EDUCATION,FAIR COMPETITION,AND CONCERN FOR THE WORST OFF

In this essay, Johannes Giesinger comments on the current philosophical debate on educational justice. He observes that while authors like Elizabeth Anderson and Debra Satz develop a so‐called adequacy view of educational justice, Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift defend an egalitarian principle. Giesinger focuses his analysis on the main objection that is formulated, from an egalitarian perspective, against the adequacy view: that it neglects the problem of securing fair opportunities in the competition for social rewards. Giesinger meets this objection by expressing two basic theses: First, he argues that Brighouse and Swift themselves fail to give an adequate account of fair competition; and, second, he shows that the adequacy view provides the theoretical resources to face this problem.     

Intrinsic Goods and Distributive Justice in Education

What is the relationship between the fair distribution of goods in general, and the intrinsic, or distinctive, value of educational goods in particular? In this article, Christopher Martin and Tal Gilead argue that clarifying this relationship has significant importance for educational justice, and they aim to accomplish this by focusing on questions of resource allocation. In particular, the authors draw on Michael Walzer's theory of “spherical” justice in order to argue that intrinsic goods are important enough that they should be of normative concern for any theory of educational justice. That is to say, a conception of educational justice that takes distributive relationships seriously should account for how the nonpositional values of education are served by resource allocation, and not only socioeconomic or other positional goods. However, Martin and Gilead also claim that such a pluralist theory of educational justice should not open the door to educational policies and practices that are plainly “antiegalitarian.” They address this concern by proffering a distinction between, and criteria for adjudicating, legitimate and illegitimate judgments of justice that aim to protect or promote intrinsic educational goods.     

School Choice and Social Injustice: A Response to Harry Brighouse

In his book, School Choice and Social Justice, Harry Brighouse attempts to show how a properly designed school–choice plan, guided by his liberal theory of social justice, can enhance equal educational opportunity and provide every child with an education for autonomy. In this paper, I argue that Brighouse is overly confident about the egalitarian potential of school choice. He seems to be defending a policy for what it could be, rather than looking at school choice for what it is: a flawed educational reform that makes things worse in terms of social justice. I question Brighouse's notion that the kind of school choice he advocates, one that promotes equal educational opportunity and education for autonomy, is politically feasible.     

Advancing Education's Autonomy through Looking Educationally at Philosophy

This article offers a general framework for considering education's autonomy and its implications for the relationship between education and philosophy. In it, Doron Yosef-Hassidim examines an initiative in Israel that calls for an autonomous secular public education and uses it as a context to clarify what education's autonomy means and to identify its major characteristics. To enhance the idea of education's autonomy, he further argues that education should not be subordinate to philosophy and that the question about being human must be kept open and educational. In particular, education's autonomy requires resisting the temptation of applying a philosophical framework about being human to education, even if the particular philosopher of education agrees with the philosophical framework. Finally, Yosef-Hassidim proposes a strategy for treating the question about being human as one that involves both the work of philosophers of education and practitioners in the classroom.     

John Wilson and the Place of Morality in Education

This paper asks whether it would be better not to talk about morality in schools. The issue is raised through a consideration of changes in public discourse and especially in educational discourse, where categories such as ''personal, social and health education'' and ''citizenship education'' are more salient than ''moral education''. Drawing on John Wilson's arguments, the paper considers claims for the indispensability of the concept of morality. It is argued that such claims, in Wilson's own writings, are applied to both an ''individual'' and a ''social'' conception of morality. Contrary to Wilson, the paper argues that the ''wisest strategy'' for public education is to take the social conception of ''morality in the narrow sense'' as a central focus.     

Children,Self-knowledge and Cultural Reproduction

This article evaluates two most popular normative theories about the reproduction of cultural values through children from the perspective of self-knowledge: Brighouse and Swift's parent-child relationship argument and Clayton's public reason argument. I suggest that while plausible on some grounds, these arguments struggle to accommodate the normative importance of the child's substantive self-knowledge. I propose that we understand cultural reproduction as a learning process and require that children, in addition to cultural content their parents transfer to them, must also acquire knowledge of their own unique personal identity.     

Critical Thinking Versus Vocationalism: A Matter of Class?

