Philosophy - John Rawls - Theory of Justice and Citizenship Education

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Rawls’ Theory of Justice and

Citizenship Education

MARIANNA PAPASTEPHANOU

Political liberalism purports to be independent from anycontroversial philosophical presuppositions, and its basic

principles and features are often presented as the most accommodating of difference and heterogeneity, so long as thelatter is not illiberal, oppressive and fanatic. Educationaltheory welcomes this assumption and attempts to utilise it in citizenship curriculum debates, often in a receptive and arguably uncritical way. I shall critique the above byunveiling the contestable epistemological and anthropologicaltheses underlying Rawls’ difference principle and bydiscussing the conception of education that they ground.

I shall draw especially on sociology of education and itsquestioning of the ‘racism of intelligence’ in order to showthat political liberalism mistakes its self- and world-

understanding as a reflection of general and undisputed facts.Further, I shall explain how a more critical perspective would give educational theory a more active role by challenging theso-called ‘reproductive’ conception of education. I shallconclude by assessing the significance of such a critique for teaching citizenship, putting forward some suggestions for areorientation of political education.

INTRODUCTION

In educational discourse relating to fashionable philosophical trends, avery simple model predominates: Here is the philosophy, there is theeducation. Philosophy is applied to education. The tendency of mucheducational theoretical work is to explore the educational implications of influential philosophical theories—and Rawls’ theory of justice has beenno exception. In spite of their merits, such moves often limit education toa passive and receptive role. A concomitant demerit is that in this way themajor stakes, dilemmas and debates surrounding the particular philoso-

phical theory are bequeathed to educational theory almost unaltered.In this article, I shall allocate education a more active part, arguing that,in its theoretical dimension, it can operate as a corrective to Rawls’

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 39, No. 3, 2005

r The Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain 2005. Published by Blackwell Publishing,9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.



epistemological and anthropological justifications of political liberalismand, in its more practical and applied dimension, as transformative of liberal society.

One of the issues that general philosophy hands down to education

regarding Rawls’ recent theory of justice, one that I find narrow andproblematic, is whether political liberalism succeeds in handling radicalotherness justly and effectively without conceding too much to it orexpecting too much from it. As Geraint Parry puts this, the primelimitation on teaching political neutrality,

. . . which profoundly affects education, is that the liberal state cannot beneutral about its own neutrality. It must seek to instil respect for itsfundamental principle in its future citizenry. The problem posed by thisrequirement is that neutralist liberalism may, in its educationalprogramme, be less accommodating than it claims towards those whowish to bring their children up to share their own non-liberal doctrines andconsequently to adopt more negative attitudes to what they variously seeto be the spread of the contagion of secularism, anti-traditionalism orlaxity of manners (Parry, 1999, p. 33).

Whereas such criticisms or reservations regarding the treatment of radicalotherness seem at first sight to be quite sharp, I believe that, in fact, theyare condescending or even patronising for otherness and that they makethings too easy for liberalism. The problem is pictured in such a mannerthat liberalism appears truly to have achieved neutrality or, as a theory,truly to have been political in the Rawlsian sense of being ‘free-standing’.Hence, now, its major difficulty appears to be how to deal with the non-liberal segment of the population. Within this account, the other becomesthe obtrusive and cumbersome case that crops up and disrupts theotherwise solid and strong prospect for a just society.1

Rawlsian justice as fairness has, in its evolution, come to be understoodas part of a political liberalism that ‘can be formulated independently of any particular comprehensive doctrine, religious, philosophical or moral.[I]t is not presented as depending upon, or as presupposing any such view’(emphasis added) (Rawls, 1995, p. 135). Unmanageable others will be

attracted to this kind of liberalism because, after all, they are only human:as such they possess two moral powers, the capacity for an effective senseof justice and the capacity to form, revise and rationally pursuea conception of the good (Rawls, 1999, p. 312). To help them adjustthemselves to political liberalism, we liberals recommend a conversationalrestraint—that is, a bracketing of disputable ultimate questions about theself, life and the world. We are able to do so because our own conceptionof the political relies solely on the ‘undisputed facts’ of natural scienceand social theory.

I shall argue that the principles of justice and more recent developments

in Rawlsian theory rely in one way or other on many currently orpotentially contestable epistemological and anthropological culturalassumptions of Western societies. Elsewhere (Papastephanou, 2004),

500 M. Papastephanou

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I have argued from a general philosophical perspective that politicalliberalism cannot avoid comprehensiveness, but here I shall examine asimilar claim from a more hybrid point of view, the educational one. Inthat work, emphasis was placed not on epistemology but on anthropology.

Here, in order to avoid covering the ground of the previous work, myemphasis will be on the former. This explains the uneven space these twoissues will be given here. Thus the problems of political liberalism gobeyond the simple accommodation of radical alterity and touch upon itsown self-understanding as political and independent from, that is, as notpresupposing, comprehensive liberalism. I see this topic as a case whereeducational theory can offer much corrective work to general philosophyby showing why some general philosophical tenets might plausibly bequestionable from an educational point of view. Such corrective work hasbeen occluded by the fact that the search for the implications for teachingpolitical attitudes and values has so far limited education to the role of passive recipient of some fashionable theories.

To conclude my preliminary remarks, I claim that my approach does notaim to diminish the import of Rawls’ theory and the quality of itsarchitectonic, but to point to problems that I view as inherent in liberalism.Thus I am not saying that there can be a liberalism that is more politicalthan the Rawlsian—that is, that Rawls has, inadvertently perhaps, let somenon-political elements slip into his notion of liberalism. Instead, I amsaying that any sharp duality insulating the political and granting itpriority over the comprehensive overlooks the former’s inescapabledependence on some form of the latter (Papastephanou, 2004). In whatfollows, I demonstrate that the epistemological and anthropologicalassumptions implied in political liberalism play a subterranean, crucialrole in justice as fairness and its principles. Then I discuss how theseprinciples assume a particular conception of education, its confines andpotentialities. Further, I explore the possibility and perhaps necessity for adifferent conception of education functioning as a corrective to politicalliberalism, showing at the same time the limits of liberalism in general. Inthis way, citizenship education may direct its efforts to objectives that maypartly go further than, or against, the Rawlsian vision of a just society.

