Fairness in education – Part 1: John Rawls
https://hail.to/methodist-church-of-new-zealand-emessenger/article/xopRDJP
This is the second in a series about social justice in education. It is in two parts. Part 1 discusses John Rawls’ famous ideal theory of justice as fairness. Part 2 outlines three major challenges to the theory.
The first blog described three basic world views about a ‘fair go’ in education: social justice, meritocratic and zero-sum perspectives. In my choice of words to describe them, I no doubt ‘placed my thumb on the scale’ of social justice perspectives because to me, social justice is both a worthy abstract ideal and a realisable concrete reality. I believe we can take some of the practical steps towards the ideal in education through: (i) deliberative, participatory, problem-oriented, reasoned and evidenced education policy making; (ii) embodying the language, practices and relations of socially just learning and teaching in our educational institutions and local communities; and (iii) ongoing reflexive analysis of how structural, legal and policy settings shape, for better and worse, the material conditions in which learners and educators navigate English medium state education participation. However, in terms of the three basic world views, more instrumental meritocratic and zero-sum perspectives have clearly come to dominate our economic, social and educational discourse over the last several decades. These perspectives maintain that a dignified, ethical life in community must be earned by the individual, not assured for them as a matter of right through the ways we choose to shape the parameters of our economy and society.
So, the last blog noted that the actual education policies we experience today as students, families and whānau, and educators always involve a mix of political, economic and moral considerations, with economic or ‘fiscal responsibility’ considerations often given top priority: a what we can afford for now approach to ‘fair go’. Because proponents of social justice and fairness in education continually must argue their corner today, and because some nominally equal voices carry much more weight in practice than others, we need both just principles and fair procedures for designing and maintaining education and other social institutions that we can all agree on.
This, in fact, was the political philosophical project that John Rawls laid out in his landmark 1971 book, A Theory of Justice. Rawls developed the concept of justice as fairness, where fairness is in essence how societies could bring about the necessary conditions to secure just outcomes. He thought, step by step, about what it would take to get people to agree on and commit themselves to principles for just social institutions in a well-ordered society, and the procedures through which these could then fairly be realised through our social institutions. Rawls distinguished between a public conception of fairness and the various competing or disputed conceptions held by individuals or groups.
Provided that there were no arbitrary distinctions made between persons and that there was a proper balance between competing claims to advantages, he argued it would be possible to come up with an agreed set of general principles to assure political rights and freedoms and economic equality of opportunity. Even so, Rawls wrote that while justice is ‘the most important virtue of institutions’, we also need to consider broader characteristics, such as efficiency, coordination and stability, that we wish to see reflected in the ways our social institutions function, and which we need to take into account when we decide which public conception of justice we should agree to.
The procedure he imagined in this thought experiment was for a diverse group of ‘heads of households’ to come together to decide on the principles of justice. In his words, these would be principles for assigning basic rights and duties to determine a fair distribution of the burdens and benefits of social cooperation. For it to work, this representative group would need to develop the principles in what he called the ‘original position’, from behind a ‘veil of ignorance’. Members of the group would not know where each of them and those closest to them would be positioned within that society, nor what sorts of resources, talents, dispositions they and their family members would possess. So, for example if one did not know whether one’s children would be ‘disabled’ or ‘neurodiverse’, one would want to ensure that educational institutions were designed to provide fully and generously for learners with these and other atypical characteristics. In Rawls’ view, as the representative group gradually learned more about the actual conditions that prevailed in society, they would develop a ‘reflective equilibrium’ between the principles and the procedures of how to organise our social institutions to achieve fair and impartial outcomes for all. So, for example, having looked at the evidence on the lived experiences of students whose needs and aspirations have been continually ignored, misunderstood, marginalised or excluded, a representative group would surely want law, policy, funding and local provision to function in productive alignment over time to remedy such unfairness and injustice, both formally and in the lived experience of education.
Over several hundred pages, Rawls meticulously developed three basic principles of justice that he reasoned all could agree on. First, that each person should have, as he put it, the most extensive system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system for all. However, for Rawls simply having these formal liberties was not sufficient. Everyone should also enjoy ‘fair value’ from their liberties, that is they must be able to exercise them as equals in society, irrespective of their place in the economic and social ‘pecking order’. For example, the legal right to enrol at any school formally provides for ‘school choice’ but as we know after nearly forty years’ experience, in practice not everyone gets fair value from their liberty to choose.
Second, Rawls argued that all offices and positions must be open to all under conditions of fair equal opportunity for all (note his use of that procedural qualifier ‘fair’, again). For example, the current political-ideological stoush, here and overseas, between ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’-based and ‘merit’-based public sector employment policies is effectively an argument about the considerable difference between formal and fair equality of opportunity approaches (and not really about so-called ‘wokeness’).
Third, and most radically in terms of his theory, Rawls argued that social and economic inequalities are acceptable only if they operate to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged. On this basis, for example, one could argue that significant increases in the current proportion of Vote Education resources that are distributed through targeted ‘equity funding’ to communities with the highest proportions of least advantaged students are both just and desirable. Similarly, the ‘social investment’ proposal set out some years ago by former Minister of Education Hon Hekia Parata to fund additional learning needs by reallocating resources from older school students to younger children as early as possible in their education, could claim to be justified on the grounds that it would over time be more ‘efficient, coordinated and stable’ so to speak than having government agencies deal with far more complex challenges of education, workforce and community participation that disengaged and alienated youth face as they became older.
Now, while Rawls’ principles may work elegantly and appealingly as an abstract ideal, the real world is somewhat different not least because many people are understandably resistant to give up for others’ benefit even a small part of any social or economic advantage they feel they have worked very hard to secure for themselves and their loved ones (for example, Minister Parata encountered resistance from families and educators of older children who could lose additional needs funding under the new arrangements). Moreover, those broader considerations of efficiency, coordination and stability that Rawls identified in the mid twentieth century continue to be interpreted and reinterpreted in the twenty first, under much more difficult fiscal conditions, through political ideologies that materially shape law, policy and lived social experience about what counts as fair and just in quite different ways (for example, differing views on the acceptable cost of a nutritious state-funded school lunch programme for poor, hungry children).
This obvious slippage, between the abstract ideal of justice as fairness and the everyday realities of political and civil society interpretations of a ‘fair go’, mean that those of us who advocate and work for social justice must consider not just the potential strengths of Rawls’ ideal approach to making state education and our other social institutions more just and fairer, but also its potential limitations and weaknesses.
Bio: John O’Neill researches in the area of critical education policy scholarship. For many years he has been an education spokesperson for Child Poverty Action Group and the Quality Public Education Coalition.