What promotes justice in, for and through education today?

KEYWORDS:

• Philosophy of education
• justice
• Education

“And don’t come telling that justice

is anything but justice, that it’s duty,

expediency, advantage, profit,

interest, and so on … ”

(Badiou 2012, p. 14)

I am delighted to present this special issue, which sets out to explore, challenge, and re-think topical questions concerning justice and education today. This issue contains eight cutting-edge articles that in different ways demonstrate sensitive methodologies when researching the link between justice and education. In doing so, all articles touch upon new ways of thinking the promotion of justice in, for and through education today.

The topic of justice and education is of course not new. From ancient times, philosophers have drawn attention to the link between justice and education. To Aristotle, the purpose of education was political, as education should introduce in each generation the type of character that will sustain the constitution. To Plato, the aim of education was goodness, as he conceived education as vital to the well-being of human society. Moreover, throughout modernity, education was the twin sister of political philosophy. From Rousseau and Kant, through Schleiermacher, and up to Durkheim and Dewey, numerous philosophers have written entire books on education. ‘ … within the political and philosophical discourse of modernity virtually no notable theorist of democracy has failed to offer a systematic contribution to educational theory’ (Honneth 2015, 18). Today, however, there is a decoupling between philosophy and education. Contemporary political philosophy does not engage with education. On the contrary, issues concerning justice and education are today totally abandoned by philosophy (Honneth 2015). It is thus left to the academic disciplines of educational and social research to reinvigorate the link between justice and education. The danger, however, is that this lack of political philosophical engagement with the issue may undermine the topicality and relevance of current educational and social research.

It may thus not come as a surprise that a recent review of philosophical studies in education reveals an undertheorized notion of educational justice (Papastephanou 2021). The thematic review comprises articles published in philosophy of education journals between 2004 and 2020¹ and which fully engage with the topic. Regrettably, the review reveals a philosophical discourse that tends to narrow down, singularize, and limit the spaces of justice in, for and through education today. ‘What is theorized within our field as a situation inviting justice is only what falls within the scope of the corresponding perspective’ (Papastephanou 2021, 3). As these perspectives are adopted from conventional philosophies and theories of justice, the discourse never moves beyond the given. The foundational issue of justice thereby loses its power as a qualifier for ethical-political education. To substantiate this claim, Papastephanou points out several discursive blind spots: First, a tendency to overlook justice as a real-world challenge. Second, to limit the scope of justice to life in classrooms. Third, an inclination to turn students into achievers by offering normative statements about how education should be. Fourth, to take the concept of justice for granted. Consequently, the discourse does not only tend to narrow down, singularize, and limit the spaces of justice and offer solutions based on orthodox ideas. There is also a tendency to promote, uphold and legitimize the hegemonic position of conventional – if not dogmatic – philosophies of education. The discourse of justice in, for and through education thus turns the philosopher of education ‘into a metaphysical deus ex machine who will take education by the hand and lead it to a better world’ (Papastephanou 2021, 12). To rethink justice in, for and through education today thus requires a radical move beyond the surfaces of conventional paradigms to reach at a deep-seated and far-reaching understanding of the phenomena of education and justice itself.

Education is the place where a culture or society reproduces or transforms itself. In brief, we may describe education as the most significant practice of everyday caring for the next generation, a way of nurturing children’s’ virtues, passing on to them the norms, values, and accumulated knowledge, cultivating their aptitude for autonomous, critical and innovative thinking, and encouraging the youths’ productive ways of being in, caring for and creating the world. In other words, education covers those phenomena ‘through which a community or society preserves and renews itself’ (Strand 2020, 1). Accordingly, education is a double-edged sword. Education can suppress or uplift, cultivate conformism or independency, encourage orthodox or creative thinking. Just listen to this poem by the Pakistan-born British poet, Imtiaz Dharker:

A century later

The school-bell is a call to battle,

every step to class, a step into the firing-line.

Here is the target, fine skin at the temple,

cheek still rounded from being fifteen.

Surrendered, surrounded, she

takes the bullet in the head

and walks on. The missile cuts

a pathway in her mind, to an orchard

in full bloom, a field humming under the sun,

its lap open and full of poppies.

This girl has won

the right to be ordinary,

wear bangles to a wedding, paint her fingernails,

go to school. Bullet, she says, you are stupid.

ou have failed. You cannot kill a book

or the buzzing in it.

A murmur, a swarm. Behind her, one by one,

the schoolgirls are standing up

to take their places on the front line.

This poem alludes to the incident of Taliban’s assassination attack on Malala Yousafzai for the reason that they perceived her activism as an intolerable act against their patriarchal rule. On 9 October 2012 a masked gunman shot 15-year-old Yousafzai and two other female students on a school bus. The bullet hit Yousafzai in the head and travelled 46 centimetre, from the side of her left eye, through her neck, and landed in her shoulder. After her recovery, Yousafzai became a prominent activist for female education and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Dharker’s poem is thus a reminder that education can be an ideological weapon, used to suppress or uplift the next generation. To some, education may be a dangerous threat to hegemonic ideologies. To others, education may be the road to self-determination, co-determination, and solidarity.