PHILOSOPHICAL ASSUMPTIONS IN POLITICAL LIBERALISM

In Rawls’ most recent work, the principles of justice that are constitutiveof his justice as fairness are couched in an idiom that purports to bepolitical and not metaphysical. It is political not only because it isdivorced from religious legitimation but also because it demands theexercise of public rather than secular reason (Rawls, 1999, p. 583).Secular reason is reasoning in terms of comprehensive non-religiousworldviews; the latter resonate with various contestable assumptions about

the self and social life. But, as I shall argue, upon closer inspection, theprinciples of justice themselves presuppose particular and already by nowdisputed views, the defence of which extends far beyond public reason,

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drawing from the secular—and secularised (Papastephanou, 2004)—cultural reservoir of Occidental significations.

Rawls holds that the principles of justice can be viewed ‘as anunderstanding between moral persons not to exploit for one’s own

advantage the contingencies of their world, but to regulate the accidentaldistributions of nature and social chance in ways that are mutuallybeneficial for all’ (Rawls, 1999, p. 175). An initial suspicion of philosophical comprehensiveness is raised by the very first part of Rawls’statement. An agreement to avoid exploitation of contingencies for one’sown advantage presupposes that before the agreement there must havebeen such an intention or inclination to self-interest, or—more weakly—astrong possibility of this. Granted that Rawls does not share Hobbes’conception of human nature, we should opt for the latter, weakerinterpretation (Papastephanou, 2004). A possibility for self-interestednessis endemic in humanity according to Kantian anthropological views of human motivation, which maintain that the human being is characterisedby unsocial sociability. Rawls may have remained faithful to Kant in otherrespects of his thought, but there is no guarantee that the above statementreflects a commitment to Kant’s anthropology. A Rawlsian might respondthat the fact that the principles of justice hinder exploitation of contingency for one’s advantage reveals only an empirical and not alogically necessary effect. This suspicion, then, requires further textualevidence and elaboration.

Another suspicion of comprehensiveness, an equally vague one at thisstage, arises when we consider the second part of the remark, theregulation of accidental distributions of nature and social chance inmutually beneficial ways. I believe that the idea of accidental distributionsof nature reveals epistemological presuppositions about giftedness of anessentialist character that are quite far from being undisputed facts. I shalltackle the latter suspicion first and then move to anthropology because, inRawls, as will be shown later on, the epistemological self-understandingof the moral person seems to affect significantly the way the ego ismotivated to think of justice and equality.

i. Epistemological Self-understanding

When Rawls analyzes his maximin or difference principle,2 he employsmetaphors that pertain to a biologistic essentialist interpretation of goodperformance—metaphors such as ‘natural assets’, ‘native talents’,‘giftedness’, ‘natural endowment’ and so on. Consider the following, forinstance:

If the two principles of justice are acknowledged, the understanding is, ineffect, that those favored in the natural lottery (that is, the lottery of nativetalents and abilities) and who know that they have been favored undertaketo gain from their good fortune only on terms that improve the conditionof those who have lost out. They are not to win advantages simplybecause they are more gifted , but only to cover the costs of the necessary





efforts of training and cultivating their endowments and for putting themto use in a way which benefits the losers. [. . .] Accepting a society inwhich the two principles are satisfied is, then, the best way for the lessgifted to overcome their misfortune in the natural lottery. The offer of themore gifted man to acknowledge the second principle would probably

be accepted, since doing so would strike the ungifted as a fair way to takeadvantage of the natural fact of differing native endowments (Rawls,1999, p. 82, emphasis added).

The strong epistemological assumptions we have here are not limited tothe obvious essentialist accounts of talent: along with them there is a self-conception (i.e. they ‘know that they have been favored’) on the axis of natural fortune and misfortune that ushers the social actors to their propersocial space. This self-knowledge secures a feeling of justice for all, sincethe social actor who recognises herself as ungifted accepts the advantages

of the gifted as means for long-term benefits. She even knows that suchbenefits would never be expected if society were politically to read talentalong lines of desert (as in some libertarian views, compared to whichRawls’ position is far more radical). Likewise, the social actor who knowshe is gifted—how does one know that really?—acknowledges that hecannot be thought to ‘deserve his greater natural capacity’ (p. 165).Therefore, all advantages to which he is entitled derive only from theirbeing motivationally efficacious in leading him to promoting social wealthand progress.

Even in his ‘Kantian Constructivism’, which is a text of the middle

period, Rawls takes such epistemological assumptions for granted.

An essential distinction is between the unequal distribution of naturalassets, which is simply a natural fact and neither just nor unjust , and theway the basic structure of society makes use of these natural differencesand permits them to affect the social fortune of citizens, theiropportunities in life, and the actual terms of cooperation between them(p. 337, emphasis added).

Here, Rawls interprets differences in performance in a naturalist andmorally neutral way and assumes that there is no alternative construal

(I extrapolate that from his term ‘natural fact’). An alternative way to viewsuch a difference would be to treat it as a result of existential dissimilarity,and with this term I describe the complex set of conditions of existencethat are unique for each individual (Papastephanou, 2003). Social origin,family, language, narrativity, identification, the relational position of one’srace or nation in the wider social context, culture and worldviews aresome constitutive factors of existential dissimilarity that conditionperformance and success at what society cherishes. In this context natureis minimally or not at all informative and the unequal possession ordevelopment of abilities can be explained through some initial social

injustices, discrimination and exclusion or even through some axiologi-cally neutral relational terms.3 Unlike Rawls’ commitment to innateness,an account of existential dissimilarity does not require a robust and





encompassing notion of natural difference. Thus the passage from naturaldifference to political inequality, which sustains an analogy that justifiesthe latter through the former, is not allowed within the alternative accountthat I provide.

