Chapter 5: Replacing the Hierarchical Master in a Social Contract with Autonomous Citizens Actively Participating within the Force of the Common Whole

In this book, I have mapped the direction of the book in Chapter 1. In Chapter 2, I introduced A Blueprint for Character Development for Evolution (ABCDE) as a deliberative method to empower educational professional leaders, teachers, parents, students and communities with the tool box they need to become self-governing. In Chapter 3, I explored the current patterns of high stakes testing globally, nationally and locally which has had the pragmatic consequence of teaching to the test in bite size chunks that are memorised. The deliberative method is not possible in such contexts, and communities are not equipped with the tool box they need to see through popularism, and fake news. In Chapter 4, I conceptualised what a social contract is in the context of different interests within a society drawing on key thinkers over time including Socrates in Brown (2003), Plato (2018), Hobbes (1651), Locke (1952), Rousseau (1762), Kant (1900); Dewey (1916, 1926), and Rawls (2005). A five-stage scaleable rubric ABCDE was introduced that moved students from A–B where they sensed the world to B–C where they developed beliefs about the world, to C–D where they developed methods and hypotheses about the world, to D–E where they developed principles about the world that were transferable from one institution or discipline to another. The scaleable rubric was mapped to ABCDE which offers a staged approach to conducting personal moral inquiries into institutional ethical rules, starting with schools. ABCDE can then be applied to moral inquiries of the ethical rules of other societal institutions such as the law, policy making, business, commerce, and industry and social institutions. The aim would be to strengthen the potential these institutions have to serve the citizens to reproduce human generations, and safe guard their well-being in a process of evolution for human flourishing.