Chapter 1: The Education of Persons in Multicultural Canada

Personal experiences are embedded in, and significantly constituted by, sociocultural practices of personhood, some of the most important and influential of which are educational practices. In many Western nations, education has the explicit, sociopolitically sanctioned mandate of producing particular kinds of persons—persons capable of free and equal participation as citizens in democratic societies. Because adolescence is developmentally so strongly associated with the formation of personal identity and selfhood, the education of adolescent students warrants particular attention with respect to the education of persons.

What is crucial about adolescence is its social position as a distinctive period of transition from the familial and social roles of childhood to the multifaceted sociopolitical norms and responsibilities of adulthood. Because this transition seems almost inevitably to imply a movement toward greater autonomy of decision and action, adolescence (especially in highly individualized societies) frequently is portrayed as a time in which young people must come to discover and assert their genuine, authentic selves. While not totally in error, such views can obscure the extent to which adolescence necessarily involves the “taking up” of relevant sociocultural practices of personhood in ways capable of supporting the emergent, yet always situated, moral agency and personal identity (concerns and commitments) of the fully participatory, adult citizen. Thus, critical aspects of identity and self-formation during adolescence are as much a matter of learning about one’s intellectual, sociocultural, and political context as they are about coming to understand what resides in one’s innermost being. Indeed, considered in this way, personhood itself may be most profitably approached from the “outside in.” And yet, such sociocultural constitution obviously must stop short of a total social determinism that would leave developing persons without the personal agency and identity so necessary for adaptive functioning in those dynamic sociocultural contexts characteristic of our contemporary world.