Abstract
Let us assume that you want to improve the world. To do that well, you must understand at least four closely related matters.
First, you must have good ideals that inform both the ends you seek and the means you use. Note that it is not enough to have ideals and to put them into practice. Mussolini had ideals and, in pursuing them, made the world considerably worse. Your ideals must be good. Since we human beings cannot directly perceive moral truths, the best we can do is to make and defend public arguments for our principles, inviting critical feedback, modifying the ideals in response to thoughtful objections, and holding ourselves and others accountable for our reasons.
Second, you must understand how the world works, and especially the factors and processes that help achieve the ends you seek and the barriers that stand in the way. Third, you must have strategies: ideas for how to move from the ways things are toward the ideal. A fully acceptable strategy is not an answer to the question, ‘What must be done?’ That is too easy; one could simply proclaim that every child must be given an excellent education or that the Supreme Court must desegregate neighborhoods as well as schools. Those are wishes, not strategies. A strategy gives us something fruitful to do. But it doesn’t stop with our own actions, which are too small to matter to the world as a whole. It begins with our actions but gives us leverage over bigger systems.
The question of leverage brings us to the fourth domain of relevant knowledge. We must understand how institutions work and how they can reasonably be expected to change in response to our actions.
These four issues are badly segregated in contemporary intellectual life. In wide ranges of the social sciences, students are taught that moral values are opinions that may bias their empirical findings and should therefore be disclosed as limitations. Budding social scientists are not taught that they must have good values or what it means to construct a normative argument. Meanwhile, philosophers and political theorists are very good at constructing and deconstructing normative arguments, but they are not sufficiently attuned to facts – including facts about our complex and highly imperfect social institutions. Knowing how an ideal society might work is of little help if we are trying to move forward from where we are.
In the movie Lincoln (written by Tony Kushner), the president tells Thaddeus Stevens,
A compass, I learnt when I was surveying, it’ll – it’ll point you True North from where you’re standing, but it’s got no advice about the swamps and deserts and chasms that you’ll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination you plunge ahead, heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp, what’s the use of knowing True North?
Knowing which way to set off is part of strategy. Strategy is largely ignored in both the normative and empirical disciplines. To the extent that it is studied and taught, it is mostly in professional schools, where the question is what makes a good strategy for a lawyer or for a school administrator. That begs the question of whether it is a good strategy to turn to the law or to school administration in the first place. In other words, we need strategies for citizens and social movements, not just for professionals.
In Education, Justice & Democracy, the editors, Danielle S. Allen and Rob Reich, and their distinguished contributors attempt to reintegrate ideals, facts (which they call ‘constraints’) and strategies. Those are the headings of the three major parts of the volume, but many individual chapters address all three concerns. They narrow the focus from improving the world (in general) to the still-capacious topic of education in the United States. That choice reflects moral, empirical, and strategic assumptions: the authors assume that education has real potential to improve human lives, and we have opportunities to change education. The authors also narrow the normative focus from all worthy ideals to one: equality. They recognize that other values – from freedom to family autonomy – also matter, but they think that equality deserves special attention in relation to American education today.
The chapter by Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift neatly illustrates the close integration of ideals, empirical observations, and strategies. They posit the existence of a ‘familial relationship good’. By identifying that good, they contribute to the normative debate. Brighouse and Swift argue that ‘children’s interests can be well met’ in families, and at the same time, adults have an ‘interest in having a parental relationship’ because this ‘makes a distinctive and important contribution to adult flourishing’ (p. 204). They identify some practical implications. For instance, a school ‘should do what it can to avoid jeopardizing or interfering with healthy parent-child relationships’ (p. 213). On the other hand, the good of familial relationships does not give parents the right to a school in perfect accord with their own values, nor does it permit parents to choose schools so as to confer competitive advantages on their own children, a phenomenon that Reich also decries in his chapter.
How do Brighouse and Swift know that this good of familial relationships exists? They have made general observations about the families around them: ‘Children enjoy the loving attention of, and bond with, a particular adult . . .’ (p. 204). They have also made more specific observations about current practices: ‘reading a bedtime story’, for example, involves ‘intimately sharing a space’ with a child, giving the child ‘exclusive attention’, and sometimes introducing the child to stories important in the family over generations.
Note that these observations combine empirical and normative dimensions, and they are culturally/historically specific. I doubt that Aristotle let his kids pick a bedtime picture book, which is one of many reasons that familial relationships do not feature in his philosophy in the way that Brighouse and Swift would recommend. The fact that reading bedtime stories is culturally specific does not mean that the underlying value is culturally relative. We may be better off if we read to our children before they sleep. The reasons Brighouse and Swift offer for this practice are valid and should persuade someone who does not read to his children at night to consider doing so. But their philosophical argumentation rests on intentional social practices, such as bedtime stories. The volume as a whole depends on reflection on our experience with schooling in the United States. That is very different from the kind of philosophy that proceeds from first principles and describes an ideal state.
