Rawls, Race, and Education: A Challenge to the Ideal/Nonideal Divide

Abstract

In this essay, Winston C. Thompson questions the rigidity of the boundary between ideal and nonideal theory, suggesting a porosity that allows elements of both to be brought to bear upon educational issues in singularly incisive ways. In the service of this goal, Thompson challenges and extends John Rawls's theory of justice as fairness, bringing it to bear upon education in our imperfect world. By showing that this representative work of ideal theory can be meaningfully supplemented and applied to the nonideal fact of race, this essay suggests that recognition of nonideal circumstances and theorizing need not void ideal theory's value to philosophy of education. Instead, the field can engage both ideal and nonideal theory on previously unavailable questions and dimensions of educational justice toward productive ends.

Working Toward a More Just Pedagogy: Epistemic Justice and Epistemic Resistance as Educational Aims

“…I will explain how epistemic justice and epistemic resistance and dual aims can help educators acknowledge and reflect on the current non-ideal and oppressive reality, while also working to resist and transform it through their pedagogical practices. This formulation of educational aims supports the idea that non-ideal and ideal theory are complementary for improving society (Medina, 2013;Thompson, 2015).…”

Integrations: The Struggle for Racial Equality and Civic Renewal in Public Education; Larry Blum and Zoë Burkholder; University of Chicago Press, 2021, Pp. 280.

“…In conjunction, Integrations' three critiques of Rawls suggest a stronger, even alternate and more central understanding for education in political society with regard to the "social, political, and economic ends intended to ensure that primarily social goods (as they relate to education) are distributed according to the principles of justice appropriate to the well-ordered society." 8 Blum and Burkholder's "justice framework," which identifies the interlocking systems of social injustice to which educational injustice is linked (Integrations, 108), precisely exemplifies this point in the claim that social domains embed education within "health, housing, occupation, income, and wealth" and therefore need "to inform how we think about realizing educational equality, in that educational injustice is deeply bound up with forms of social injustice, of a racial and class character" (Integrations, 108). This move not only supports the case that educational outcomes shape and are shaped by the public and private sector in ways that can perpetuate inequality but also indicates the pervasive recursiveness of schooling influences that, for instance, reinscribe intergenerational wealth and poverty.…”

Rethinking Discussions of Justice in Educational Research: Formative Justice, Educational Liberalism, and Beyond

“…While Rawls carefully attempts to avoid bias in the creation of these principles and their identified subjects, some partiality may have bled through the work. Issues of gender and race potentially complicate Rawls' work, calling into question his conclusions and their scope (Thompson, 2015). But these and similar leanings (of the sort that might be identified as faults) are not the only limitations of the framework.…”