I am including here extracts from a piece I wrote for TreboilPress

at http://trebolpress.com/2013/10/alon-serpers-review-of-a-terrible-case-of-beauty-by-lynn-cohen/

It is relevant to this day and the escalation that now includes my own city of Tel-Aviv-Jaffa and my family and friends

As I was writing up http://connect.nmmu.ac.za/Blogs/Developing-and-Testing-An-Applied-Applied-Dialecti/July-2014/Values-and-morals-as-standards-of-judgement; http://connect.nmmu.ac.za/Blogs/Developing-and-Testing-An-Applied-Applied-Dialecti/July-2014/Meaningful-life ; http://connect.nmmu.ac.za/Blogs/Developing-and-Testing-An-Applied-Applied-Dialecti/July-2014/Middle-East-problems

My friend sent me a picture, that I am attaching here, of the sign held by two young Jewish Israeli girls. He said he took it off twitter it was twitted by an Israeli girl ,University of Jerusalem. 

If he means the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, then he means the best University in Israel and where I did my graduate work in theoretical and critical humanistic and dialectical psychology of the human subject.  On the other hand, the University is now on the Summer holiday.  The students are away.

I was discussing my questions with the founder and director of The John Dewey Center for Democracy and Education, Prof Karl Rogers, and the following needs, issues, questions and conclusions were formulated

I dedicated the last week to the question of values.  Lets recap and summarise, and problematize some more

Let us reflect and dialogue on the question of values and the scientific methods and methodological approaches of studying and conceptualising human beings and human phenomena, as well as scientific (empirical) methodologies and methods in general

I am attaching my final version of my paper - 

Democratic Education Practices in South Africa:

A Critical Reflection on a Dialogic Perspective

This was the version before the editor polished and prepared it for publication. 

It was published in May 2014 by TrebolPress Los Angeles http://trebolpress.com/in

Democracy & Education: Collected Perspectives

Democracy & Education: Collected Perspectives is the first in a series of volumes of collected essays and papers from people around the world on the subject of democracy and education. The series is the project of the John Dewey Center for Democracy and Education based at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. The ongoing work represents the critical, reflective, and exploratory efforts of a collection of scholars and thinkers working from a range of disciplinary perspectives to examine the problems and possibilities of achieving universal democracy through education.

DEMOCRACY & EDUCATION: COLLECTED PERSPECTIVES

and was edited by Viktoria Byczkiewicz

Here are details of the book

http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Education-Collected-Perspectives-

Volume/dp/0990360709/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1401253671&sr=8-

1&keywords=viktoria+byczkiewicz

Democracy & Education: Collected Perspectives

Democracy & Education: Collected Perspectives is the first in a series of volumes of collected essays and papers from people around the world on the subject of democracy and education. The series is the project of the John Dewey Center for Democracy and Education based at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. The ongoing work represents the critical, reflective, and exploratory efforts of a collection of scholars and thinkers working from a range of disciplinary perspectives to examine the problems and possibilities of achieving universal democracy through education.

My Abstract

This paper critically reflects upon my practice of contributing to the transformation of South Africa from apartheid and colonialism to a participatory democracy of and for all its citizens and residents in dignity, humanity, and equality. My practice draws on the premise that a transformation of educational practices and policies is essential to the courageous transformation of South African education based on the practices of (1) encouraging and eliciting critical reflection and self-reflection; (2) dialogical co-enquiring of equals; and (3) encouraging the acts of challenging, critiquing and testing established ideas, premises and norms among South Africans. I start with an account of “Bantu education” and a critical reflection on my own experiences with the hierarchical systems’ expectations of subservience. I follow with a brief account of how the new South Africa has begun to transform its tragic history. Subsequently, I account for my own practices of eliciting critical reflection, self-reflection and dialogical co-enquiring among students and staff at my South African university by testing and critically reflecting upon an applied dialectical model of studying and conceptualizing human beings and human existence in order to meaningfully contribute to the endeavors of the new democratic South Africa. My model is embodied directly in the practice of participants to improve their self-fulfillment, wellbeing and quality of life. It is a reaction to the reduction and objectification of the study and conceptualization of human beings to disembodied linguistic propositional abstractions.