The Teaching of Patriotism and Human Rights: An uneasy entanglement and the contribution of critical pedagogy

Abstract

This article examines the moral, political and pedagogical tensions that are created from the entanglement of patriotism and human rights, and sketches a response to these tensions in the context of critical education. The article begins with a brief review of different forms of patriotism, especially as those relate to human rights, and explains why some of these forms may be morally or politically valuable. Then, it offers a brief overview of human rights critiques, especially from the perspectives of Foucault, critical legal studies and postcolonial theory, and emphasizes that foundationalist perspectives of human rights need to be constantly contested. The next part of the article discusses how to overcome issues of incompatibility between patriotism and human rights. The final part proposes that a ‘rapprochement’ between patriotism and human rights in the context of critical education has to take into consideration that patriotic feelings (as a form of love for one’s country) constitute a particular form of ‘emotional education’. As such, the teaching of both patriotism and human rights would benefit from the notion of ‘critical pedagogies of emotion’ that interrogates the emotional commitments of patriotism and human rights and the consequences of these commitments.

Keywords:

• patriotism
• human rights
• critical pedagogy
• emotion

Notes

1. As he writes: ‘Either one is a patriot or one believes in human rights. If one sees patriotism as the prior virtue, this then rules out human rights, or indeed any cosmopolitan concerns, except possibly as a default position which corresponds to, or echoes, the morally prior virtue of patriotism’ (Vincent, 2009, p. 348, original emphasis).

2. Although the issue of ‘citizenship’ is somewhat relevant to our discussion here, the scope of this article is limited to the relation between human rights and patriotism; for a detailed analysis of the relation between human rights and citizenship, see Zembylas (2012a).

3. It is interesting to note that debates about patriotism in political and moral philosophy often reflect larger debates about universalism and cosmopolitanism on the one hand, and communitarianism on the other (Kodelja, 2011).

4. The idea that critical patriotism is concerned with the welfare of those outside one’s border implies an understanding of one’s role as citizen in ways not confined by national borders or geopolitics (Merry, 2009). I am thankful to one of the anonymous reviewers for suggesting further clarifications of this issue.

5. Although I agree with Hand’s (2011) position about patriotism as a form of emotional education, I find several of his assumptions about educating for the emotions (pp. 330–337) to be problematic; for example, the dichotomy he establishes between rational and non-rational emotional education, his argument about partial emotional control, and the therapeutic regime he subscribes to. It is beyond the scope of this article to critique Hand’s position on educating the emotions, but an interesting set of counter-arguments for the claims he makes can be found in Amsler (2011), Stenberg (2011), Worsham (2001) and Zembylas (2008, 2012b).