Governments around the world are faced with increasingly pluralistic populations at the same time that they wrestle with shrinking public budgets and worsening unemployment which exacerbate social tensions and anxieties. As social and cultural fabrics stretch to the breaking point, a crisis of citizenship looms. Modes of belonging pull in conflicting, sometimes directly competing, directions. Faced with these challenges, states are exploring ways to reinforce civic attachments from their heterogeneous populations, but doing so is proving difficult when former ways of belonging no longer resonate with a large portion of the citizenry.

The absence of a shared moral vision in particular is salient. As centripetal forces gather momentum, the result is both a politics of fear and distrust of others. While the reasons for discordance are complex — they have economic, social and cultural causes and effects — they certainly are aggravated by the presence of different cultures, religions, and political views existing side by side without a shared moral vision. In the history of the world this is not new, of course. But what is new is the scale of the challenges governments face in galvanizing peoples from conflicting experiences and visions of morality.

Educational institutions are at the center of these challenges — challenges that can lead to cynicism and despair, or lead to new visions of hope and opportunity. But opportunities for meaningful engagement with substantive moral difference are too frequently passed up in favor of a moral rhetoric that either glosses over substantive differences, or else alienates and divides rather than inspires and unites. In the presentations for this Summer Institute we want to explore different possibilities for a shared moral vision. How can citizens be united through education when centripetal cultural forces might otherwise pull us apart?