As to the distinction between naturalness and its social treatment thatRawls has drawn in the previous passage, it shows, or so it seems to me,his intention to avoid the libertarian leap from existential dissimilarity topolitical inequality (that is, to connect naturalness and desert). Overall,however, this distinction is not elaborated in such a way as to break freefrom naturalistic essentialism and so to avoid the charge of a similar kindof naturalistic fallacy.

The difference principle can be regarded as an agreement to considerthe distribution of natural assets as common property and to share in thebenefits of this distribution, whatever it turns out to be. Those who havebeen favoured by nature, whoever they are, may gain from their goodfortune only on terms that improve the situation of those who have doneless well. The naturally advantaged are not to gain merely because theyare more gifted, but rather in order to cover the costs of training andcultivating their endowments and for putting them to use in a way thathelps the less fortunate as well. No one is thought to deserve his greaternatural capacity or to merit a more favorable starting place in society(Rawls, 1999, p. 165).

By seeing existential dissimilarity as a natural fact rather than a socialconstruction and qualitative appraisal of difference, Rawls ends up in

justifying inequality on naturalistic grounds (in a way deriving the Oughtfrom the Is) even when he tethers this to moral final purposes. For,ultimately, he argues that those who are naturally endowed may enjoysome kind of favorable inequality in order to be motivated to make theirtalents available to all for the common good.

A crucial question here, of course, is how or why all this matters inRawls’ original position. In his words, ‘we assume that in the originalposition the parties have the general information provided by naturalscience and social theory’ (p. 236). As Johnston puts it, ‘going into theoriginal position, we know only a few facts of moral psychology/ sociology . . . and nothing about our particular selves, communities, or

societies’ (Johnston, 2005, p. 210).4 This means, amongst other things,that the parties do not know their own personal luck in the natural lotterybut they know generally that, inevitably, in their society, some people willbe naturally more gifted than the rest. That this is a natural fact iscorroborated, in Rawls’ mind, I assume, by science or common sense, but,with hindsight, this paradigmatic conviction of the Rawls of the 1970s canbe explained as the myth of a society that employed science as a tool forspecific ideological purposes. If we recall the numerous tests by which theAmerican immigration policy tried to sift the incoming population, thewell-known arguments by Jensen about a supposedly intrinsic intellectual

inferiority of black people, and more general efforts based on streaming toseparate the wheat from the chaff (often keeping the chaff!), we realisethat when Rawls committed himself to this kind of innateness he was led





astray by the spirit of the times. By this I do not mean that he subscribed toany of the above mentioned blatant forms of exclusion and discriminationbut rather that those were more extreme articulations of a general andpopular innateness conviction.

The Rawlsian kind of innateness breaks with any speculative ortheological metaphysical worldview, but its foundations share somethingwith those of biologism and scientism. Thus, when Rawls contrasts themetaphysical with the political and opts for the latter, he means, more orless, that there is no psychic kernel in the idealist metaphysical sense. Hedoes not wish to imply that the self is ‘ontologically prior to the factsabout persons that the parties are excluded from knowing’ (Johnston,2005, p. 211) in the original position. Nor, however, does he realise thatthe description of those facts as natural, according to a particular, and bynow disputed, set of scientific theories, might equally be metaphysical. Inany case, the reliance on natural science and social theory is hardlypolitical as such, but the fact that this reliance is on controversial questionsthat different ideological camps answer in different ways proves that herewe have a clear case of liberalist dependence on comprehensiveness(Papastephanou, 2004).

All the same, one may notice in Rawls’ texts occasional shifts in hisaccounts of natural assets, for example, of intelligence. True, these shiftsmay prove that he does not have a crude or naive notion of intelligence,but they also unveil the extent to which polemics intervene in the shapingof a theory that purports to be political and in a certain sense impervious tocomprehensive (for example, ideological) influence. Rawls exaggeratesthe supposed naturalness of intelligence when he feels compelled to justifythe accommodation of some inequalities that he finds inevitable, and hedownplays it only when he sees it as leading away from his theoreticalpriorities and becoming a conceptual weapon for the opponent. Here is atelling example. In rejecting the idea of a lump sum tax on natural abilities(an idea that derives from the Marxist precept ‘from each according to hisabilities, to each according to his needs’), Rawls emphasises the non-measurable and unfixed character of natural assets and their precariousand changing social use:

Intelligence, for example, is hardly any one such fixed native ability. Itmust have indefinitely many dimensions that are shaped and nurtured bydifferent social conditions; even as a potential, as opposed to a realized,capacity it is bound to vary significantly in little understood and complexways . . . Thus potential earnings capacity is not something independentfrom the social forms and the particular contingencies over the course of life, and the idea of a lump sum tax does not apply (Rawls, 1999, p. 253).

But one may reverse this argument and turn it against Rawls’ theory too.Why should intelligence then be informative at all for political theory if it

is so elusive and dependent on contingency? How does a person know if she is gifted or ungifted? Why should intelligence be classified as a naturalgiven and be taken for granted, thus setting an ontological limit to





educationally formative or reformative effects on people? Rawls himself has, as we have seen in some previous citations too, fallen elsewhere5 intothe positivist trap of the measurable and the locatable. Therefore, theconcession here appears to serve only polemical purposes instead of being

a consistent shift of perspective.Education assists us in unmasking the concealed comprehensivecharacter of political liberalism as well as the mistaken epistemologicalframework that informs the self-understanding of the Rawlsian moralsubject. Current sociology of education, influenced by Pierre Bourdieu’sresearch, not only questions ideas of giftedness and natural talent but alsoexposes their ideological functioning as mechanisms for the reproductionof consolidated social power structures and inequalities. Good schoolperformance is not explained as a sign of innate intelligence but as aproduct of the concurrence and coordination of cultural capital andteaching expectations. More explicitly, children from educated strata entereducation already equipped with an informal and subtle cultivation that iscalled cultural capital. Such capital is not directly measured in schools, butit is nevertheless a non-thematised advantage. This is so becausechildren’s attempts to decipher the communication code of the teacherand the transmitted knowledge depend on the extent to which their ownvocabulary and cultural experience match the upper-middle class origin of the taught material and the teaching method. Educators mistake that initialsuccess for a token of charisma and natural giftedness, and interpretfailures as signs of inherent inability thus imposing on the ‘bad’ pupils theself-image of the ungifted (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1985). This oftenproduces a self-fulfilling prophecy. At a later stage of education, culturalcapital is accompanied by symbolic capital, which is the intellectual aurathat the ‘charismatic’ enjoy due to the academic titles they have obtainedfrom prestigious institutions, and by social capital, which denotes thesocial affiliations and acquaintances that open ways to power. Thus, usingapparently egalitarian and meritocratic methods, education selects andsupports those pupils whose social origin has endowed them with thecapital of hegemonic discourse. By declaring this success an indication of natural giftedness, it produces in them that elitist self-understanding that isnecessary for the justification of their social position. But more

