A non-ideal aim of redressing epistemic injustices in corruptive educational environments: Toward restorative epistemic justice

Introduction

The epistemic aims of education and effective pedagogies to achieve these aims have been vigorously discussed by philosophers of education and virtue/vice epistemologists for some time. Several virtue epistemologists have endorsed the cultivation of epistemic virtues as the primary aim of education (e.g. Baehr, 2013, 2019; Curren, 2017). Moreover, writers like Porter (2016) have characterized a standard pedagogy to instill virtue, and have discussed the relevant importance of, for instance, direct and formal instruction in the virtues, exposure to good exemplars, the provision of sufficient opportunities to practice virtuous behaviors, and the enculturation of virtues in students by the ethos of the classroom. More recently, virtue/vice epistemologists have directed attention to the epistemic vices in the context of education and have examined the applicability of the standard pedagogy in remedying these vices (e.g. Battaly, 2016; Tanesini, 2016). The literature, however, has pointed out that this standard pedagogy of the virtue/vice framework may not be very effective in dealing with epistemic injustices. For instance, Battaly (2022) holds that the standard pedagogy can only be effective as an educational method to help children mitigate vices – for example, servility caused by epistemically unjust treatments – by helping them regain self-pride, whereas a different, systemic design is necessary to combat the origin of epistemic injustice.

To understand the relationship between education and epistemic injustices, it is useful to bear in mind, as Kidd (2019) holds, that education can be both edifying (helping children to grow in epistemic virtue) as well as corrupting (prompting them to fall into epistemic vice). Education saturated with epistemic injustice is an education of the latter type. As will be shown below, epistemically unjust educational environments are some of the more important corruptive environments that perpetuate epistemic injustice; finding oneself educated in such an environment is one of the most obvious examples of the environmental bad luck that children often suffer. Notable features of these corruptive environments may include an abusive power relationship between educators and children, the impediment of children’s development of self-trust as eligible inquirers, and children’s lack of control over their educational environments. Kidd (2019) outlines some of the ways that educators can combat the risk of corruption.

Noting that education is often corrupting certainly does not deny that education can be edifying. Rather, it is to notice that while many of the ‘grand’ aims of education are edifying, there also exists, for education, a more modest role and that is to prevent children being corrupted, epistemically speaking. I call this aim of education ‘non-ideal’. The term ‘non-ideal’ is employed in political philosophy to refer to a political theory constrained by actual, non-ideal political and social conditions, including corruptive environments in the real social world (e.g. Sen, 2009; Valentini, 2012). Similarly, when it comes to educational aims, I hold that it is important for educational aims to be sketched not only in ideal, but also in non-ideal terms. Moreover, the non-ideal aims of education also need to be supported by pedagogies, including interpersonal and systemic ones, which ameliorate the influence of education as corruptive epistemic environments.

This article situates educational environments as sometimes corruptive epistemic environments and investigates how testimonial, participant, and hermeneutical injustices can be found there; it also propounds the view that one important non-ideal educational aim is to redress these injustices. A non-ideal approach to educational aims must consider the impact of environmental bad luck on children and the lack of control that they have over the corruptive environments they are in. Accordingly, I propose that such an approach must focus not on the reduction of our implicit prejudices, as is commonly argued in the epistemic injustice literature (e.g. Fricker, 2007), but must focus on providing for the epistemic needs of the child who suffers the injustice, as well as fostering children’s recognition generally of the epistemic needs of those who suffer epistemic injustices in corruptive environments. I argue that our aim in redressing epistemic injustice should be two-fold. First, an interpersonal aim of education is to care for children who are afflicted by epistemic injustice by having their epistemic needs legitimately recognized by caring educators. Second, a systemic approach must offer an educational curriculum for any child and teacher to develop a critical imagination to recognize the epistemic needs of those who are vulnerable to epistemic injustices. This is crucial because not all children are suffering epistemic injustices at present; on the contrary, some children and even educators may potentially commit epistemic injustices owing to their implicit prejudices or asymmetrical power relationships in education. By developing some studies of imagination as a good source for moral practices (e.g. Diamond, 1991; Warnock, 1978) and anti-racist education (Lebron, 2015), I advance indirect interactions using movies and novels, combined with suitable questioning practices, to foster critical imagination for recognizing the epistemic needs of vulnerable people.

