Challenging educational injustice: ‘Grassroots’ privatisation in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

The phenomenon of low-cost private schools ‘mushrooming’ in poor areas of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, and elsewhere, is now well-documented. Findings from research by the author’s teams and others show that these schools are serving a majority (urban and peri-urban) or significant minority (rural) of the poor, including significant proportions of the poorest of the poor. Concerns are raised in the literature about their implications for social justice. In The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen asks us to rethink ideas about justice; instead of the quest for a Rawlsian ‘transcendental institutionalism’, he argues for a comparative approach, grounded in the practicalities of human behaviour. Linking Sen’s ideas on justice with the grassroots privatisation leads to the tentative conclusion that those concerned with promoting social justice could agree to help improve access to, and quality in, the low-cost private school sector, rather than focus on the public education sector. Paradoxically, this could be true even for those whose ideal is an egalitarian public education system.

Keywords:

• private education
• development
• equity
• social justice
• low-cost private schools

Notes

1. Such schools also exist in other developing and emerging economies, see e.g., Banerjee and Duflo, 2011, p. 83; this article focuses only on regions where I have conducted most of my research.

2. We also explored rural China, where slightly different considerations apply (see Tooley, 2009, ch. 5).

3. A fourth relevant argument, on ‘global neglect’ is not explored further here. This is the Rawlsian claim that ‘we need a sovereign state to apply the principles of justice through the choice of a perfect set of institutions’. So ‘Perfect global justice through an impeccably just set of institutions … would certainly demand a sovereign global state’. Without such a state on the horizon, says Sen, ‘questions of global justice appear to the transcendentalists to be unaddressable’ (Sen, 2009, p. 25). While this argument would also lend support to the argument of this paper—showing how positions based on Rawls’ foundation, such as Brighouse and Swift’s, would inevitably lead to the neglect of peoples outside of any Rawlsian sovereign state, whatever their educational needs—it is perhaps not so intuitively obvious why this follows from Rawls’ position; explication of this would take us too far beyond the scope of this paper.