Answering the Question

The previous chapter used a personal example to raise the issue of risk and possibility. But it has meaning in terms of the question that has guided the chapters in this book only when it is connected to a larger emancipatory impulse. While my focus in this book has been on education and its connections to processes of social transformation along multiple dynamics of power, the arguments and examples I have advanced have been grounded in a more general moral and political commitment—what has been called radical democratic egalitarianism. This rests on a conviction that “robust egalitarianism” is necessary for a flourishing and fulfilling personal and social life. Because of this, it is guided by a critical impulse, one that seeks to challenge the social, economic, and cultural policies and practices that generate inequalities in the material and social conditions of identifiable people’s lives that limit the possibility of such flourishing. It seeks both to remove the barriers that limit “individual freedom and collectively empowered democracy” and to illuminate the possible paths to building more responsive policies and practices (Wright 2010, p. 33; see also Williams 1989). ¹