24 Introduction components and justifies their role within the organic whole of the context. On a societal level, fragmentation means that the unified, sense-giving context is disrupted. In a context characterised by super-diversity and super-complexity, the old accounts of social cohesion are shattered and changed, and entirely new accounts are proposed. The loss of broad moral homogeneity may cause disorientation among teachers and students, and it asks for a broad and integrative reorientation with regard to both citizenship and citizenship education. MacIntyre (2007) chose fragmented over pluralistic. His moral account of fragmentation deliberately dramatised unlimited plurality and diversity. For that reason, he evaluated the term pluralistic as ‘too imprecise’, ‘for it may equally well apply to an ordered dialogue of intersecting viewpoints and to an un-harmonious melange of ill-assorted fragments’ (MacIntyre, 2007, p. 10). One more reason to opt for the MacIntyrian lens of fragmentism is that it facilitates the search for a moral account of citizenship conceptions and citizenship education. Such an account has been shown to appeal to an explicitly felt need among educators (Veugelers, 2011) (14). Moreover, it ties together the global and the local, focusing on personal responsibility. This perspective also provides the opportunity to address fragmentation, not just at the societal level but also within the individual person, where processes of alienation from the self—as a type of inner fragmentation—can be observed as the effects of radical individualization and subjectivation. As I will argue in Chapter 1, this context of fragmentation is highly relevant for education in general and for citizenship education in particular. The conclusion to be drawn from this section can be that, in terms of their classical function of preparing students for society, schools have to face the specific challenges of fragmentation as a key characteristic of modern society. Super-diversity and super-complexity are both symptoms of the rapid sociocultural change that led to this fragmentation. Furthermore, part of the complexity stems from the fact that the movement schools have to make to bridge the gap between the relative homogeneity of family and the superdiversity of society has grown much larger than it was in the past. 14 As Veugelers (2011) found in his study, teachers opt for moral global citizenship over open global citizenship, which would neglect the moral dimensions, and social-political global citizenship, which would pay too much attention to sensitive political affairs.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw