Concluding Remarks

In this book I have offered an interpretation of John Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness and of the role that educational institutions have-or should have-in the theory. As part of that effort I have tried to clarify his very complex model of a just society and his account of reasonable citizenship. This paved the way for a clearer discussion of the contribution that families and schools can make to sustain, or to create, a just society of the kind defended by Rawls by educating reasonable citizens. One valuable aspect of Rawls’ theory is that it takes justice to be a property of the set of major social and political institutions of society, working together as a system. As we saw in chapter 4, this implies that it would be a mistake to try to apply the principles of justice directly to the functioning of one social institution alone, such as the family or the educational system. This theory is not meant to answer the question of what just families are like, or what just schools are like. Rather, it is meant to provide a model of a just society as a whole. Partly with this kind of institutional interdependence in mind, I argued that the tasks of families and schools should complement each other: schools cannot provide the kind of emotional and moral support that families give (in well-functioning families), and families cannot provide the diverse and rule-structured environment of schools that encourages the development of capacities for reasonability (again, in well-functioning schools). But institutional dependence does not mean that the failures of schools or families can always be blamed on external factors. Rawls’ theory places certain requirements on how these institutions should function: there are certain threshold capacities that these institutions must help cultivate if they are to play their role within the overall system. There is another corollary of Rawls’ systematic approach that is worth

stressing, even if it might seem obvious to many readers: schools’ contribution to achieving justice in society is significant but it is unavoidably limited, and cannot be separated from the contribution that other sectors of society must make. I would not like to give the misleading impression that I hold the main solution to most social evils to be better education provided by schools. I do not think that all that is needed to improve societies is that schools manage to educate children in the right way, that is, to teach them

to appreciate their rights and the rights of others, to engage with others on reasonable terms, and to develop the set of skills and capacities that will enable them to have a good life in the future. Nor do I want to suggest that schools or teachers are to blame when children finish school having failed to learn these things. We live under social institutions that send out a huge array of conflicting messages and that encourage students to think of themselves, their life prospects, their fellows, and their society in a wide variety of potentially incompatible ways. Even if schools do their part in teaching the valuable political ideals of fairness and respect for freedom and equality, these messages may not have sufficient impact when they are too starkly at odds with what children and adolescents are picking up in other parts of their lives. A good number of the reforms that would make schools more effective at encouraging good citizenship and a mature sense of justice lie outside of schools themselves. Among the most urgent of these reforms include those aimed at the reduction of poverty and violence, the improvement of housing, and the provision of better access to health care. The interpretation of the theory of justice offered in this book has taken

into account the changes that Rawls introduced in his theory after his political turn. This required looking at Rawls’ early work in a selective way, leaving aside those aspects of his early theory that are in conflict with the political restrictions on justification. What is most significant about the political turn is the attempt to demonstrate that the principles of justice can be acceptable to reasonable citizens who hold a variety of comprehensive doctrines and conceptions of the good life. Rawls argues that the principles of justice that regulate the basic structure could be at the focus of an ‘overlapping consensus’ of reasonable citizens. He also recommends that public debates about the constitution and about matters of basic justice should be conducted in terms of ‘public reasons.’ That is, such debates should avoid appeal to comprehensive doctrines that not all citizens share. But because this restriction applies only at the very high level of constitutional reform and matters of basic justice, it is not very clear what follows if one is trying to provide guidelines for educational policy, or to explain the kinds of things that schools are required or allowed to do to support social justice. According to the interpretation that I defended in this book, Rawls provides some general prescriptions for the education of citizens, but he is concerned that his prescriptions satisfy the general guidelines of political argumentation. This is why he refuses to appeal to ideals such as personal autonomy or individuality as part of the required contents of civic education: these ideals are not shared by all reasonable citizens. But this is very different from saying that the political justification of policies requires actual consensus among the citizens of real societies. ‘Overlapping consensus’ is a technical notion in Rawls’ theory, and the possibility of achieving overlapping consensus, as Rawls understands it, does not require reaching consensus on actual policies. Similar remarks can be made about the ideal of public reason: it is not an ideal that makes sense to apply to discussions at

Parents/Teachers Association meetings, or to class debates. It is certainly valuable if schools encourage students to try to find reasons that other people can accept as relevant. This can be seen as part of the general task of cultivating a general civil disposition to engage in dialogue in respectful terms. But this is different from Rawls’ recommendation that considerations that appeal to comprehensive doctrines about the good should be avoided in public debates concerning constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice. Such debates touch on the functioning of the basic structure of society, and it is important that the principles that regulate this functioning could be acceptable to reasonable citizens. Debates in schools will not have this type of impact, and it would be inappropriate to transplant the requirements of public reason to this micro-level. In fact, as I argued in chapter 5, schools should make room for respectful exploration of a variety of conceptions of the good, since this is part of what is needed to cultivate reasonability and mutual understanding. In the previous three chapters of the book I developed Rawls’ theory in

directions that he himself did not explore, but that are (I hope) consistent with his views. Of course I have to acknowledge the possibility that Rawls could have reached very different conclusions on the topics I discuss in these chapters. After all, his theory of international justice turned out to be very different from what theorists predicted. It might seem puzzling that a theory that is explicitly built on an ideal of free and equal citizens denies that the education of children should be guided by a comprehensive ideal of personal autonomy. But we should keep in mind how controversial such an ideal is bound to be. There are disagreements not only about the value of ideals of personal autonomy as part of a conception of the good life, but, also, among those who defend autonomy as an ideal, about how to characterize the ideal itself. If we try to find common ground among the proponents of autonomy, I suspect that we are quite likely to be left with only a very minimalist account that has lost much of what made the idea attractive and distinctive to its proponents in the first place. Of course one might always try to defend a detailed and robust notion of personal autonomy and show that most children will be unable to find a good life unless they manage to achieve such autonomy. But that would be to give up many of Rawls’ plausible premises: premises that I have taken as starting point in this book. It seems to me that the idea of freedom as non-domination provides a clearer alternative to any conception of autonomy. And, since there is much more agreement that domination is an evil than that autonomy is a good, appeal to non-domination has the advantage of fitting better with the requirements of political justification. I also extend Rawls’ theory somewhat when addressing questions about

the value of patriotic or nationalist feelings, and whether they should be cultivated in schools. These questions are hard to answer within the theory as Rawls presents it. This is because his model of a just society involves a number of simplifications that allow him to deal with very complex social

phenomena. For similar reasons his model of a just international order involves a number of simplifications as well: it has us imagine societies that are self-contained, which makes mass immigration ‘not a problem’ within the theory. My strategy, in the face of these kinds of theoretical simplifications, has been to use the principles of justice as guidelines to assess the level of justice in real, multicultural, societies and to ask what kind of educational policies would support the fulfillment of the principles. It is in applying the theory in this way that we can take into account the complexity of these societies and the fact that citizens may have a variety of political identifications. And if we do so, I believe that we should not find it persuasive that patriotic or nationalist feelings are instrumental to social justice (much less to international justice). We would do better to focus on teaching core values of political justice and a range of political virtues. Not only would this avoid the liabilities of patriotic civic education, but it might be one of the most useful ways to encourage mutual understanding among members of societies with different national and cultural affiliations.