A Systematic Political Philosophy of Education

Abstract

My dissertation proposes a fundamental repositioning of philosophy of education relative to political philosophy. I argue that we cannot afford doing political philosophy without a theory of education, just as we cannot afford making philosophy of education modular, insulated from the rest of political philosophy. To this end, I propose a systematic political philosophy of education, meaning both a systematization of existing approaches to education and a comprehensive assessment of their merits and limitations. I reconstruct the main theories of education – liberal, conservative, democratic, and critical – from their most basic social ontological assumptions to their political programs for education. I then argue that they all struggle to realize their goals for education either as a result of flawed social ontological assumptions or because of a failure to institutionalize their commitments in practice. The lessons I draw from these critiques form the basis of my own novel systematic theory of education. My theory combines traditional political philosophy with insights spanning critical theory, social ontology, and education studies. The central goal is to reconfigure the school as a democratic institution of social learning that not only enables the flourishing of all students but helps society as a whole progress. The project advances on two levels: a methodological and a substantive-normative one. Methodologically, I resist a growing tendency towards the unmooring of political philosophy and philosophy of education. This tendency is peculiar both from a historical and a conceptual perspective. Historically, education was a core issue of political philosophy. Many, even most, of the canonical political philosophers started from the assumption that education is a central purpose of political life. In my substantive introduction, I take a historical excursus through the canonical political thinkers who best exemplify this emphasis on education: Plato, Rousseau, and Dewey. For all the differences in their views, all three understood education as essential to realizing their visions. They would have regarded any political philosophy that failed to address education as incomplete. Today, however, few political philosophers address the subject at all, let alone give it pride of place in their theories. This unmooring has had bad consequences for both subfields. Much contemporary work in philosophy of education takes for granted a liberal social ontology and liberal normative commitments without sufficient critical scrutiny. Similarly, most contemporary political theory neglects the topic of education and operates under the assumption of fully formed liberal agents. The lack of conceptual clarity is mirrored in political practice. Education is marred by persistent and seemingly intractable disagreements – from controversies about indoctrination to failures to realize the ideal of equality of opportunity. Our substantive disagreements about education, I argue in my first chapter, are not merely value disagreements about the goals of education. They stem from deep-rooted social ontological assumptions about the nature of human beings and society. But these social ontological assumptions are rarely acknowledged, let alone articulated, by political philosophers or philosophers of education. To correct this, I propose a novel metatheory that shows the systematic connections between the social ontology, normative commitments, and political programs of our dominant approaches to education (liberal, conservative, democratic). My reconstruction illuminates several surprising agreements and differences between them. For example, it reveals that many of our most heated political debates about education, between left and right liberals, are merely intramural disagreements among thinkers committed to the same individualist ontology. The systematic reconstruction also illuminates these theories’ failure to generate a coherent vision for education. My critiques show that each approach is characterized by a flawed or incomplete social theory which prevents it from promoting its own values and fulfilling its aims for education. In the case of liberal theories, I show that the liberal goal of cultivating autonomy is selfundermining in light of liberal theory’s individualist social ontology. In the second chapter, I turn to critical theories, which focus on the function of education in reproducing our broader social system. Whereas the dominant approaches start by asking about the nature and goals of education in general, critical theories analyze our contemporary educational systems under specific political and economic conditions. They reveal how schools contribute to perpetuating an oppressive and unjust social system. In other words, the focus of these theories is not on the school as a standalone institution, but as a particularly important subsystem in a larger process of social reproduction. While they are promising in many ways, I nevertheless argue that critical theories of education also have distinct limitations. In particular, even though their social theory and normative commitment are more compelling than the dominant views’, they do not satisfactorily translate these into practical proposals for remaking our systems of education. Having found none of the existing approaches fully satisfactory, I start developing the positive and evaluative dimensions of my own view in the third chapter. I go beyond critical social theory while relying on the broad strokes of its ontology of the human. My aim is to supplement this ontology by drawing on both empirical social studies and complexity theory to more precisely characterize the social relations and practices that constitute the domain of education. More specifically, I argue that we can best understand the educational subsystem by attending to its overlap and co-integration with the family, the state, and economic production. Schools are the mediating institutional domain between the family on one hand and the polity and economic production on the other. At the evaluative level, I articulate three critiques of social pathologies that I believe have been ignored or underutilized in critical education studies: alienation, commodification, and fragmentation. Alienation refers to a pathological relation of disconnection from one’s own learning, other students, and teachers. Commodification and fragmentation, on the other hand, are problems with the organization and distribution of resources in the education system. In my fourth and final chapter, I propose a new program for education that seeks to overcome some of the barriers faced by other systematic theories of education. Attempting to counter the problems I diagnosed and explained in the third chapter, I argue for a few different kinds of interventions. First, I propose restructuring the educational system in order to resist fragmentation by pursuing a unified distributive pool, consolidating school districts, and abolishing charters. Second, I argue for a reconfiguration of the co-integrated subsystems of the family, the school, and production that seeks to empower both children and those involved in their care to be involved in free, meaningful work. Finally, I articulate a set of classroom-level practices that seek to equalize access to development for individual students while cultivating their collective social and political imagination. One of the long-term goals is to make schools into democratic institutions of social learning, through which we strive to remove social blockages such as ideology and reflexivity deficits, in order to collectively solve political problems.