Transcending Equality Versus Adequacy

Theory and Society, 1975

Professor Liu's article convincingly shows that the Fourteenth Amendment can be read, and has been read in the past, to confer a positive right on all citizens to a high-quality public education and to place a correlative duty on the legislative branches of both state and federal government to provide for that education. Specifically, the United States Congress has an obligation under the Fourteenth Amendment's Citizenship Clause, Liu argues, to ensure that the public education provided by states meets minimal standards so that citizens possess the competencies requisite to meaningful participation in civic life. Liu's argument is not simply that Congress may, within the grant of power of the Fourteenth Amendment, address educational inequality, if it sees fit to do so (thus withstanding federalism challenges). Rather, Liu's claim is that the states, and Congress, jointly must do so. The Constitution imposes a duty on government to educate, and confers a positive rig...

Executive Summary: McClintock (2004) illustrates his claims regarding the failure of contemporary educational discourses to generate conceptual models appropriate to pedagogical aims by pointing to educational scholars' reliance on a distributive model of justice when inquiring about whether schooling policy and practices live up to democratic ideals. By focusing narrowly on the question of whether society distributes educational goods in a fair manner, McClintock argues, scholars working at the intersection of schooling and questions of justice miss more fundamental issues regarding justice in education, such as how do children become ideologically attached to the ideas and problems that shape their social environment, and how do these forms of attachment reproduce various kinds of subjectivities in relation to the law? These latter questions fall under the aegis of what McClintock terms ​ formative justice ​-a concept that, despite its dominance throughout the history of educational thought, has become overshadowed by questions directed by political expedience. McClintock's critique of scholarly discourse that attempts to stretch conceptual constructs beyond their useful sites of application begs the question of why scholars of education and the public at large remain attached to equity and distributive justice as analytic tools, even as these tools seem to fail to describe something essential about democratic educational practices. In this essay, I extend McClintock's conceptual critique of Rawlsian distributive justice, providing a brief explanation for its limited applicability to educational concerns. At the same time, I argue that part of our uncritical association of educational and distributive themes can be traced to a very different distributive ideal of educational justice at least as old and well-established as what McClintock has termed formative justice. Drawing on a few examples from the history of educational thought, I aim to show that a significant influence on our current attachment to distributive justice can be found in those metaphysical and religious traditions in which the aim of education is to connect the learner to a divine resource that is diffusive of itself. While the fundamental tenets of these traditions are clearly at odds with the stated purposes of contemporary democratic education in the United States, their presence is explicit in some of our founding educational policy and continues to have a hold on our rhetoric regarding education as a driver of equity. From Platonic and Biblical roots through The Old Deluder Act and Horace Mann's understanding of schooling as a " great equalizer, " to contemporary calls for universal post-secondary education, the idea of education as the distributor of an inexhaustible good prevails despite our more sober understanding of education as a reproducer of existing economic relationships.

Studies in Philosophy and Education, 1968

On the Usefulness of P'hllosophers of Education," STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY AND EDUCATION, V (Fall, "1967), 428-32. Each quotation from this essay, or reference to some part of it, is followed by the number of the page on which "it appears. 2John R. Perry, "Equality and Education: Remarks on Klei.nberger's Paper," IBID., 433-45. Quotations and references will be attributed in the manner indicated in note 1, above. Studies in Philosophy and Education

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2018

Studies in Judicial Remedies and Public Engagement, 1999

Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 2020