Basic education as a collective good: In defence of the school as a public social institution

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that the more objectively desirable children's formal education is, the stronger are the moral reasons to conceptualise the school normatively as a public social institution. Social institutions are goods-producing teleological entities for which the good created provides a central framework for the normative evaluation of the institution. The intrinsic value of desirable human goods morally obliges both their collective availability and collective production that, on a large scale, is possible only via public social institutions. In contrast, private social institutions are disposed to produce goods whether instrumentally or exclusively, and thus, within private institutions, the production and distribution of the desirable goods is easily compromised for private purposes, such as for monetary profit, ideological gain or the internal coherence of a social group. Privatisation of desirable goods thus endangers their collective availability. Moreover, private social institutions are required to bring forth the aggregated interests of their members that might only have an arbitrary connection to desirable goods, whereas public institutions are morally and politically responsible to the general public to guarantee the collective availability of the goods that they produce. Therefore, if children's formal education is considered a desirable good, it is also a collective good that ought primally be publicly produced.

Schools and the principle of non-intrusion into the private

“…The most importantly, institutionalised schooling includes the idea of providing quality education for all children that is not affected by parents’ own level of education, talent or other educational resource in their possession. Even if it is true that the existing schools need to be improved from the viewpoint of equality, compared to home or privatised schooling, they have the potential to level-out educational differences brought by students’ socio-economic background and thus equalise opportunities for personal flourishing – a feature that can be argued as being at the core of the institution’s legitimacy (Kannisto, 2022; Leiviskä and Martin, 2022). Therefore, as schools in this sense are more ‘public’ social institutions than families, even a stronger means to realise the basic principles of justice in schools should be warranted than in relation to the family.…”