Popular demands for greater access to higher education may have diluted the “college isn't for everyone” claim, but some members of the privileged class are making a more subtle argument: A classical liberal arts curriculum should be reserved for the elite with low and middle income students receiving vocational training. In this article, we examine the historical and contemporary manifestations of differentiated educational experiences based on class and highlight how this bifurcated phenomenon continues to surface within post-secondary's newest venue—online education. Drawing upon the theoretical tenets of knowledge production and class formation, the methodology section of this article constructs a multilayered sequence model to analyze how the college admission process reinforces this binary in stark, yet unassuming, ways. We present the resulting social justice implications in terms of students’ participation in a classist educational system as well as the antidemocratic repercussions for public institutions. Lastly, we call for recommendations designed to bolster public education's commitment to critically educate all students and to restore its bedrock democratic mission.     

The Development of Justice Conceptions and the Unavoidability of the Normative

This article spells out the way in which normative concerns unavoidably enter into the design and interpretation of empirical research on children's development of justice conceptions, with special emphasis on Damon's well-known stage theory of such development. Normative considerations provide assumptions not only about what counts as a conception of justice in the first place but also what counts as a better or a worse conception. Damon, for one, relies on the questionable normative premise that all distributive choices are choices about justice. An alternative research programme is suggested, based on piecemeal mutual adjustments between the normative and the empirical, a programme which would focus on children's desert-based emotions.     

EDUCATION AND “THICK” EPISTEMOLOGY

In this essay Ben Kotzee addresses the implications of Bernard Williams's distinction between “thick” and “thin” concepts in ethics for epistemology and for education. Kotzee holds that, as in the case of ethics, one may distinguish between “thick” and “thin” concepts of epistemology and, further, that this distinction points to the importance of the study of the intellectual virtues in epistemology. Following Harvey Siegel, Kotzee contends that “educated” is a thick epistemic concept, and he explores the consequences of this for the subjects of epistemology and philosophy of education. Ultimately, Kotzee argues that its nature as a “thick” concept makes education suited to play an important role in explaining how the intellectual virtues can be acquired.     

Luck,Choice, and Educational Equality

Abstract

Harry Brighouse discusses two conceptions of educational equality. The first is a type of equality of opportunity, heavily influenced by the work of John Rawls, which he calls the meritocratic conception. According to this conception, an individual’s educational prospects should not be influenced by factors such as their social class background. The other, radical conception, suggests a person’s natural talents should not influence their educational prospects either. Brighouse favors the meritocratic conception, but this article argues that it is flawed and that the radical conception ought to be preferred. Although a superior conception of educational equality, the radical conception is still not quite right, so this article develops a luck egalitarian conception of educational equality. It is argued that this conception reflects much current thinking about equality and avoids some of the difficulties with Brighouse’s two conceptions. Finally, two objections to a luck egalitarian conception are considered.     

When the Exception Is the Rule: School Shootings,Bare Life,and the Sovereign Self

Much discourse on school shootings tends to imply a binary separation between what is considered normal and exceptional, between an expected course of human events and sociohistorical aberrations. In this article Harvey Shapiro suggests the need for new directions in our responses: First, he shows how responses to school shootings tend to expropriate and (paradoxically) dismiss certain kinds of violence in order to articulate a vision of the self as sovereign, exerting power over bodily life, exercising a self‐removal from community conversations, and thus claiming what Giorgio Agamben and others call the “sovereign exception.” Second, he suggests how Agamben's development of Walter Benjamin's concept of “divine violence” can unmask prevailing states of exception and can inform education's efforts to challenge binaries of good and evil, urban and suburban, individual and community, justice and law, normal and exceptional, that confound our deliberations and long‐term responses to mass shootings.     

Rural Futures: Development,Aspirations, Mobilities,Place, and Education

This piece responds to the content of each of the articles in this issue and raises questions in response to some explicit and implicit themes including particularly the way that differently positioned rural youth are “oriented” in the course of their educational experience. These articles are read as accounts of people in place that confound and confront simplistic deficit assessments of educational paths, aspirations, relationships, and purposes in rural space. I suggest that this issue illustrates how rural education scholarship inevitably returns to the particular and to the material, challenging the hegemony of the placeless and abstracted neoliberal vision of education's aims in late modernity. The broad argument is that educational struggles and orientations in rural schools should be understood in relation to the crucial global challenges of sustainability and survival.     

Educational Goods and the Ethical Dimensions of Educational Policy and Practice

This essay is a commentary on Brighouse, Ladd, Loeb and Swift's Educational Goods: Values, Evidence, and Decision-Making. It discusses the book's conceptualisation of childhood goods, and it comments at length on its place within the larger philosophical enterprise of promoting normatively and evidentially sound decision-making in education. A thesis of the commentary is that the book provides an important form of orientation to educational policy decision-making, but that the goods and distributive values it identifies would need to be supplemented in order to adequately address aspects of educational practice beyond the kinds of policy matters it discusses. These would include the content of education, the scope and division of educational authority, and the manner in which such authority should be exercised, for example pedagogically, in shaping student conduct, and in communicating and implementing educational policies.     