importantly, it ensures that those who have not succeeded in the selectionprocess will internalise the failure as a personal inadequacy, remainingthus unsuspecting of the hidden character of the selection mechanismitself. In this way, the natural disguise of social privilege guaranteescompliance and legitimates inequality and its ancillary procedures bygiving them ontological citizenship, that is, by accounting for performancein physiologist or geneticist essentialist terms. The route to wealth andenjoyment of culture is largely predetermined for the possessors of cultural capital by their initial social positioning. Successful progress tohigher education and political power is not obstructed by cultural

ignorance along the way; it poses, however, as a deserving and inevitablepersonal development of natural individual excellence. Such legitimationof privilege is almost invulnerable, and Rawls’ theory is a good example





of that. Arbitrary inequality on the grounds of property must be ousted, butinequality on the grounds of merit and talent is not only tolerated but alsomade good for society. Bourdieu considers the racism of intelligence asthe worst of all racisms (Bourdieu, 1984).

Additionally, the natural endowment conviction has also beenquestioned and its undesirable pedagogical implications exposed byeducational theorists of persuasions that share very little in common withBourdieu and Passeron. Charles Jencks has shown that any egalitarianschool reform is doomed to fail so long as there is no further and moredrastic change at the level of societal and economic conditions. Thus, hehas attributed differences of performance to the latter conditions ratherthan genetic endowment. Even before Jencks, James Coleman hadexplored social factors intervening in learning outcomes and foughtagainst the racism of intelligence. Along with other theorists, theyattacked Jensen’s assumptions about genetic racial differences and arguedthat the only way to check whether—and to what extent—heredity of intellect plays some role would be through first ensuring that all socialvariables are equal for many generations. More recently, sociologists of education such as Michael Young, Geoffrey Esland and Nell Keddieconverge in the problematisation of categorisations based on such notionsas ‘talent’ and ‘competence’ and the exposition of the social constructionof knowledge (Blackledge and Hunt, 1989).

True, there are problems in Bourdieu and Passeron’s conception of education as reproduction and several difficulties with what is now called‘new sociology of education’, and those cannot be dealt with in thisarticle. However, what is crucial here is that this whole discourse showsthat there is no unanimity regarding those epistemological issues thatRawls takes for granted. Consequently, their supposed generality can nolonger ground the claim that liberalism’s reliance on them is politicalrather than comprehensive. As Parry puts it, ‘the once clear liberal notionof education preparing for the career open to the talents has becomeobscured as the central ideas of merit and talent have joined the ranks of contested concepts’ (Parry, 1999, p. 24). What is perhaps more importantis that even within the innateness hypothesis there is a variety of positions,some of which assume universal competences and attack the individualist

theoretical differentiation of them as elitist and racist. Noam Chomsky’s(1975) work in his Reflections of Language is a significant example.Jacques Maritain’s conception of natural intelligence (D’ Souza, 1996) asuniversal is another case that proves that the assumptions of winners andlosers in the natural lottery are not taken for granted even within moretraditional educational theories.

Thus, for my argument here, it suffices that these assumptions arecontested. Controversial substantive positions belong to the sphere of thecomprehensive rather than the political (Papastephanou, 2004), and thisdemonstrates that such positions operate within—and sometimes

through—the principles of justice. Showing this constitutes an immanentcritique. The challenge to the established epistemological admissionsabout who the moral subject is and who she believes herself to be as a





knower in relation to existential variety and difference exposes liberal-ism’s unavoidable dependence on comprehensiveness. This challenge isimmanent because it does not draw from a supposedly incommensurablelanguage game of illiberal radical otherness, inferior, fanatic and

burdensome, but from sources upon which liberalism itself has bestowedauthority.A further issue is, evidently, whether this immanent critique drastically

affects Rawls’ conclusions about the necessity of a dose of inequality inthe basic structure of society. We may indirectly reach some answer to thisquestion after the examination of the second set of assumptions, that is, theanthropological. By the end of that discussion we shall also be able tomove to the active role of education. I now proceed with a discussion of those tacit accounts of human nature underpinning justice as fairness thatwill prove once again that political liberalism is not as antisepticallydevoid of comprehensiveness as Rawls would expect it to be.

ii. Anthropological Implicit Assumptions

For my anthropological argument and the way it connects to theaforementioned cognitive dimensions, the following quotation is reveal-ing: in his 1969 text ‘The Justification of Civil Disobedience’, Rawls saysabout the original position:

The parties do not know their position in society, past, present, or future;

nor do they know which institutions exist. Again, they do not know theirown place in the distribution of natural talents and abilities, whether theyare intelligent or strong, man or woman, and so on. [. . .] What the partiesdo know (or assume) is that Hume’s circumstances of justice obtain:namely, that the bounty of nature is not so generous as to rendercooperative schemes superfluous nor so harsh as to make themimpossible. Moreover, they assume that the extent of their altruism islimited and that, in general, they do not take an interest in one another’sinterests (Rawls, 1999, p. 178).

In this passage, a very specific conception of human nature appears to

hold for the actors themselves whose self-image is that of the rationalegoist—perhaps not in the anthropologically stronger libertarian sense butin the more mitigated one of Humean and Continental liberalism(Papastephanou, 2004).

