Fairness in Education – Part 2: Beyond 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 discussed John Rawls’ famous ideal theory of justice as fairness. Part 2 outlines three major challenges to the theory.
While many have praised John Rawls’ work since the publication of A Theory of Justice, and warmly acknowledge that he fundamentally changed the nature of how political philosophers think and write about socially just institutions, his theory has also been subject to sustained criticisms, from ‘libertarian’ (e.g. Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia) and ‘communitarian’ (e.g. Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue) ideological poles and many other clusters of beliefs in between. In Part 2, I briefly mention three such positions which strike me as particularly relevant to considerations of justice and fairness in education: those by Susan Moller Okin (regarding gender and family), Charles W. Mills (racial oppression), and Amartya Sen (actual lives and institutions) respectively. Collectively these criticisms give us considerable pause for thought about the utility of ideal theories of justice and fairness, and provide something of a rationale for the need to explore the specific dimensions of justice that will each be the subject of a future blog in the series.
Susan Moller Okin’s Justice, Gender and the Family (1989) examined the injustice of the gendered division of labour in our society and its ramifications for a social justice of ‘human nurturance’. This division, she observed, inflicts profound damage on children and women, but in her words ‘is also destroying the family’s potential to be the crucial first school where children develop a sense of fairness’. While Okin acknowledged the progressive feminist potential of Rawls’ approach, she criticised his apparent blindness to the actual positioning of women, gender and family. According to Okin, Rawls’ analysis simply took for granted, for example, that the family is a just social institution (despite significant empirical evidence to the contrary), that the heads of households he envisaged would be chosen to participate in determining the principles of justice in the original position would be male (with no experience of ‘being’ a woman in a gendered society), that only the paid labour market counted for justice purposes (not the unpaid domestic sphere), and that there was no difference between the welfare of individuals and that of households.
As with Okin in the case of gender, Charles W. Mills has pointed to what he called the illiberalism (in practice) of liberalism (in theory) with respect to racial injustice. In Black Rights/White Wrongs: The critique of racial liberalism (2017), he took Rawls to task for a crucial ambiguity in his decision to focus on an ‘ideally just’ society. Mills argued that Rawls had focused on the philosophical theoretical task of building an ideal society and social institutions from the ground up without, as Mills puts it, any previous history of injustice. This, Mills says, was quite different from the philosophical anthropological project of developing an ideally just society and social institutions where past injustices had been identified, theorised and ‘corrected for’. Mills asserted that we therefore need to work with a non-ideal, not an ideal theory of justice, and work out ways of addressing the ongoing problems caused by historic racial injustices and oppression. In marginalising and largely ignoring the issue of race, Mills argued that Rawls had developed a framework the terms of which are completely inadequate for understanding the workings of race in society and the economy, or for generating principles and procedures for concretely addressing racial injustice.
In The Idea of Justice (2009), Amartya Sen elaborated just such a non-ideal theory of justice< He took a reasoned, practical, social choices approach to address social injustice, as against Rawls’ social contract approach. Sen began by acknowledging the importance and originality of Rawls’ emphasis on fairness. For Sen, fairness was prior to the principles of justice because it can broadly be seen as a demand for impartiality in evaluation and deliberation. In this regard, the ‘original position’ is an attempt to obviate or overcome the influence of personal biases and vested interests, and to actively take account of the interests and concerns of others, as Sen put it, while trying to develop a single set of impartial principles of justice. Sen used a simple illustration to show that this ‘single set’ approach is misguided. Rawls, like most modern theorists of justice, focused on the ideal just society and fairness between persons. Sen, in contrast, was interested in comparisons across ‘a plurality’ of options or choices that we typically face for reducing or eliminating actual injustices in an imperfect world, in other words, a focus on real practices and real institutions.
Sen’s illustration of this told the simple story of a flute and three children, each of whom has an impartial but different and competing ‘just’ claim to the instrument (one made it, one could play it, and one had no toys). Sen’s story illustrated this plurality of reasonable claims to justice, the futility of attempting to arrive at a single transcendent set of principles, and the need for reasoning, deliberation and compromise in making choices from among the various claims to justice (Could the children not agree to share the flute, for instance?). He made the point that those who strove for the abolition of slavery, for example, did not imagine that abolition would make the world perfectly just, but it would nonetheless remove a manifest social injustice. And on this basis, wrote Sen, we should focus on removing unjust barriers in the lives that people are actually able to realise, the capabilities (freedoms and opportunities) they have to do so, and consider how and to what extent our capabilities make us accountable for our actions.
Overall, then, the obvious parallel for social justice in education would suggest that we focus not on creating perfectly just institutions and procedures, but on addressing the most egregious injustices of actual behaviour and its material effects, while reconciling ourselves to the inevitable imperfections of state education as a large, complex institutional system within which people as individuals, families and social groups subscribe to very different particular conceptions of and claims to social justice. The ‘20 hours free ECE’ universal subsidy has not guaranteed access to equal quality of early learning for all children, for example. The legal right to enrol at the local school has not led to perfectly just inclusion experiences. The Te Kōtahitanga and Developing Mathematical Inquiry Communities initiatives have not led to universal adoption of culturally responsive pedagogies by teachers in English medium secondary and primary schools. And the ‘fees free’ subsidy for first -time tertiary study has not removed access and participation barriers for all socio-economically disadvantaged students. But each of these initiatives has substantially reduced the absolute injustices of marginalisation and alienation for significant fractions of the learner population.
The next blog in the series discusses the dimension of redistributive justice, and the writings of Nancy Fraser.
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.