The Whats and Hows of Distributive Justice in and around Education

A great deal of work on educational equality has addressed the question of how to achieve equality. In his influential work, however, Takehiko Kariya looked closely into the documents in which teachers and scholars claimed educational equality to be established, and observed that the rhetoric and policy claim for educational equality in Japan are so peculiar that the phrase of “meritocratic discrimination” makes some sense, which, in his view, is a kind of category mistake. Since then, for roughly two decades, egalitarians have not successfully responded to this criticism.<BR><BR>However, in the light of what we are able to know today from the literature on distributive justice and educational equality, contrary to all expectations and not necessarily in a sophisticated tone, vernacular voices recorded in a collection of education practices titled “Donna Komo Kiristende Hoshii (No Child Left Behind),” published forty years ago, tell us that sufficiency and sometimes priority, but not only equality, were implicitly regarded as a demand of justice in education. Unfortunately, however, they did not have the available linguistic resources that they needed, especially in order to constitute their desired education.<BR><BR>This article discusses issues of distributive justice in and around education with a focus on the clear distinction between three categories of distributive principle: egalitarian, prioritarian, and sufficientarian (adequacy) principles. The basic contrast between them is as follows. Equality is necessarily comparative or relational, while priority and sufficiency are not. Further, with regard to the latter two, the priority view gives attention exclusively to benefiting the least advantaged, while the sufficiency view stresses the importance of people living above a certain threshold.<BR><BR>It is worth remarking that even if the elimination of inequality in and around education is one important concern of educational policy, it is only one. Depending on which principles education is based on, normative judgments about what is to be distributed and how are varied. Furthermore, if, as some philosophers have suggested, equality, priority, and sufficiency are not mutually exclusive principles, then what matters is not only which principle is adopted but how they are combined. Thus in order to understand their philosophical foundation and their political and educational relevance, much ink is spilled on recent controversies generated by advocates of each category of distributive principles applied to education. Among them, a meritocratic conception of educational equality and the positional aspect of education, both of which are articulated by Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift, are illuminating education as a multifaceted good.