Civility in Politics and Education

This book examines the concept of civility and the conditions of civil disagreement in politics and education. Although many assume that civility is merely polite behavior, it functions to aid rational discourse. Building on this basic assumption, the book offers multiple accounts of civility and its contribution to citizenship, deliberative democracy, and education from Eastern and Western as well as classic and modern perspectives. Given that civility is essential to all aspects of public life, it is important to address how civility may be taught. While much of the book is theoretical, contributors also apply theory to practice, offering concrete methods for teaching civility at the high school and collegiate levels.

Deborah S. Mower is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University. She received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship on Virtue Ethics and Confucianism at Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 2008. She is a member of the Executive Committee for the Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum and has published multiple papers in applied ethics. She co-directed (with Wade Robison) the 11^th International Conference on Ethics Across the Curriculum on "Citizenship and Civility" in 2009.

Wade L. Robison is the Ezra A. Hale Professor of Applied Ethics at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He was President of the International Hume Society for sixteen years and is active in Ethics Across the Curriculum at RIT and elsewhere. He has written, edited or co-edited 9 books. His most recent book, with L. Reeser, is titled Ethical Decision Making in Social Work (2000). His book Decisions in Doubt: The Environment and Public Policy (1994) won the Nelson A. Rockefeller Prize in Social Science and Public Policy.