However, Dharker’s poem also reminds us that education is imbued with antinomies, essential contradictions impossible to disentangle or resolve. One example is the question of societal reproduction. On the one hand, we can ask if it is at all possible to think societal renewal based on norms, values and worldviews passed on to the next generation. On the other hand, how can we justify not transmitting cultural norms, values, and accumulated knowledge? Moreover, we may ask if it is at all conceivable for educators not to transferring doxic beliefs and worldviews to the young. Bertrand Russell explains: ‘We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought’ (Russell 1952, 160). In short, a key characteristic of the phenomenon of education is that it is fundamentally paradoxical. Philosophers have all since antiquity struggled with these paradoxes. Key examples are the learning paradox in Plato’s Meno,² the paradox of upbringing in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile,³ or the paradox of cultivating freedom under conditions of compulsion as articulated by Immanuel Kant in his lecture On Education.⁴ When reflecting on these antinomies, we are invited to elucidate and reflect on how life itself contains fundamental contradictions and challenges. In education, as in life, we should not hide, gloss over, or reject these antinomies. Because – only when they are discovered, made visible and illuminated – do they shed light on the complexities of life and the permanent challenges of education. In other words, these fundamental contradictions cannot be resolved analytically. Rather, they are ontological incitements to take a stance, to decide, to point out a direction. In this way, the impossible antinomies embedded in education helps considering the fundamental values and ethical choices characterizing educational phenomena. Consequently, to deal with these antinomies is to deal with the normative nature of education, including competing ideas of justice.

Questions of justice concern the relation between the individual and the community (Raphael 2001). Justice can be seen as a ‘virtue as a whole’ (Aristotle), as a duty to act according to certain moral principles (Kant), or as institutionalized freedom (Hegel). Competing theories of justice, however, entails contrasts and dilemmas. Such as the contrast between conservative versus ideal justice; between corrective versus distributive justice; between procedural versus substantive justice; and the contrast between comparative versus non-comparative justice. When it comes to educational research, however, dilemmas and complexities seem somewhat glossed over as the discourse tend to focus on social justice while connecting to three historically formed paradigms: the distributive, the recognitive and the representative justice paradigm. The distributive justice paradigm is represented by John Rawls (1971) or Dworkin’s (2006) ‘luck egalitarianism’; the recognitive justice paradigm by Benhabib’s (2011) and Honneth’s (2014) approach to ‘respect egalitarianism’; while the representative justice paradigm is marked by Nussbaum’s (2006), Gutman’s (2014) and Andersen’s (2010) approach to ‘minimalist egalitarianism.’ However, a blind adoption and application of theories of social justice may hinder a sensitive approach to the situated values, cultural norms and practices characterizing the field of education today.

Forst (2017) holds that the concept of justice takes on different meaning in different contexts and should be grasped through its situatedness and complexity. To him, ‘the constitutive places of justice are to be sought where the central justifications for a social basic structure must be provided and the institutional ground rules are laid down that determine social life from the bottom up’ (Forst 2017, 237). Such a bottom-up approach goes well with Walzer’s (1983) analysis of different spheres of justice, in terms of various distributive arrangements of ideologies, or ‘relations of justification within a society’ (Forst 2017, 237). Walzer thus points to education as a vital sphere of justice, while implying that education is a social field that creates, justifies, upholds, and renews socio-cultural norms, values, beliefs, and forms of practice related to images and imaginaries of justice. Accordingly, to research the promotion of justice in, for and through education today do not only require a radical move beyond the surfaces of conventional paradigms to reach at deep-seated insights on the phenomena of education and justice itself. There is also a call for more sensitive approaches to the situated values and cultural norms characterizing the field of educational theory, research, and practices. This special issue responds to that call.

This special issue contains eight articles discussing topical questions concerning justice and education today. The very last article – Justice as rhythm, rhythms of injustice: Reorienting the discourse on educational justice – is a response to this special issue written by Claudia Schumann. She originally presented this response at a symposium November 2021, in which we – the seven authors – presented our initial papers on how to re-think issues of justice in, for and through education today. In her response, Schumann highlights how the seven papers produce a shift in the understanding of educational justice. First, there seem to be a joint attempt to move beyond the boundaries set by traditional, hegemonic perspectives on educational justice, and to touch upon ways of thinking that have until now been concealed or overlooked by more conventional paradigms. The papers do this in different ways, but Schumann points at a shared tendency of moving towards more worldly, materialistic, bodily, and embodied notions of justice and injustice. Moreover, she reveals a shared tendency of the seven articles to exposing philosophy’s own blindness. The seven articles bring into view philosophy’s various relations to ‘the real’ by rethinking philosophy’s basic metaphors and their respective approaches to educational justice, as well as making a self-reflective turn towards our own positioning, both in philosophy of education and in ‘the real world.’

