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5 UNIVERSAL PARTICULARISM: MAKING AN ETHICAL ISLAMIC SCHOOL IN CHICAGO Barnaby B. Riedel What makes [these values] Muslim? Aren’t they universal? I don’t think they’re just Muslim. I think it’s something that all religions have and all people . I mean, but Islam reinforces these as well as the others. —Science Teacher at an Islamic Private School The [Character Counts!] Coalition works to overcome the false but surprisingly powerful notion that no single value is intrinsically superior to another; that ethical values vary by race, class, gender and politics. (Character Counts! home page, accessed at http://www.charactercounts.org/backgrnd.htm) T hese quotes reflect a form of ethical universalism that is increasingly being appealed to in order to defend the reintroduction of moral pedagogy , particularly character education, in American schools. The first quotation is from a female science teacher at an Islamic private school in the suburbs of Chicago; the second is from the website of a mainstream American character-education curriculum, called Character Counts! This curriculum is now being implemented in hundreds of public and private schools across the country, including the Islamic private school at which the quoted science teacher works. The convergence of diverse religious and cultural groups around the idea of character education expresses the fact that many American educational communities are responding to the dilemmas of diversity by shifting their struggles with otherness to the realm of values. For such communities, values are endowed with the transcendental power to unite peoples of diverse national, cultural, and religious backgrounds under the umbrella of a shared educational aim: “strengthening the character of America ’s youth” (Character Education Partnership 1998). Researchers and educators who support the return of character education portray American schools as dominated by market metaphors and a sense of 132 purpose organized around competition and the pursuit of individual economic rewards. Educational communities that support the reintroduction of character education often blame the liberal, multicultural rhetoric of the 1960s and 1970s for laying the ideological roots of an accelerating and invidious trend toward “radical individualism” and “the loss of community” in American society. From their perspective, the pluralist critique of moral education —rooted in the question, “Whose values?”—conflates the concerns of identity politics (including politics of gender, race, culture, and religion) with the goals of moral pedagogy. As they see it, the pluralist critique shows a lopsided emphasis on group recognition at the expense of an inclusive vision of education.1 William Damon, a contemporary scholar within the character-education movement, reflected this opinion when he responded to the question “Whose values?” by stating, “They are our values, the ‘our’ referring to the worldwide community of responsible adults concerned with the quality and very futures of the civilizations that their younger citizens will one day inherit ” (2002, ix). Values, as many character educators see it, promote unity and sustain “civilizations” because they are self-evident and universal. As the director of Character Counts!, Michael Josephson has argued, “No one seriously questions the virtue of virtues or doubts that honesty is better than dishonesty , fairness is better than unfairness, kindness is better than cruelty, and moral courage is superior to cowardice and expediency” (1997, 212). I explore the broader political and pedagogical implications of the character -education movement through an examination of Universal School (not a pseudonym), an Islamic private school in Chicago that has adopted the Character Counts! Curriculum. Universal School’s accommodation of the character -education movement is surprising because, as a religious private school, it stands as a symbol of educational pluralism, particularly the right of groups to perpetuate their own distinctive communal identities through schooling. The character-education movement, on the other hand, represents the impulse to transcend cultural and religious diversity in pursuit of a common and unifying form of schooling. This, then, is the paradox. Why has Universal School combined the particularistic goals of Islamic education with the universalistic stance of the character-education movement? Why has a religious private school taken up a common-school agenda? As it turns out, issues of cultural and national diversity have been troublesome features at Universal School. Serving the children of families that come from places as diverse as the Middle East, Africa, and the Indian Subcontinent , the school includes a global diversity of Muslims, each with their own cultural and theological renderings of Islam. In order to manage this diversity and foster a sense of Muslim community, Universal School has come to define Islam principally in terms...

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