85 Fragmentation and Subjectification 1 excessive focus on the subject by encouraging the person to be subject to others and to the common good. It goes hand in hand with socialisation, although socialising forces can also pose a risk for it. Amid high diversity and complexity, it is necessary that the student becomes a self that knows what it stands for and why it reaches out to others or involves itself with the common good. To rely heavily on socialisation as uncritical assimilation into the wider social group poses a threat to the necessary subjectification. On the level of the person, the need for subjectification entails (re) connecting persons to both themselves and others, which theologically implies a focus on personhood as communion. On the level of the society, it involves creating room for social and identity groups, even when they exert influence over the individual person, but always requiring them to be subject to peaceful coexistence and the common good of, for example, global citizenship. A strong Biblical motivation to do so is the Apostle Paul’s concept of heavenly politeuma which can be applied well in a community-based society. On the level of the world, subjectification means that people who differ widely in their life convictions—and possibly even disagree on the very existence of a cosmic order—keep connecting to each other in the meaningful sense of intersubjectivity. A Biblical way to do so can be found in a relational epistemology, which holds that it is helpful to rely on revealed truth without feeling the need to possess or impose it to others. These Biblically holistic elements help to give cohesion to citizenship education as the art of creating social cohesion by inviting students to connect with each other (within the school), their communities, society as a whole and the world as the whole of God’s creation.
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