For liberalism to be convincing in claiming that its assumption ispolitical—that is, it does not rest on controversial grounds6—what isnecessary is to show not only that it is shared by all but that suchuniversality is not the outcome of mere conformity or hegemonicenforcement. It is true that the liberal notion of the self as interest-seekingenjoys much empirical and theoretical support; however, it is especially

from a deontological cognitivist ethics such as Rawls’ that one expectsa distinction between validity and social currency. Even within Occidentalthought itself, there have been alternative scenarios about the self





(for example, the Stoic, the Rousseauist, to some extent the Marxist, andsome anarchist conceptions) most of which have operated as undercurrentsand counterfactual theoretical possibilities. Whether those or othercontemporary or future accounts of the self are more justified than the

liberalist and might have better implications for a radical politics is amatter of external critique of Rawls. For the purposes of this article, itsuffices that the sheer existence of such alternative views problematisesthe supposedly uncontroversial character of political liberalism and offersa springboard for an internal critique.

The political implication of the Rawlsian coupling of epistemologicaland anthropological self-depiction is that all should agree that the ‘gifted’of society will be motivated to make their talents available to society, notout of altruism but out of egoism. This is so because the differenceprinciple exists precisely in order to provide to them that kind of satisfaction that stems from recognition of their superiority—a recognitionthat is vouchsafed by accommodation to inequality. Proof of that is thefollowing passage from Rawls’ ‘Justice as Reciprocity’, written in 1971:

If there are inequalities which satisfy the conditions of the secondprinciple, the immediate gain which equality would allow can beconsidered as intelligently invested in view of its future return. If, as isquite likely, these inequalities work as incentives to draw out betterefforts, the members of this society may look upon them as concessions tohuman nature: they, like us, may think that people ideally should wantto serve one another. But as they are mutually self-interested, their

acceptance of these inequalities is merely the acceptance of the relationsin which they actually stand, and a recognition of the motives which leadthem to engage in their common practices. Being themselves self-interested, they have no title to complain of one another (Rawls, 1999,p. 203).

The way by which a theory of human nature demarcates ideals is anotherexample of the Is-Ought fallacy, one that illustrates the dependence of political liberalism on anthropological views of comprehensive liberalism.By declaring themselves facts, these anthropological views don the guiseof the political. This becomes clearer in a passage that explains how, in

justice as fairness, the conception of the moral person is a companion idealof that of a well-ordered society.

Like any other ideal, it must be possible for people to honour itsufficiently closely; and hence the feasible ideals of the person are limitedby the capacities of human nature and the requirements of social life. Tothis extent such an ideal presupposes a theory of human nature, and socialtheory generally, but the task of a moral doctrine is to specify anappropriate conception of the person that general facts about humannature and society allow (p. 321, emphasis added).

A crucial political implication is that the transformation of society is

thereby determined.7 For Rawls, certain social and economic inequalitiesexist either as ‘requirements for maintaining social arrangements or asincentives satisfying the relevant standard of justice’ (p. 245). Why do we





need such an incentive if it is possible for people not to be motivated byinequality? Thus, in a negative way, we see that there is an implicitaccount of human motivation delineating impossibilities, one of thembeing the other-oriented stance. The anthropological limits of ideality

along with the epistemologically assisted transition from existentialdissimilarity to political inequality shape the liberalist conception of adesirable society and the positioning of education in it.

THE ROLE OF EDUCATION

Rawls’ ideas about education and its role in connection with his aforemen-tioned epistemological and anthropological assumptions emerge first andforemost in his dismissive discussion of the principle of redress. This is:

. . . the principle that undeserved inequalities call for redress; and sinceinequalities of birth and natural endowment are undeserved, theseinequalities are to be somehow compensated for. Thus the principle of redress holds that in order to treat all persons equally, to provide genuineequality of opportunity, society must give more attention to those withfewer native assets and to those born into the less favorable socialpositions. . . . In pursuit of this principle greater resources might be spenton the education of the less rather than the more intelligent, at least over acertain time of life, say, the earlier years of school (p. 165).

This principle shares the dominant interpretation of variant performance of

cognitive tasks but treats it in a more charitable manner and subjugates it toa more egalitarian political ideal. Education within its context is moreinterventionist than in the Rawlsian framework. It is expected to work lessin favour of societal reproduction and more in favour of a perfectionist idealof human individuality and collectivity. Still, this kind of redress leaves thephysiologist or geneticist essentialism untouched, and, therefore, the kind of off-setting education it suggests is problematic. The real causes of thetranslation of dissimilarity into inequality may be obscured, resulting in aneducational inability to address the social and cultural origins of thecategorisation of people into the advanced and those ‘lagging behind’ them.

Thus, without considering the principle of redress a preferable alternative tothe Rawlsian maximin, I have discussed it here nevertheless in order tofacilitate the exposition of Rawls’ conception of education. Rawls contraststhe two principles, that is, the difference and the redress, as follows:

The difference principle is not, of course, the principle of redress. It doesnot require society to move in the direction of an equality of naturalassets. We are not to try to even out handicaps as if all were expected tocompete on a fair basis in the same race. But the difference principlewould allocate resources in education, say, so as to improve the long-termexpectation of the least favored. If this end is attained by giving moreattention to the better endowed, it is permissible; otherwise not. And inmaking this decision, the value of education should not be assessed onlyin terms of its productivity effects, that is, its realising a person’s capacity





to acquire wealth. Equally important, if not more so, is the role of education in enabling a person to enjoy the culture of his society and totake part in its affairs, and in this way to provide each man with a securesense of his own worth (p. 166).

