Open Collections

England, Christopher

University of British Columbia

This study sets out to answer two questions: 1) What do all students living in liberal democracies deserve when it comes to their education? and 2) How can we ethically pursue educational justice in liberal democracies? This study analyzes how social justice is currently promoted through education. Current efforts to promote social equality though equity, inclusion and diversity are put into policy, sometimes without careful consideration of their ends. This lack of clarity is a potential source of unethical educational policies and practices. The task of social justice is to ensure that all citizens get what they deserve. Scholars and educationalists have argued that citizens of liberal democracies deserve equal opportunities, equality of outcomes or other measures of social equality. I argue that these approaches to justice are misguided. Instead, I argue that educational justice requires universal access to the conditions required for individual freedom. After an analysis of the idea of social equality, I argue that social equality is a problematic aim because 1) it is redundant, 2) it masks underlying aims, 3) it distracts from other aims, 4) it is only instrumentally valuable, and 5) it is used metaphorically but interpreted literally. I present Raz’s (1986) account of personal autonomy, which requires personal access to certain skills, adequate options and independence, as the most complete conception of individual freedom. Further, I argue that current movements promoting social justice (which are understood as promoting social equality), like equity, inclusion and diversity, rely on the foundations of critical theory. As such, these movements are better understood, not as promoting social equality, but as promoting human emancipation (freeing people from their unfair disadvantages). I argue further that the promotion of human emancipation should be only part of a broader aim: the aim to promote individual freedom. In conclusion, I argue that ensuring all citizens have access to the conditions of personal autonomy is a necessary and sufficient aim for educational justice. This aim also reveals when measures promoting equity, inclusion and diversity can be implemented ethically, and when they overstep themselves.

Text

2021-05-21

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/78400

Interdisciplinary Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/