Rawls, Citizenship, and Education

Victoria Costa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136935589
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

This book develops and applies a unified interpretation of John Rawls' theory of justice as fairness in order to clarify the account of citizenship that Rawls relies upon, and the kind of educational policies that the state can legitimately pursue to promote social justice. Costa examines the role of the family as the "first school of justice" and its basic contribution to the moral and political development of children. It also argues that schools are necessary to supplement the education that families provide, teaching the political virtues that support just social institutions. The book also examines the questions of whether civic education should aim at cultivating patriotic feelings, and how it should respond to the deep cultural pluralism of contemporary democratic societies.

1
Introduction

From the earliest writings on political philosophy to the present day, philosophers have been theorizing about citizenship and the type of education that best encourages its development. The works of Plato, Aristotle, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, and John Dewey are among the most well-known in this regard. Although not all of these philosophers provided fully developed accounts of the kind of education favored by their political theories, they all recognized the need to educate the younger members of society, whether for the purpose of reproducing the social order or for the purpose of radically transforming it.¹ Contemporary political philosophy is no exception to this historical pattern. The last few decades have witnessed a revival of interest in the topic of citizenship, and in the particular contribution that different types of educational institutions such as families and schools can make to secure the enjoyment of rights and the fulfillment of responsibilities by members of future generations.²

Recent philosophical debates on citizenship and education are distinctive in that they reflect a number of concerns related to the political, cultural, and social conditions of the contemporary world.³ For example, one shared premise in these debates—a premise that has by no means been uniformly endorsed by philosophers in the past—is that all members of democratic societies should be considered as free and equal and that, as a consequence, educational institutions should be designed to uphold their freedom and equality of status. But agreement on this general premise does not always translate into consensus on policy, even among those truly interested in promoting justice (instead of mere factional interests). This is partly because there are a host of alternative ways of conceptualizing freedom and equality, and also because there are disputes regarding which institutional arrangements would best secure the status of citizens as free and equal. Accordingly, some disputes over the ways in which educational institutions should be set up can be traced to disagreements regarding the correct interpretation of the normative political ideals of freedom and equality—or of other competing political ideals such as virtue, utility, or legitimacy—and their implications. But other disputes have empirical sources having to do with the foreseeable consequences of alternative policies in particular social contexts. Empirical research may help resolve some of these disagreements by providing information about, for example, the kind of educational environments that are most favorable for children’s academic success, or for their developing civic virtues such as tolerance and mutual respect. But empirical research cannot replace the task of normative assessment of policy, which depends on a thorough consideration of the reasons that justify selecting one particular policy from the wide range of possibilities. A significant amount of empirical research is in fact guided by a set of (more or less implicit) normative ideals. For instance, interest in the study of differences in the educational achievements of children of different gender, ethnicity, or socioeconomic background is in part motivated by the assumption that some children may be suffering as a result of prejudice or unfair social disadvantages which affect their performance in school and their future prospects in life. Empirical research that addresses this type of phenomena is considered useful because acquiring deeper knowledge in the area may help us to design policies that are aimed at combating prejudice and correcting or compensating for unfairness. But our understanding of situations as unfair of course presupposes some notion of what a fair and truly supportive educational and social environment for children and young people would look like. As we pursue a better understanding of our social world, it is as important to clarify and refine these and similar normative assumptions as it is to gather more empirical information about the complex causal relationships that hold between social phenomena.

However, despite an appropriate concern with normative issues, contemporary literature on citizenship and education tends to pay a disproportionate amount of attention to a relatively small subset of these issues: those that are the source of public controversies. For example, a surprisingly large number of articles and book chapters have been written on certain specific judicial decisions regarding exceptions to state educational requirements for Amish or Christian Fundamentalist children in the United States. Similarly, there is a very substantial literature about the political disputes surrounding Muslim girls’ use of headscarves in public schools in France.⁴ Academic fascination with these types of cases may be due to the fact that they serve to test the limits of the educational authority of liberal democratic states when these come up against the demands of religious citizens. Other controversial topics that are receiving increasing attention are also related to educational policy and religion. Two examples are the permissibility of state funding of religious schools via educational vouchers or other policies and the permissibility of religious practices in public schools.⁵ But there are many other important and perhaps more basic normative questions concerning educational policy in liberal democratic societies that are worth examining, even though they do not tend to make the headlines or end up in court.

The questions that I am interested in examining in this book concern the role that public and private educational institutions play—or should play—in the construction of more just and more democratic societies: societies that offer adequate enjoyment of liberties, opportunities, and resources to all their members. In seeking to answer these kinds of questions we can learn from political philosophers of the past who explicitly considered the problem of determining the proper way to educate citizens. In discussing this problem, philosophers were guided by political theories containing well-developed pictures of the types of society and government they regarded as most desirable. It is true that many of their views about desirable social and political arrangements are deeply mistaken and unacceptable in light of our contemporary commitment to democracy as the only legitimate form of government and to the moral equality of all human beings. But my point is that an examination of proposals for educating citizens is more fruitful when aided by a clear account of the type of society and government that underlie such proposals. Accordingly, it is the goal of this book to provide a systematic exploration of the role of education for the promotion of social justice that is based on a well-developed and widely endorsed account of social justice: John Rawls’ theory of justice.