The argument proceeds as follows. Section ‘Environmental bad luck and children’s lack of control over corruptive environments’ characterizes epistemic environmental (bad) luck and highlights children’s lack of control over environmental luck. Section ‘Education as corruptive environments’ explains how educational environments are sometimes corruptive and how the specific conditions found in these environments sometimes lead to epistemic injustices. Sections ‘A caring obligation for the recognition of epistemic needs’ and ‘Indirect interactions, combined with questioning, for critical imagination’ propound a non-ideal educational aim in two ways. Section ‘A caring obligation for the recognition of epistemic needs’ presents the first way to care for children who are being afflicted by epistemic injustices by having their epistemic needs legitimately recognized by virtuous educators. Section ‘Indirect interactions, combined with questioning, for critical imagination’ articulates a systemic approach based on indirect interactions, combined with suitable practices of questioning, to equip any student and teacher to have critical imagination that helps them recognize the epistemic needs of those who are vulnerable to epistemic injustices. Section ‘Concluding remarks’ concludes this article and suggests future research focused on the recognition of the epistemic needs of vulnerable people as restorative epistemic justice.

Environmental bad luck and children’s lack of control over corruptive environments

I begin by clarifying the impact of environmental factors on the cultivation of epistemic virtues and the rehabilitation of epistemic vices. Baehr (2011) provides an in-depth exposition of the cultivation of the responsibilist epistemic virtues, like open-mindedness and intellectual honesty, in children. Responsibilists hold that intellectual virtue requires proper motivation (love of truth) and emphasize the importance of self-control in the cultivation of epistemic virtues – that is, to a large extent, intellectual virtue must be self-cultivated (cf. Zagzebski, 1996). In Baehr’s view, epistemic virtue is not acquired naturally, unlike temperament, but is trained through the repetitive choices and actions of an individual.

[I]ntellectual virtues are not ‘natural’ – either in the sense of being innate or in the sense of being a mere product of one’s upbringing or communal influences. Certainly, a person’s upbringing or community can influence whether or the extent to which he possesses an intellectual virtue; but again, virtues are to a significant extent a product of their possessor’s repeated choices or actions – choices or actions that are under their possessor’s voluntary control. (Baehr, 2011: 27)

Epistemic virtues cannot be inculcated in children by external agents like teachers or parents without children’s self-effort. Rather, to qualify as epistemically virtuous, children are required, to a significant extent, to have cultivated those virtues themselves. For instance, they must make proper effort to repeatedly practice virtuous judgments and actions, and while educators surely can assist them in practicing to be virtuous, it is the child themselves who must be properly motivated (through love of knowledge) to keep up these forms of practice.

Clearly, the requirement of self-cultivation is very difficult to fulfill. ¹ First, some children blindly develop epistemic ‘habits’ that are short of full epistemic virtue in their childhood, even when they are still too immature to recognize what they are acquiring and why they are doing so (Sher, 2006: 12). Until they recognize that their judgments and actions are aimed at the acquisition of certain epistemic virtues, they cannot consciously control their learning process on their own. Furthermore, to acquire epistemic virtues, children must have sufficient practical knowledge to balance sets of conflicting epistemic virtues, such as the virtues of cooperation and independence; however, it is unlikely that children in early childhood have the necessary practical knowledge to effect these complicated and context-dependent balancing decisions.

Second, and more importantly, whether children can self-cultivate epistemic virtues depends substantially on environmental luck. Virtuous educators, including trustworthy parents, responsible caregivers, and reliable teachers, can be regarded as good epistemic resources that allow children to cultivate epistemic virtues. For instance, educators may guide children in going outside to interact with animals, sea creatures, birds, and so on, and encourage them to develop epistemic curiosity about the world. Moreover, public institutions, such as libraries and museums, comprise good physical educational resources that can facilitate the development of children’s epistemic virtues. For instance, where a public library is accessible, children and their parents may have many chances to visit the library and cultivate wisdom by reading many novels and illustrated reference books. On the other hand, children are susceptible to the risk of picking up epistemic vices, such as arrogance and dogmatism, in bad epistemic environments (Battaly, 2016). For instance, online environments contain much misinformation and fake news, which make children epistemically vicious in accessing only preferred evidence of their ideas, thus contributing to the polarization of opinions in the post-truth society. ²

Whether children can access good or bad educational resources substantially depends on the environment that they find themselves in during crucial periods of their intellectual development, and whether one finds oneself in a good or bad epistemic environment at a point before one has (self-) acquired intellectual virtue is simply a matter of good or bad luck. I refer to this type of luck as ‘environmental luck’ in education, borrowed from a corresponding notion in political philosophy. In this context, children’s environmental bad luck can be defined as follows:

Interestingly, then it seems that the acquisition of epistemic virtues and the rehabilitation of epistemic vices is not exclusively a matter of self-cultivation; it also depends to a significant degree on the environment the child finds themselves in during the formative period in their epistemic life. Nevertheless, this does not deny that the more effort children make to acquire epistemic virtues on their own, the more likely they are to be praised for the development of their epistemic virtues. The self-cultivation of an individual makes them more praiseworthy. Granted, the point of the above criticisms of self-cultivation is that such a praiseworthy effort is made possible only by children who happen to be in epistemically good environments.