Let us comment on the conception of education that Rawls’ epistemo-logical assumptions allow, as displayed in the above citation. Educationappears to be an institution that does not aim to even out something thatprecedes it: differences in performance are not the outcome of educationitself. They emerge from differences in natural endowment that pre-existenculturation. Far from being responsible for their existence, education,therefore, stands in a subject-object relation to them. It takes them as givenand has the function of channeling them in such a way that collectiveprofit will emerge from them. It is even legitimate for education,according to Rawls, to concentrate on the better ‘endowed’, if that wouldpromote the long-term end of improving the life of the least favoured. It isobvious here that the cogency of Rawls’ difference principle not onlypresupposes a comprehensive genetic account of talent but even stands orfalls by the latter’s validity. For, if the debatable assumption about naturalgiftedness proves wrong and social theory is right in claiming thatqualitative difference of intellect is exclusively the outcome of socialasymmetry and often injustice, the difference principle will be nothing buta further legitimation of inequality. Likewise, the Rawlsian conception of education would produce an institutional apparatus for the perpetuation of inequality, unconscious of its role in social reproduction and unable toaddress the problem of the initial artificial separation of the ‘sheep and thegoats’, judged in terms of knowledge. Justice as fairness would block interventionist efforts and off-setting educational treatment of culturalcapital. It would be incompatible with a political teaching for reformingpurposes. So the educational dilemma is either to cling to liberalism or tocontribute to its reformulation.

Also, since the anthropological assumptions underlying justice asfairness reflect the individualist tenets of liberalism, it is predictable thateducation will serve the accommodation of competitiveness as a constantof interested selfhood in the social context rather than change it. On

dealing with the arrangements of the institutions of a constitutionaldemocracy in a way that justifies the two principles of justice, Rawlsexplains that approximations are possible,

. . . provided the government regulates a free economy in a certain way.More fully, if law and government act effectively to keep marketscompetitive, resources fully employed, property and wealth widelydistributed over time, and to maintain the appropriate social minimum,then if there is equality of opportunity underwritten by education for all,the resulting distribution will be just (p. 140).

Below we shall discuss whether the goal of equal opportunities exhauststhe significance of education for justice. To summarise what we have





explored so far, Rawls’ theory not only is more comprehensive than itadmits, but, in the wake of this comprehensiveness, holds a particularconception of education that is unaware of its own complicities andreproductive function. Couched in a framework that understands

difference in natural qualitative terms and assumes a concomitantmotivational ground of social/moral action, education would be compelledto undertake only a very limited and long-term reforming task regardingsocial justice.

As I mentioned previously, another point where Rawls’ account of education emerges concerns equal opportunity.8 The egalitarian formalismunderlying the role given to education becomes clearer in the followingformulation: ‘we suppose that, in addition to maintaining the usual socialoverhead capital, government provides for equal educational opportunitiesfor all either by subsidising private schools or by operating a public schoolsystem’ (p. 141). Egalitarian educational formalism signifies the idea thatschools must have a standard formal approach to all students—didactically and with regard to the course material—in order to securemeritocracy and equal opportunity to achieve distinction. We encounterthis idea in Talcott Parsons’ sociology of education, which has attractedcriticisms to the effect that he loses sight of the fact that equal standards of teaching and assessment cannot neutralise uneven performances thatderive from social inequalities (Blackledge and Hunt, 1989). Rawls’ viewthat ‘equality of opportunity is a certain set of institutions which assuresequally good education and chances of culture for all and which keepsopen the competition for positions on the basis of qualities reasonablyrelated to performance’ (Rawls, 1999, p. 143) echoes Parsonian socialtheory.9 Rawls understands equal educational opportunities only as theeradication of discrimination and favouritism in classrooms because hisepistemological assumptions commit him to a naturalist interpretation of talent, ability and effort:

Assuming that there is a distribution of natural assets, those at the samelevel of talent and ability and who have the same willingness to use them,should have the same prospects of success regardless of their initial placein the social system, that is, irrespective of the class into which they were

born. In all sectors of society there should be roughly equal prospects of culture and achievement for everyone similarly endowed and motivated(p. 161).

Had Rawls questioned the naturalist account of endowment, he wouldhave been compelled to reconsider the functionalist socio-theoretical basisof the difference principle and perceive its complicity in the symbolic andpractical reproduction of inequality.

Overall, Rawls overlooks the active involvement of education in theshaping of subjectivity (including aspects of it such as ability and

motivation) and this leads him to a vision of education that is morereproductive of social inequality than transformative. The reforming effectof education can be better served through a vigilance that uncovers the





ways in which some interpretations of existential dissimilarity, on the onehand, and political inequality, on the other, become secret accomplices. Tosummarise, I have so far argued that:

i. Rawls promotes a political liberalism, one that does not, he claims,presuppose any contestable metaphysical accounts of the self andthe world.

ii. To explain why some inequalities are allowed within his secondprinciple of justice, he assumes, epistemologically, that there is sucha thing as natural intelligence and, anthropologically, that humanbeings are rational egoists. He considers these assumptions intuitiveas well as undisputable facts of science and social theory.

iii. Yet, despite their intuitive force in the Western worldview, thoseepistemological and anthropological assumptions have been con-

tested, precisely as ideological—that is, metaphysical after all— justifications of the status quo.iv. Regardless of whether these assumptions prove right or wrong in

future, that they are by now contestable renders them ill-placed inRawlsian political liberalism. The justification they provide forinequality has negative political implications.

v. Educational theory can expose some of the problems in theseRawlsian assumptions and contrast them with new interpretations of the human self.

vi. Thus, my aim has not been to refute Rawls’ assumptions empiricallybut to show, first, that their place in his theory of justice betrays thefact that his liberalism is not political (in the Rawlsian sense) and,second, that they are not as enabling as they are usually taken to be.Exploring the counterintuitive—that is, those assumptions that goagainst the Rawlsian intuitive ones—may point to a new springboardfor organising political education and reforming the political system,and to an ethic that would offer no legitimation to inequality.

