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Abstract
Liberal egalitarians are rightly interested in the meaning and scope of educational justice. Much of this work involves developing an account of what the fair allocation of educational resources ought to look like under ideal conditions. However, recent developments in competitive global capitalism, including the protracted nature of the global recession, have called the feasibility of such accounts into question. Austerity policies have developed to the extent to which the idea of social goods as public and sharable – and so the very concept of distributive justice – has been called into question. Accordingly, what kind of conceptual resources can liberal theory offer to actual citizens working for educational justice under austerity as a public policy? This article argues for a shift in the emphasis in liberal egalitarian critique that recognizes current developments in education policy reform and provides one illustrative account of what such an analysis could look like.
Notes
1. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for emphasizing the importance of this clarification.
2. I acknowledge, but leave to the side, philosophical works that seek to justify aims of education without reference to any specific egalitarian or other political theory of justice.
3. As Adam Swift has rightly noted, public opinion does not justify our moral or political principles or the social policies that we might infer from that public opinion. However, such opinions go a long way toward determining what is feasible or practicable at the level of public policy (Citation1999).
4. See the recent comments by UK Prime Minister David Cameron, who popularized the term, as discussed in Winnett (Citation2012).
5. Recall Hume’s dictum that justice is called for under conditions of moderate scarcity, in other words, conditions where justice is neither superfluous nor infeasible (Goodin Citation2001). For states overseeing a post-War boom, it’s easy to see how distributive questions would be more pressing. In a scenario where there is relatively more, ensuring that all citizens can share in that boom is the kind of problem we would expect normative theory to take up. However, today the trend seems to be one of relative greater scarcity and so we can expect normative theory to explain, not only why the limited resources we have should be shared, but also what specific social goods are essential for egalitarian distribution as a matter of course and not simply luxuries for elites. For an account of the historical dimensions of justice and the ways in which a change in background circumstances may alter what is just and fair in the here and now, see Waldron (Citation1992).
6. As Jones puts it, the protracted nature of the current economic crisis has led to austerity reforms that rely on a ‘justification’ that presents social goods and public services as ‘lavishly funded, incompetently staffed and incompatible with the public good’ one consequence being that ‘it has become harder to draw combative distinctions between notions of the common good, supposedly embodied in the public sector, and the values promoted by the marketplace’ (Citation2010, 793–794). Examining such a ‘justification’ is important from a philosophical point of view because while a defense of the public value of goods like education will partly be based on empirical evidence showing such claims are mistaken, this will have to be supplemented with normative arguments showing why education ought to be public (and distributable) irrespective of the various inefficiencies and ‘incompetence’ that comes with the large-scale administration of any good.
7. See the recent policy debates regarding the UK government’s Students at the Heart of the System (Citation2011) and the public white paper that opposes it. The central issue in the debate is not distribution of educational opportunities per se so much as the very idea that citizens should be able to make a claim on their government for the provision of such opportunities.
8. See footnote 13.
9. As they put it, ‘In [poor] societies in which it is clear that increased economic growth yields improved prospects for flourishing throughout the population … economic growth is a tremendously urgent imperative … In those societies there may be a great deal to be said for the idea that an unfair distribution of education could, over time, benefit the least advantaged, all things considered.’ (453)
10. Another candidate might be Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice (Citation1983). However, Walzer’s argument adopts a more communitarian position. This paper is primarily concerned with the potential contribution of mainstream liberal theory.
11. As one reviewer of this paper has pointed out, what counts as a normal range of opportunity could always already be unjust so long as that range is defined by capitalist society (to the extent that we can make a relative comparison with what would be a normal range in a socialist economy). This is an important question that I cannot engage with in its entirety. Briefly, however, I remain agnostic about the comparative improvements in the range of opportunity offered by such a collectivized society. Regardless, however, the question falls outside the scope of analysis offered here. I am interested in assessing the extent to which, and ways in which, liberal egalitarian theory can assist policy analysts working in liberal democratic states and who are motivated by a sense of justice but encounter serious challenges brought about by competitive global capitalism. Recall that Daniels refers to a range of opportunities in ‘one’s particular society,’ not some imagined society. While it is possible that a Marxian theory, for example, could posit a better conception of educational justice, it would be a different project to show how such a theory offers help for policy analysts working under the same political and economic conditions. Finally, it is worth noting that there is no prima facie incompatibility between liberal egalitarianism and Marxian principles of social justice (see DiQuattro Citation1983).
12. The idea here is that youth have inflated expectations about their life chances and they need to lower them. Such a change in expectations could be paired with workplace strategies designed to encourage workers to see menial tasks as more meaningful and structuring frequent, but incremental, promotions in order to foster a sense of accomplishment in non-elite positions. For an overview of some of the psychological dimensions of youth entering the workforce during recession and their expectations around career, see Hauw and Vos (Citation2010).
13. As I acknowledge below, autonomy is not a new educational ideal. However, as an illustrative case it makes more sense to appeal to a traditional liberal political value. Other candidate values may also apply.
14. This account is indebted to Raz (Citation1986) and shares some broad similarities with White (Citation1991).
15. Note that this means that the AP explanation, by virtue of its emphasis on autonomy, shares some broad similarities with what is sometimes called ‘responsibility sensitive egalitarianism’ (see Mason Citation2001, for an overview).
16. Note also that for the AP explanation the role of educational provision in higher education is conditional on the extent to which such provision is necessary for the acquisition of skills and qualifications that can make societies’ options real options for them. This is partly a sociological question and a philosophical question about the role of higher education that cannot be addressed here. But the AP explanation nonetheless offers principled criteria that make such an empirical assessment possible.
17. There are some options, but none of which are immediately satisfying. One could take a more comprehensively liberal route, and adopt the Kantian premise that autonomous choice confers value upon what is chosen. A long and healthy, but heteronomous, life is not a well-lived one. A more plausible strategy could be to emphasize that the AP conception of autonomy is grounded in the possibility of real, material choices. Someone who is healthy but unable to exercise the potential choices conferred by that healthy capacity is less well off than someone who is relatively less healthy but who has a larger range of real, material choices.