Spheres of Justice #9

Chapter 8 is about education.

Every human society educates its children, its new and future members. Education expresses our deep wishes to continue and improve human life. The purpose of education per Aristotle is to reproduce in each generation the type of character that will sustain the constitution [me: configuration and characteristics]. The members of society are likely to disagree about what the constitution is, what it is becoming, and what it should be. If schools served to reproduce society exactly as it is, then a more just distribution of education wouldn’t make sense.

Schools, teachers, and ideas provide a context for critical understanding of living in a society. Schools fulfill an intermediate space between family and society.

We can think of educational equality as a form of welfare provision, where all children, conceived as future citizens, have the same need to know, and where the ideal of membership is best served if they are all taught the same things. Simple equality is connected to need; all future citizens need an education. Schooling provides the common currency of political and social life, of equal citizenship. Simple equality is entirely inappropriate as soon as the core has been grasped, the common end achieved. After that, education must be shaped to the interests and capacities of the individual students. Specialized or professional education is necessarily a monopoly of the talented, or at least the capable. This is a legitimate monopoly.

He describes George Orwell’s experience as a negative example of education. He was educated in a prep school, expected to later attend an elite university, where higher ranking civil servants and professionals were educated. In effect it was to a large extent a commercial enterprise. The owners of the Crossgates school Orwell attended admitted a few non-paying or reduced tuition students to bolster Crossgates’ academic prestige. Orwell was one. He was invited into a system in which the highest qualifications were hereditary. Wealthy parents were, in effect buying advantages for their children, who were taught to claim the privileges as a matter of right. Orwell described it as a perfect illustration of the tyranny of wealth over class and learning.

Schools can never be entirely free, but there should be constraints in other distributive spheres, for example, on what money can buy and the extent and importance of office. (Ref: #7)

I will skip the details, but Walzer in Chapter 8 comments on segregation and integration, private schools, educational vouchers, neighborhood schools, and talent tracks. All support his idea of complex justice. There are principles of justice, both practical and ideal, that are unique to this part of life in a society.

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