The right to deliberate

Is it possible to say that everyone, every pupil or student in school, should have the right to be able to, or perhaps to have the right to develop his or her ability to deliberate? On what grounds, if any, could this be maintained? What kind of (citizenship) right should this be referred to? I will try to develop an answer to these three, closely related, questions by referring to, first, the discussion on citizenship rights that can be led back to Thomas Marshall (1949) and his development on civil, political and social citizenship rights and to some of the critique to his theory put forward by Bryan Turner, Anthony Giddens and others seeing the development of these rights within a theory of modernization. In a second stage I will supplement this critique by launching Dewey’s Democracy and Education (1916) as a starting point for a communicative rationale within this perspective of modernization. In a further development and critique of the Marshall-scheme I am presenting the ideas put forward by Jürgen Habermas and his argumentation for communicative rights as basic for political rights seeing every human being as a potential author of law. This also means coming back considering what Marshall call education as a social right and what Habermas calls welfare rights – rights creating equal opportunities for each citizen to participate in political processes. Contribution to NERA congress 2007 Philosophy of education networ