Rawls’ work on social justice has had an enormous impact in the development of political philosophy over the last four decades.⁶ His first book, A Theory of Justice, was published in 1971. This was a time in which practical philosophy was dominated by the study of moral and political language and reasoning—in particular, by the study of their formal or logical features. There was widespread skepticism about the possibility of developing moral and political theories with substantive normative implications. Instead of offering theories designed to systematize and explain our judgments about what is right and wrong, or just and unjust, philosophers were discussing the meanings of normative terms and the logical relations among propositions that contained them. Rawls’ work was a sharp departure from this metaethical focus and marked a return to systematic normative theorizing. Not only did his work offer novel philosophical arguments for the justification of normative claims, but it also provided a new way of thinking about the justice of a society’s main institutions, laws, and policies by developing a set of substantive principles of justice that could be used to assess the joint functioning of those institutions, laws, and policies. Subsequent writing in political philosophy has been significantly shaped by Rawls’ theory and by his general approach, even in the work of critics who think his views are deeply misguided and who want to propose alternatives.

Without having “changed the field” in a similar way, Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness has already been applied to the discussion of a number of topics in the philosophy of education.⁷ However, most of the philosophical work on education that qualifies (in broad terms) as Rawlsian is not really intended to be taken as a systematic exploration of the educational implications of Rawls’ theory. Rather, their authors make use of selective elements of Rawls—such as his views on reasonability, the political justification for the use of state power, or the idea of an overlapping consensus—to argue for their own conclusions about the type of education that is most appropriate for future citizens of liberal democracies. As a consequence of this selective use of Rawls’ theory, it is sometimes difficult to get a clear view of the extent to which the core prescriptions of the theory of justice as fairness are endorsed by authors who employ a broadly Rawlsian framework or terminology.⁸ Given that many readers concerned with educational policy may not be familiar with Rawls’ vast work, this book begins with an overview of his method for conceptualizing the philosophical problem of social justice. Once we have a picture of what a just society looks like according to justice as fairness, then we will be in a better position to discuss the kind of education that children should receive, both at home and in schools, if they are to develop their sense of justice and their capacities to live good lives. We will also be in a better position to discuss what schools can do to promote social justice, within the limits of their legitimate educational authority. Rawls’ theory implies that children should have guaranteed access to primary and secondary education of high quality roughly until they are 18 years old, and that they should also have fair opportunity to access higher education. Although these claims have independent plausibility, they receive additional support from the fact that they are consequences of a general theory of justice that readers might find attractive and plausible as well. My presentation aims to show that justice as fairness can be used as a basis for developing, clarifying, and evaluating policy, and that the plausibility of its implications lends support to the theory as a coherent articulation of democratic values.

In the first part of the book (chapters 2 and 3) I offer a presentation of the central aspects of John Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness. This presentation combines important elements of Rawls’ first book, A Theory of Justice, with newer elements introduced in Political Liberalism, in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, as well as in a number of other works.⁹ It is not my aim to examine in detail the evolution of Rawls’ thought on social justice. Nor am I interested in stressing the tensions between his earlier and later work. Rather, I will provide a reconstruction of the core normative and methodological commitments of the definitive version of his theory, and then go on to discuss the contribution that educational institutions can and should make for the achievement of social justice according to such a theory. My presentation will distinguish what Rawls said about social justice and policy from what I take to follow from what he said. In this way readers can make up their own minds regarding the plausibility of my interpretation. In my view, the educational literature that relies on Rawls’ work has tended to overlook important lessons of A Theory of Justice and has placed a disproportionate emphasis on the notions of legitimacy and political justification, which are the more explicit focus of his later works. Although Rawls did not discuss educational policy in detail, and some of his remarks suggest a quite minimalist account of the aims of education, I will argue that the definitive version of justice as fairness supports a robust and progressive account of the role of education in a liberal democratic society. In other words, educational institutions have a significant role to play in the promotion of social justice while respecting pluralism and social diversity.

