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.