Chapter 4: Creating Democratic Identities for a Social Contract

In this book, I have mapped the direction of the book in Chapter 1 and explored the deliberative methods in Chapter 2. I considered the extent to which descriptions of issues of importance help young people make sense of the world in community, and I called this sense making A. The sense making of these descriptions inform beliefs which I called B, and I called moving from sense making to beliefs A–B. These beliefs can be further explored by developing methods which I called C, and the move from beliefs to methods I called B–C. From these methods hypotheses can be identified which I called D, and the move from methods to hypotheses I called C–D. From testing the hypotheses, principles can be identified which I called E, and moving from testing hypotheses to principles I called D–E. I suggested that A Blueprint for Character Development for Evolution (ABCDE) as a deliberative method gave citizens the tool box to explore a context of popularism; fake news and Violence, Uncertainty, Chaos and Ambiguity (VUCA). In Chapter 3, I considered the patterns of testing regimes across all nation states currently (Taysum, Beutner, et al., 2017; Taysum et al., 2014; Taysum, Yang, et al., 2012) and identified that there is no correlation between a high place in the testing regimes league tables and a nation state's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita. If the current education system's policies across the globe do not impact the wealth of a nation, and it prevents teachers from engaging with the deliberative methods, I have suggested it is time for a paradigm shift.