With a systematic interpretation of Rawls to work from, chapter 4 is devoted to a discussion of the family, which is for Rawls the first educational institution. The status of the family in Rawls’ theory of justice is a subject of considerable debate. Many critics of Rawls are puzzled by his claim that the principles of justice do not apply directly to the family. But there is a simple explanation for this claim: for Rawls, the principles apply to the functioning of the set of major social and political institutions taken as a unit. The family is only one part of the whole unit, and cannot be evaluated in isolation. As I will argue, when we assess the family as an educational and distributional institution, we need to keep in mind that its effects are combined with and affected by those of schools, the labor market, and other social and political institutions. Within this network, the family has a significant role to play as the first “school of justice,” in which children begin to develop their moral and political capacities.¹⁰ But because not all families provide a perfectly supportive environment for the moral and political development of children, and because families cannot possibly mirror the diversity and complexity of the wider society, their role in the development of reasonable citizens needs to be supplemented by schools. As part of a complex network of institutions, the family also plays a significant distributional role. As regards adult family members, the arrangements of any particular family involve a distribution of paid work and of the task of caring for children and other domestic tasks, and this distribution can be more or less fair. But more importantly for our focus in this book, families also affect children’s educational success, since some families are more encouraging than others, or have more resources available with which they can support their children’s education. Although Rawls does not discuss these topics in any detail, I will argue that his theory makes room for family partiality. That is, his theory counts it as legitimate for family members to promote their children’s education, even though this has an effect on the working of the principle of fair equality of opportunity. But again, this is permissible only provided that the basic structure of society compensates for this effect. And it is schools that are the best candidates to play the compensatory role, so that the set of central social and political institutions satisfy the principles of justice.

Having discussed the educational role of the family on a Rawlsian view, I shift the focus in the remainder of the book to the civic aims of schools. I argue that schools play a key role in reproducing citizens’ support for just institutions over time, or in contributing to the creation of just institutions. One of the goals I pursue in chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8 is conceptual: to expand on Rawls’ account of citizenship. I examine what it means to say that society should treat its citizens as free and equal, as well as what kinds of dispositions and attitudes, in citizens, support the maintenance of just institutions that treat them in this way. But I also have a practical goal in mind in these chapters: to shed some light on the contribution that schools, both public and private, can make to the cultivation, in citizens, of the complex set of capacities for what Rawls calls “reasonability.” Chapter 5 discusses the ways in which the capacities for reasonability can be legitimately cultivated by schools. This task is more difficult than it might seem at first, since Rawls endorses some restrictions on the ways in which policies in pluralistic societies may be justified, and the defense of policies for civic education must therefore take these restrictions into account. In other words: Rawls requires the justification of public policy to be “political.” This means that public policy must be justified by appealing to considerations that reasonable people with very different understandings of the good life could accept. My conclusion is that Rawls’ overall theory requires more robust forms of civic education than Rawls’ own remarks suggest, but that this robust form of civic education counts as “political” in Rawls’ sense, because it can be justified appealing to public reasons.

There is a tendency to interpret Rawls’ first principle of justice as endorsement of an ideal of freedom as non-interference. But Philip Pettit has recently defended a distinct account of freedom as non-domination that takes the paradigm of a lack of freedom to be a state of slavery or servitude. Chapter 6 extends the robust Rawlsian account by clarifying the ways in which Rawls’ theory can be seen to be committed to a political ideal of freedom as non-domination (even though Rawls himself does not use this terminology). If my argument in this chapter is correct, there is a case for an education for freedom as non-domination that is different from the more common defenses of education for autonomy that appear in the literature. I argue that domination is an evil that undermines citizens’ status as free and equal, and that education for non-domination can be defended in Rawlsian “political” terms, since a just society cannot condone serious forms of domination. In educational terms, civic education can make an important contribution to prevent state domination, as well as interpersonal relationships of domination and servility.

In chapter 7 I discuss the question of whether or not Rawls’ account of reasonable citizens should be extended to include the cultivation of patriotic identifications. Some critics of Rawls claim that schools should encourage patriotism, understood as an identification with a particular people and its political institutions. In support of this idea, they claim that patriotism provides indispensable motivation for citizens to support fair social arrangements of the kind that satisfy Rawls’ principles of justice. After considering a variety of instrumental and non-instrumental arguments for the teaching of patriotism, I conclude that teaching patriotism in actual (that is, imperfect) societies has many moral liabilities, and that it is better to focus on the teaching of principles of justice and the ways in which actual institutions (imperfectly) embody them. In chapter 8, I go on to discuss whether Rawls’ account of reasonable citizens should be extended in another direction: to include positive attitudes towards social and cultural diversity, and a willingness to find fair ways of accommodating cultural differences in society. In contrast to my answer in the case of patriotic feelings, my answer to this question is positive. But I also expect my answer will be somewhat controversial. In particular, I argue for two conclusions. First, if a society is to work according to the principles of justice, then there must be policies that facilitate the voluntary integration of cultural minorities (immigrants and national minorities) into major social institutions, such as the political system. But, second, justice does not require public support for relatively separate social institutions for cultural minorities. In particular, it discourages certain forms of separate schooling and other educational policies designed to support the cultivation of quasi separatist forms of national identity. I argue in favor of teaching the principles of justice and cultivating attitudes and dispositions that support fair social arrangements, while encou...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 What is a Just Society?
• 3 Stability and Social Change
• 4 The Family
• 5 Reasonable Citizens
• 6 Free and Equal Citizens
• 7 Patriotism
• 8 Cultural Diversity
• 9 Concluding Remarks
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index