The environmental bad luck is more damaging to children than adult learners because children are socially situated, not in the same way as adults in that they usually have no control over the option of educational environments, at least until they grow to a certain age. In essence, children have no control over the option of whom they learn with and what learning facilities they can access, which makes them more susceptible to environmental bad luck than adults.

Much worse, as children are usually not in a position to escape bad educational environments, they have no power to preemptively avoid corruptive educational environments. In feminist virtue ethics and epistemology, Tessman (2005) and Dillon (2012) hold that moral and epistemic (critical) virtues that aim to empower women, or socially powerless people, and enable them to engage in resistance against oppression and injustice by the privileged can be ‘burdened’. Owing to their deep commitment to such resistance, they do not always achieve their flourishing but may sacrifice it and even be painfully damaged because the privileged may retaliate against them by abusing their power for oppression and injustice. For example, if individual children manifest resistance against toxic parents and prejudicial teachers, they are at a higher risk of more severe retaliation. This leads us to recognize a second important point about corrupting educational environments, that is, that children lack control over bad educational environments.

Taking both Statements 1 and 2 into account, we see that environmental bad luck pushes children to an ‘epistemic dead end’ because they are in little or no position to overcome or even flee from corruptive educational environments that hinder them from acquiring epistemic virtues and rehabilitating epistemic vices.

Education as corruptive environments

The above observations direct our attention to the influence of education as corruptive epistemic environments related to epistemic injustices on children. In this section, I demonstrate that, given the environmental bad luck that children suffer and their lack of control over corruptive educational environments, some children, particularly those belonging to minorities and socially powerless groups, are often exposed to an educational variant of epistemic injustices.

Epistemic injustice can be understood as wrongdoings done to people owing to prejudices against their social identities, including race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and social class, and owing to their inferior social positionality (Fricker, 2007). Testimonial injustice is a form of epistemic injustice in which speakers unduly receive less credibility than they deserve owing to prejudicial stereotypes. A gender-oriented testimonial injustice may be illustrated by detailing a scene in the screenplay of Anthony Minghella, titled The Talented Mr. Ripley. Herbert Greenleaf implicitly possesses a prejudice that negatively links women to being too intuitive and even emotional. When Greenleaf sees Marge Sherwood obsessed with a suspicion that seems absurd to him, he soothes her by saying, ‘Marge, there’s female intuition, and then there are facts’. Greenleaf regards Sherwood as less credible based only on the fact that Sherwood is a woman. This caused Sherwood to be downgraded as a testifier and thus be silenced.

Testimonial injustice can negatively thwart children’s capacity as testifiers in educational environments. Consider the case in which some ‘Zainichi Koreans’, or Koreans with permanent residency in Japan (Taka, 2015), have long been suffering racial discrimination in Japan owing to racial prejudice against them. They may be unjustly marginalized and excluded from trustful conversations with their neighbors. They are even targeted by hate groups that provoke thoughtless speeches in public and are thus threatened and intimidated in Japan (Higaki and Nasu, 2021). Note that such racial discrimination against Zainichi Koreans brings about testimonial injustice against their children in educational environments. As ethnic prejudice is directed at them by classmates and teachers, they may be wrongfully downgraded in their capacity as active testifiers at school even if many of them are born in Japan and thus have good command of the Japanese and Korean languages. Despite their birthplace being in Japan and their familiarity with Japanese language and social customs, they tend to suffer what Fricker (2007: 27) called ‘systematic testimonial injustice’ because of their noticeable difference such as their names or appearance which tracks them throughout various dimensions of their social lives.

This testimonial injustice can take a distinct form in educational environments. Wanderer (2017: 35) distinguishes between thin and thick interpersonal relationships to highlight the different features of testimonial injustice. A thin relationship is characterized by transactions involving strangers’ assessment of each other’s credibility through their verbal or nonverbal interactions in practice, whereas a thick relationship is characterized by interactions involving normative trust among interlocutors. Educational relationships are ‘thick’ relationships; given their close relationship with educators, children trust parents and teachers and expect them to be trustworthy and supportive. When testimonial injustice occurs in a thick relationship, this can constitute a ‘testimonial betrayal’ in education.