If one wants to improve the world by making schools more equal, one needs a moral theory of equality. In chapter 1, Helen Ladd and Susanna Loeb offer three standards by which to judge equality: access to schools of equal quality, equal opportunity for each child, or an adequate education for all. They also distinguish three ways to assess the quality of schools: resources, the schools’ processes and practices, and student outcomes. Those two distinctions produce at least nine different options for measuring equality – and more if multiple approaches are combined. Ladd and Loeb defend no single option but suggest that the measures we use should depend on our criterion of equality.
In chapter 2, Rob Reich shows that adequacy is not necessarily an easier standard to meet, for the bar may be set very high. But equality is more appropriate to the extent that educational success is a positional good. For instance, a job will go to the best-qualified candidate, notwithstanding his or her absolute level of ability. The government should not allow parents to obtain positional advantage through better public schools.
In chapter 3, Anthony Simon Laden describes this whole debate as dependent on a distributional account of equality, in which ‘the subjects of justice are basically passive recipients’ and ‘justice is easily thought of as realized by policies worked out and implemented by experts’. In other words, it is all about how much and how good an education should be given to every child. For him, equality is not (only) distributional but also relational; it is about treating others as worthy interlocutors. That means that it is essential to teach equality as a set of skills and dispositions. Sigal Ben-Porath likewise treats the content of education as essential to the question of equality; she argues that nation-states must teach their children to recognize a ‘shared fate’.
The whole focus on schools would be misguided under certain possible empirical conditions. For example, it might be the case that intelligence is like height: something that grows over the course of childhood and that may be stunted by poor treatment, but that largely follows an innate course for each individual. Then, it would not matter whether schools were equal; children would not be. But Gregory Walton assembles evidence that intelligence test scores are highly sensitive to context and to the way the test is presented. That implies that intelligence is relational. It is a measure of how you relate to the immediate environment and the other people in it. Much as I would be far more confident, motivated, secure, and competent in my own living room than on a sound stage, I will be more ‘intelligent’ in some settings than others.
Likewise, a focus on schools would be misplaced if some populations were resistant to education, for example, as a result of having suffered severe discrimination by the dominant society. But Angel L. Harris shows that for two such populations – African Americans in Maryland and Afro-Caribbeans in Britain – prolonged injustice has strengthened their commitment to educating their children.
Nevertheless, schools have their work cut out for them because of social injustices beyond their walls. Carola Súarez-Orozco and Marcelo M. Súarez-Orozco show that many young immigrants suffer from not being able to master English in time to face high-stakes tests and from having families split by immigration. Insensitive policies exacerbate their predicament. Likewise, Richard Rothstein forcefully argues that the residential segregation that reinforces the deep segregation and inequality within our schools does not arise naturally, as a result of free individual choices. Public policies and brutal enforcement by the state and by mobs of white citizens have concentrated African Americans in certain neighborhoods and have kept them there. Rothstein makes the case for integrationist policies regarding zoning and planning.
The section on strategy is the weakest, not because of the chapters, which are individually well done, but because we lack plausible strategies for addressing the kinds of problems this volume documents. Brighouse and McGuinn are assigned to the strategy section because they offer advice for policymakers who must balance parental rights and interests against other values. Patrick McGuinn insightfully describes the intellectual struggle within the Democratic Party over testing, accountability, and school reform. His analysis is relevant to strategy insofar as the Democratic Party has considerable power, and one can advocate within it for either a favorable or critical stance toward tests.
Anna Marie Smith makes a strong normative argument for federal judicial intervention, but she shows that the courts have moved in the opposite direction from what she would recommend, and she ends with a reminder that the judiciary never leads important reforms unless pressed by ‘mass organizing’ and ‘radical democratic social movements’. Starting such a movement would be a strategy; wishing for different federal jurisprudence is not.
Seth Moglen ends the volume with a moving and evocative story of how certain Lehigh University faculty (including himself) committed themselves to ‘intellectual desegregation’ by working with residents of the surrounding community in Bethlehem, PA, to understand and address the problems of their city. The ‘segregation’ that concerns him is less the division among facts, values, and strategies with which I began this review than the gap between academic and popular knowledge. However, when academics and others address problems together, they will ask the question, ‘What should we do?’ which inevitably unifies ideals, facts, and strategies. As Moglen writes, universities ‘can widen the public sphere, bringing people together to deliberate’. They might ‘in short, help us become more answerable to one another’.
The virtue of his effort is also its limitation: its small scale. He and his collaborators in Bethlehem and Lehigh did not address the issues of explicit concern throughout the rest of the book: unequal opportunities and outcomes in K-12 public schools across the country. They looked at the immediate environment and focused particularly on the pending arrival of a casino, rather than the educational system. But just as the Progressive Movement emerged from Settlement Houses and other small experiments in democratic thinking, so the mass movements that we need today may grow out of experiments like Moglen’s. They will need the broader analysis of facts, constraints, and strategies exemplified by the other chapters in this volume; but in turn, academic analysis will need the practical experience and reflection of people like Moglen and his professional and lay colleagues.