As Schumann carefully describes and discusses each of the seven papers, I will here just briefly provide a general picture of this special issue by mentioning the topic and content of each article.

The first article, An Ethics of Rhythm by Inga Bostad, is a highly topical exploration of an ethics of rhythm. Arguing that philosophy itself has contributed to an insensibility towards how we create and follow rhythmic societies, Bostad recommends a shift from the historically predominant philosophical language of seeing, viewing, or looking at towards a language of listening, hearing, or attunement. Drawing on Roland Barthes concept of rhuthmos, Søren Kierkegaards concept of repetition, Johann Friedrich Herbart’s concept of pedagogical tact, and Julia Kristeva’s notion of existential relationship, Bostad calls for a new philosophical tune. As rhythms affect, shape, and set boundaries for interpersonal relationships, a more fine-tuned listening may well cast new lights on our ways of living together.

The next two articles takes the case of Norway as a starting point in their exploration of how (in)justice may be promoted through schooling. In his article – Facets of justice in education. A petroleum nation addressing United Nations sustainable development agenda – Ole Andreas Kvamme points to some ugly dilemmas related to the promotion of climate justice in Norway, a nation that has built a state-funded welfare system based on incomes from the petroleum industry. Through an analysis of three instances of environmental and sustainability education, Kvamme discloses how the educational discourse on climate justice is centred around impossible tensions and dilemmas. Moreover, how these tensions seems hidden in the public discourse. In her article – When Unhappiness is not the Endpoint. Fostering justice through education – Elin Rødahl Lie performs a close reading of the new national curriculum, with a specific attention to its aim at promoting the students’ ‘life skills.’ The rationale behind this recent curriculum reform in Norway was a substantial increase in young people’s mental health problems. Lie, however, points to the fact that teaching ‘life skills’ to prevent mental problems is quite naïve at best. At a time when educational outcomes is over-emphasized, the edification of ‘life-skills’ may actually work against its purpose. Consequently, Lie calls for a new language of education that highlights the pedagogical dimensions of teaching and recognizes the students’ life worlds.

The next two articles deal with ethical-political philosophies and issues related to justice. In her article – Responding to wrong doing – Helgard Mahrdt performs a close and diligent reading of Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy. In line with Arendt, Mahrdt argues that educators should introduce students to various ways of responding to wrong doings and thus make the next generation better prepared for acting in and taking responsibility for the world. The next article – The will to injustice. An autoethnography of learning to hear uncomfortable truths – is an auto ethnography written by Eevi Elisabeth Beck. Here, Beck describes three personal and deeply discomforting moments in her life relating to class, climate, and whiteness. Beck uses these three instances to illustrate how her ignorance of her privileged position has helped enduring structural injustices, without she being aware of it. On the contrary, her privileged positions seemed unintentionally to have contributed to maintain injustices she was eager to fight. Beck thus calls for a higher collective awareness of the ways in which we benefit from various aspects of privilege.

The last two articles included in this special issue, however, aim to move beyond the surfaces of conventional paradigms. In his article – ‘Plastic Justice.’ A metaphor for education – Kjetil Horn Hogstad takes the paradox of social reproduction versus renewal as a starting point. Our navigation of this paradox, he holds, relates to our conception of justice. However, this conception might find a materialist expression instead of the usual transcendental ideal of justice. Because justice does not come forward as an (un)achievable ideal. In the real world, justice is most often experienced as a void inviting immediate responses to injustice. Following Catherine Malabou’s semiotic materialism, Hogstad thus promotes ‘plastic justice’ as a metaphor for education. In the last of the seven articles – Thinking educational justice in viral modernity – I present a Badiouan reading of educative justice in relation to the aims and mission of philosophy of education. I start by briefly mapping out current educational philosophical paradigms and their ways of treating the issue of justice. Next, I contrast these conventions to a Badiouan model of the link between philosophy and justice. My ambition is to promote a philosophy of education that avoids philosophical doctrines, old and new, while simultaneously carrying a potential for unveiling the phenomenon of justice as educative truths-in-worlds. I encourage the readers to read my article, along with the other seven articles included in this special issue, as an invite to re-think topical issues of justice and education in line with a sensitive and deep-seated approach to the phenomena of education and justice itself.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The review comprises articles published in Journal of Philosophy of Education, Ethics and Education, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Studies in Philosophy and Education, and Educational Theory during the period from 2004 to 2020.

2. Meno articulates the learning paradox: «But how will you look for something when you don’t in the least know what it is? How on earth are you going to set up something you don’t know as the object of your search? To put it another way, even if you come right up against it, how will you know that what you have found is the thing you didn’t know?” (Plato 1989, 80d)

3. Jean-Jacques Rousseau opens his book on education by questioning the possibility of raising a child when the childhood is essentially unknown and open (Rousseau 1979, 33).

4. «One of the greatest problems of education, is how to unite submission to the necessary restraint with the child’s capability of exercising his free will” (Kant 2003, 124).