TEACHING CITIZENSHIP

Let us pull together the main arguments. Rawls’ principles of justice

depend on comprehensive liberalist assumptions about the knowing andethical self that are so deeply entrenched in hegemonic discourse aboutsubjectivity as to give the impression that they map indisputable naturalfacts. Educational theory in its hybrid drawing from diverse disciplinessuch as sociology and philosophy could play a more active part than isusual and provide alternative accounts of the self, thereby exposing thecomprehensive character of Rawls’ political liberalism. Educationaltheory also demonstrates that, regrettably, as an institution, educationhas a more serious and consistent involvement in shaping subjectivitiesalong the divisive lines that the dominant epistemology of giftedness and

inherent self-centeredness establishes. In this way, education has apolitical responsibility for existing inequalities. From this, it follows thateducationalists also have a moral duty to reconsider its reproductive role





and to contribute to social change instead of accommodating and servingunequal enculturation. Such a conception of education presupposes asense of inequality redress that puts it at odds with Rawls’ account of education for equality. Organising citizenship education in a political

liberalist fashion, either as a separate curricular provision or as a generalpedagogical attitude-orientation, enervates the critical and social-reform-ing potential of pedagogy. It becomes ethnocentric in presenting liberalistconvictions as true descriptions of the human condition. When sucheducation faces the neutralist predicament—that is, the robust demand onall cultures to commit themselves to neutralism10—this subtle ethnocentr-ism becomes manifest, since the management of non-liberal othernessconveniently appears to be the only challenge to liberalism’s apotheosis.

What kind of citizenship education does this critique of Rawls point to?Using the above summary as a background, I shall move to mysuggestions. First, a more interventionist and transformative educationcan be approached both theoretically and practically through a rejectionof liberalist epistemological and anthropological essentialism. Teachingcitizenship should not comprise only the transmission of values,substantive or otherwise, nor simply familiarisation with civic virtues oracquisition of political scientific knowledge. A more expressive, activeand participative practice (Mills, 2004, pp. 260 and 276) may effect moreinvolvement in decision-making but it cannot change, by itself, apolitically suspect self-image. For, teaching and practising tolerance andrespect may contribute to the cultivation of refined and sensitive politicalattitudes. If, however, a person’s political conception of herself asintellectually superior and interest-driven remains unaltered, her attitudeswill lapse into condescension and competitiveness. Likewise, the feelingof intellectual inferiority of the ‘losers’ in the natural lottery will effect aninternalisation of social failure. This will never let them questionestablished Occidental divisions such as the mentalist privileging of theintellectual over the manual or the performative over the non-measurable,and it will never allow the inequalities to be revealed and more radicalsocial change to be pursued. Political education then should give priorityto the de-schooling of those presuppositions that influence the affectiveand the imaginary, that is, our feelings about ourselves and others and our

visions about what is possible for humanity. When political thinking isdetermined by such presuppositions, it accommodates inequality at adeeper level; it gives it ontological citizenship, so to speak. It renouncesinequality politically, only to reintroduce a version of it—the Rawlsianprinciple of difference has served as an example of this—as a motivatingforce for ‘naturally gifted’ people to make their ‘talents’ available to the‘less gifted’, for the benefit of all. The Rawlsian justification for economicinequalities, even where this is found in mitigated forms, is notindependent of political inequalities, in my view, and it must be combatedboth theoretically and in practice.

To combat such political implications, citizenship education mustenlarge its perspective by turning to the connection of the public spherewith the way in which pupils understand themselves and their positioning





in society. It must use the negating of essentialism as a springboard fromwhich to explore the possibility of alternative, more daring and more justpolitical and social bonds in the future.

In more concrete educational terms, teaching citizenship for critique and

social change rather than adaptation and social maintenance shouldinvolve an open questioning of the way the self is pictured epistemolo-gically and anthropologically. Such questioning can be carried outtheoretically as a part of a (meta)-critical thinking approach within acitizenship course where students will be directed towards examining, orquestioning, the political implications of their self-image for issues of

justice and equality. Students could also be invited to consider possibleworlds and utopias in which our assumptions about the human conditionwould be different. A strategy of exchange of positions and narrativeimagination regarding one’s perception of one’s performance and itssocial significance as well as an attempt to explain non-essentialisticallyone’s progress would be helpful. A very early and simple example of thisis Heraclitus’ dictum that he would not have had the intellectual qualitythat characterised his life if he had been born a slave, or a poor citizen, or awoman. Even if not taken at face value, since the aspects that affect one’slife history are more multiple and complex than such categories of socialdifferentiation, this example has a political pertinence for citizenshipeducation. It points to a contemplation of one’s own existential positionand a capacity to imagine oneself in an alternative, less favourablecondition that are often missing today, even in discourses belonging to thepolitics of difference. For, arguably, such discourses seem more frequentlyto shift the attention of citizenship education to participatory, inclusive,even ‘charitable’ models of treating otherness to the neglect of thetheoretical perception and construction of otherness in hegemonicdiscourse that lies behind these.

CONCLUSION

Thinking about epistemological and anthropological issues has importantimplications for teaching citizenship,11 for the following reasons. First, the

scope of political education depends on how we understand the role of education in general. For instance, a fatalist indictment of education asinescapably reproductive of existing structures of inequality, ultimatelyattributable to human nature, is bound to elicit less radical expectationsfrom citizenship education than a more interventionist conception. Howmuch we concede to education’s capacity to redirect interests and shapebetter subjectivities is a crucial determining factor of what citizenshipshould mean today. Second, the aims of political education vary accordingto the way we comprehend the reforming effect of schooling. In spite of the importance of the fact that, as Johnston (2005) convincingly argues, a

Rawlsian educational theory encourages pluralistic dialogue and debate, apolitical education modeled on Rawls’ liberalism would promote socialintegration and socialisation, but to a lesser degree social change. In fact,





the demands of a neutralist political education are greater in reconstructiveterms on those who espouse non-liberal doctrines than they are on liberalsthemselves, where they are likely to have a reinforcing effect that extendsto the comprehensive dimensions of liberalism (Parry, 1999, p. 34).

Finally, answers to ultimate questions about the self and the world, farfrom being circumventible, determine political education both in contentand purpose. If abilities and dispositions are to a large degree natural andpre-given, political education preparing future citizens for justice andequality will consist in imparting the political attitudes that favour theunobstructed deployment of individual talents for the sake of the publicweal. If one questions the innateness assumption and the liberalist accountof human motivation, however, one is likely to become an advocate for apolitical education that prepares future citizens for more criticalconceptions of justice and redistribution of wealth. Ultimately, what isat stake is the positioning of citizenship education between the Is and theOught: in other words, what should citizenship education aim to achieve?Should it be closer to a morally-disposed management of existing realitiesor to a commitment to change those realities for the sake of a moreprofound ethical worldview? I have argued that, if thought through to itsend, this positioning relies on, or, perhaps, is conditioned by, implicitcomprehensive depictions of the knowing and moral self.