Distributive Justice in Education and Conflicting Interests: Not (Remotely) as Bad as you Think

The importance of education and its profound effect on people's life make it a central issue in discussions of distributive justice. However, promoting distributive justice in education comes at a price: prioritising the education of some, as is often entailed by the principles of justice, inevitably has negative effects on the education of others. As a result, all theories of distributive justice in education face the challenge of balancing their requirements with conflicting interests. This article aims to contribute to developing an account of conflicting interests by identifying a category of conflicting interests—non‐positional conflicting interests—the realisation of which does not necessarily disrupt distributive justice. Non‐positional conflicting interests include, for example, the interest in realising one's full potential and parents’ interest in familial relations. The article argues that the core dimensions of non‐positional conflicting interests can usually be realised without upsetting distributive justice, and that actions that do upset distributive justice tend to be peripheral to these interests. Either way, there is no severe friction between distributive justice and non‐positional conflicting interests: in the former cases, both are realised simultaneously. In the latter, tension exists; however, because the infringement on the conflicting interest is of relatively little weight, it is often justified, all things considered, in order to promote distributive justice. The conclusion is that while there are indeed cases in which distributive justice must retreat in the face of other interests, the friction between distributive justice and other interests is actually weaker than meets the eye.     

Comparing Futures or Comparing Pasts?

This article, firstly and briefly, suggests that there is no single or unified 'comparative education' but that there are multiple comparative educations. How may such a variety of comparative educations be distinguished? Rather more importantly and secondly, what might an 'interesting' comparative education constructed in universities look like, and on what criteria would it be interesting? The specific suggestion offered here is that at least one kind of comparative education, for a decade or so, should concentrate on exploring moments of educational metamorphosis, rather than assuming that the equilibrium conditions and the dynamic linearities of development of educational systems can be predicted. Thus for the moment the correct answer to the question, how far can we learn anything of practical value from the study of foreign educational systems is: 'not a lot'. The correct question is, why have we as scholars taken that question so seriously for so long?     

On Extending the Educational Goods Framework

In this review of the Educational Goods, the author provides a set of comments that might extend the worthy framework provided by Brighouse, Ladd, Loeb and Swift. In particular, the author calls attention to the ways in which continued work within this project might broaden its conceptualisation of educational goods, increase the scope of potential application of its framework and clarify its forward- or backward-looking character.     

Educational Equality: Luck Egalitarian,Pluralist and Complex

The basic principle of educational equality is that each child should receive an equally good education. This sounds appealing, but is rather vague and needs substantial working out. Also, educational equality faces all the objections to equality per se, plus others specific to its subject matter. Together these have eroded confidence in the viability of equality as an educational ideal. This article argues that equality of educational opportunity is not the best way of understanding educational equality. It focuses on Brighouse and Swift's well worked out meritocratic conception and finds it irretrievably flawed; they should, instead, have pursued a radical conception they only mention. This conception is used as a starting point for developing a luck egalitarian conception, pluralistic and complex in nature. It is argued that such a conception accounts for the appeal of equality of opportunity, fits with other values in education and meets many of the objections. Thus, equality is reasserted as what morally matters most in education.     

Beyond Amplification: Using the computer to Reorganize Mental Functioning

Computers are classically viewed as amplifiers of cognition. An alternative conceptualization is offered of computer as reorganizer of mental functioning. Software analyses illuminate the advantages of the latter approach for new visions of the potential cognitive benefits of computers. A new result emerges: Because the cognitive technologies we invent serve as instruments of cultural redefinition (shaping who we are by changing, not just amplifying, what we do), defining educational values becomes a foreground issue. The demands of an information society make an explicit emphasis on general cognitive skills a priority. The urgency of updating education's goals and methods recommends an activist research paradigm: to simultaneously create and study changes in processes and outcomes of human learning with new cognitive and educational tools.     

Bottom line: A seat at the table that I set: Beyond social justice allies

Toby Jenkins argues for including the roles of advocates and agents in higher education's conversation about social justice.     

荀子义利思想辨析

义与利的关系,早在春秋战国时期就已经被提出了,孔孟荀从不同的角度论述了各自的观点。孔子和孟子坚持以义为上,主张重义轻利。荀子则克服了孔孟的片面性,全面论述了义利的关系。荀子认为人生而好利,主张计利富民、以义制利、先义后利。