ABSTRACT

The ideal of a just society entails the existence of certain institutions-those that make up the basic structure of society-that guarantee basic rights and liberties, equality of opportunity, and access to material resources. Such an ideal also presupposes a certain account of reasonable citizens. In particular, reasonable citizens will have a set of moral capacities and dispositions, and will voluntarily support just institutions. This last point is related to the following important consideration in favor of a normative theory of justice: that it be stable. That is, such a theory must be capable of generating its own support over time. This means that it has to be possible for its citizens who live under just institutions to develop a reasonable moral psychology and to come to endorse the principles of justice, integrating them into their personal conceptions of the good life. When Rawls turns to consider the question of how a widespread and deep moral consensus on the principles of justice might be generated in actual societies-a question which is closely related to the issue of how such consensus could be maintained over time-he does not pay much attention to the potential contribution of schools to the production of reasonable citizens. This neglect can be explained, in part, by his confidence that the functioning of just institutions will ‘spontaneously’ generate, in citizens who live under them, the necessary support for principles of justice, and will encourage the development and exercise of the virtues characteristic of reasonable citizens. While the basic structure includes many institutions that might contribute to this outcome, Rawls relies primarily on the effects of the functioning of its political and judicial institutions. He thinks that these institutions in particular have an educational role in a wide sense. In his own words

Those who grow up in such a society will in good part form their conception of themselves as citizens from the public political culture and from the conceptions of person and society implicit in it. They will see themselves as having certain basic rights and liberties, freedoms they can not only claim for themselves but freedoms they must also respect

in others. Doing this belongs to their conception of themselves as sharing the status of equal citizenship … Citizens acquire an understanding of the public political culture and

its traditions of interpreting basic constitutional values. They do so by attending to how these values are interpreted by judges in important constitutional cases and reaffirmed by political parties. If disputed judicial decisions-there are bound to be such-call forth deliberative political discussion in the course of which their merits are reasonably debated in terms of constitutional principles, then even these disputed decisions, by drawing citizens into public debate, may serve a vital educational role.1