, but they have not yet internalised what they sense, and they struggle to balance the right in praxis. Interestingly, this data confirms that of Bronstein, Glaser and Werbeloff, who found the same phenomenon amongst law students.
Their study found that while most student respondents support general statements in favour of free expression, their commitment to this value seems to buckle under the stress of hard test cases. The mean levels of student support for free expression vary widely across items and mask wide variations of opinion amongst students. The fact that student-teachers, the custodians of democracy, are still not able to internalise and apply the right to freedom of expression in practice indicates that our school system still fails to be a market place of ideas, and is incapable of developing individuals as critical and individual thinkers to reach their fullest potential and to be citizens in a developed democracy.
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