Seeking moral high ground - global citizenship education: the quest for a global planetarian ethics

Abstract

This chapter proposes that Global Citizenship Education (GCE) could become a planetary ethics. In so doing, it follows the tradition of an Ethics of Liberation so well represented in the work of Enrique Dussel who not only draws from a variety of European and post-colonial non-European sources, drawing in the end from the legacies of philosophy of liberation and theology of liberation from Latin America. Among the core values of a planetarian ethics, the author proposes key elements from the philosophy of ethics by Enrique Dussel but also involved in the analysis of phenomenologists such as Paulo Freire and Paul Ricoeur. It highlights the need to articulate these conversations in a genre of dialectical dialogues crucial to a democratic pedagogy. These dialogues should be promoted by critical educators building a philosophy of values based on tolerance, an epistemology of suspicion, but also an epistemology of curiosity, which is a basic principle of science, and a fundamental value in the life of children seeking to understand the world.