As a final illustration of how this applies to Rawls’ theory, consider hisnotion of what a realistic utopia might be in one of his last works, The Lawof Peoples. The vision of a reasonably just constitutional democraticsociety is a realistic utopia on two conditions, the first of which is relevanthere. To be realistic, a liberal conception of justice ‘must rely on the actuallaws of nature and achieve the kind of stability those laws allow, that is,stability for the right reasons. It takes people as they are (by the laws of nature), and constitutional and civil laws as they might be, that is, as theywould be in a reasonably just and well-ordered democratic society’(Rawls, 2002, pp. 12–13). What does it mean to ‘take people as they are(by the laws of nature)’? I hope to have shown that, for Rawls, this meansto hold the epistemological and anthropological ideas that he takes asgeneral facts of natural science and social theory, and to allow ‘science’(natural and social) to decipher for us the constraints that reality imposes

on the imagination. As I have argued, however, ideas that are takenas facts by some trends in some sciences are questioned by other trendswithin those sciences or by other sciences. By contrasting those ideas toalternative views and exposing their contestable status, I hope also to haveshown that the only sense in which the myth of ‘realism’ they offer is‘realistic’ is that it blocks the imaginative reach of normativity. By this Imean that these ideas are employed by liberalism in order to demarcatewhat is feasible and worth pursuing; in this sense they appear as realistic,that is, sensitive to ‘how things actually are’. Yet, ironically, they arerealistic only in another sense: in their unwitting reinforcement of reality

as it is. In other words, a theory that takes accounts of ‘how people are’ forgranted serves the affirmation and conservation of the actual—the statusquo—as against the possible. It seeks the best feasible vision within the





naturalised confines of existing reality. Education might rather want thoseconfines shattered.12

Correspondence: Marianna Papastephanou, University of Cyprus,

Department of Education, PO Box 20537, Nicosia 1678 Cyprus.Email: [email protected]

NOTES

1. As Kenneth Strike remarks, Rawls holds that comprehensive doctrines are necessary for people

having a conception of the good but at the same time he regards them as ‘the problem’ (Strike,

1998, p. 222).

2. The difference principle: ‘all differences in wealth and income, all social and economic

inequalities, should work for the good of the least favored’ (Rawls, 1999, p. 163). The difference

principle is also ‘a reciprocity principle expressing a natural condition of mutual advantage’(ibid.).

3. Evidently, cases of physical damage or special needs that some people may carry from birth

belong to a different category and should not be conflated with the assumption of natural talent.

A discussion of the former goes beyond the scope of this article and is left aside.

4. Hence, the fact that the principles of justice are not founded on the social position or natural

endowments of the particular social agent does not entail, as one might think, that they are

independent from the very assumption of natural endowments. On the contrary, as we have seen,

the content of the difference principle relies on a naturalist essentialist conception of talent.

5. ‘It is perfectly true, as some have said [with reference to Hayek—M.P.], that unequal inheritance of

wealth is no more inherently unjust than unequal inheritance of intelligence’ (Rawls, 1999, p. 143).

6. In ‘Kantian Constructivism’ Rawls admits in passing (while arguing for something else) the

following: ‘in justice as fairness the first principles of justice depend upon those general beliefsabout human nature and how society works which are allowed to the parties in the original

position’ (Rawls, 1999, p. 351). Thus he admits a dependence on philosophical assumptions, but

the crucial point for him is their generality.

7. In justice as fairness, ‘the main ideals of the conception of justice are embedded in the two

model-conceptions of the person and of a well-ordered society. And, granting that these ideals

are allowed by the theory of human nature and so in that sense feasible, the first principles of

justice to which they lead, via the constructivist procedure of the original position, determine the

long-term aim of social change’ (Rawls, 1999, p. 352).

8. In his words, it is necessary ‘that the various offices to which special benefits or burdens attach

are open to all. It may be, for example, to the common advantage, as just defined, to attach

special benefits to certain offices. Perhaps by doing so the requisite talent can be attracted to them

and encouraged to give its best efforts. But any offices having special benefits must be won in afair competition in which contestants are judged on their merits. If some offices were not open,

those excluded would normally be justified in feeling unjustly treated, even if they benefited

from the greater efforts of those who were allowed to compete for them’ (Rawls, 1999, p. 51).

9. Arguably, Parsonian functionalism is not the only possible influence on Rawls’ views. Sociology

of education drawing from Theodor Schutz’s theory of human capital can also be shown to be

compatible with Rawls’ position.

10. As Parry puts it, contemporary political liberals hope to produce ‘an education which will

encourage future citizens to sustain a form of politics which is limited in its scope and neutral in

its dealings with the diversity of conceptions of the good life which exist within modern pluralist

societies’ (Parry, 1999, p. 23).

11. Consider the following passage in Rawls’ Political Liberalism (1993). Political liberalism ‘will

ask that children’s education include such things as knowledge of their constitutional and civicrights so that, for example, they know that liberty of conscience exists in their society and that

apostasy is not a legal crime, all this to insure that their continued membership when they come

of age is not based simply on ignorance of their basic rights or fear of punishment for offences





that do not exist. Moreover, their education should also prepare them to be fully cooperating

members of society and enable them to be self-supporting; it should also encourage the political

virtues so that they want to honor the fair terms of social cooperation in their relations with the

rest of society’ (p. 199).

12. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Philosophy of Education Seminar of the

London Institute of Education on 5 November, 2004. I would like to thank Terry McLaughlin forthe invitation to present this work on that occasion, Paul Standish for his valuable critical

suggestions, John Colbeck for proof-reading the paper, Richard Smith for some previous

discussions on issues concerning the possibility of a more active employment of education in

relation to philosophy, and Antonis Hatzistavrou, John White and Patricia White for their many

helpful comments.

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