Testimonial betrayal can have a devastating impact on children’s affective states (cf. Zembylas, 2022), as children are less powerful than educators in asymmetrical power relationships between them. Consider a report of the case in which Miura, who has roots in the Republic of Uganda and Japan, received microaggressions at her middle school, such as being repeatedly teased by her classmates about her poor sports performance after being encouraged to join an athletic club as they biasedly assumed that she was a good athlete because she was black (Wallace and Inuma, 2021). When she consulted her homeroom teacher with the expectation that he would address the microaggressions she had suffered by her classmates, the teacher did not take her testimony seriously and even told her, ‘You are different from other Japanese students, so it is natural that people around you behaved that way’. This attitude by the teacher toward Miura constituted testimonial betrayal because she felt affectively betrayed by the teacher whom she normatively expected to be trustworthy because of his social role as a teacher. This has put Miura in a situation in which she was unable to recognize that she was being discriminated against and convince herself that she was to blame. Faced with this betrayal at school, Miura had to quit school because of her psychic trauma and lost her self-trust as a testifier (Japan Broadcasting Corporation 2020).

Thus, testimonial betrayal, owing to educators’ abuse of power in educational relationships with children, is a constitutive condition of corruptive educational environments.

This kind of betrayal in education is not confined to the case of testimonial injustice but may include the case of thwarting students in their capacity as potential inquirers (Hookway, 2010; Medina, 2013). Hookway (2010) characterizes this wrong as participant injustice. In essence, it prejudicially dismisses the relevance of children’s questions about an inquiry, downgrading children in their epistemic capacity as inquirers. Consider the example of a bad teacher’s biased treatment of a student who asks questions in a classroom. If a teacher is negatively prejudiced against a student’s social identity, then they will underestimate the student’s question as irrelevant to the inquiry and even ignore it.

Due to prejudice, the teacher fails to respect the student as a potential contributor to discussion (or participant in discussion). The student, who wished to be recognized as a member of a community of people collaborating in the attempt to improve understanding or advance knowledge, cannot be recognized in that way. The result is that the student can no longer think of herself as a participant in inquiry and discussion. What is important in this case is that the leader fails to take the student’s questions seriously. (Hookway, 2010: 155; italics in the original)

Participant injustice by educators whom children legitimately expect to be trustworthy can constitute what I call ‘participant betrayal’, which can even negatively construct children as impotent inquirers. Children participate in a collective inquiry with the aim of not only pursuing the truth but also developing their potential to be good inquirers. In general, children can expect the proper assistance of educators whom they legitimately expect to be trustworthy and supportive because of their social roles. However, if children are repeatedly ignored and thus betrayed by prejudicial educators, they may end up internalizing a distorted image of themselves imposed by the educators and may be unable to develop inquiry skills and self-trust as eligible inquirers.

Children may advance their inquiries even without any dependence on educators. Although some talented children may be able to do so, many children are epistemically vulnerable. The notion of ‘vulnerability’ originates from the Latin word ‘vulnus’, meaning people have an innate competence to suffer because they are embodied in a world (Mackenzie et al., 2014: 2). Suppose that a small child is being bullied at school. The child could be autonomous to the extent that they can make their judgment and act but still needs the assistance of their parents and teachers in deciding the best course of action regarding the bullying. In this respect, the child is morally vulnerable. In the same way, children at the developmental stage as inquirers may be epistemically vulnerable. For instance, they may have trouble dealing with unforeseen questions and opposing ideas or may fruitlessly overthink how to respond to irrelevant questions, thus being frustrated by losing confidence in advancing their inquiries (Sato, 2018). As Brick (2020) explains, treating children as trustworthy epistemic agents, even if they are not yet so, may be crucial in allowing them to develop into trustworthy epistemic agents. Thus, in participating in a collective inquiry, children need educators’ appropriate treatment for their epistemic vulnerability to become eligible inquirers.

The participant betrayal becomes serious given children’s lack of control over corruptive educational environments, as observed in Statement 2. Most children are in a minimal or no position to overcome and escape from participant betrayal because assumed asymmetric power relationships between children and educators may justify adults’ continuous abuse and maltreatment of children, and educators may retaliate against them by abusing their power, as was seen in the case of toxic parents and prejudicial teachers in the previous section. The vicious cycle of participant betrayal and children’s inability to escape from such corruptive environments constructs them as impotent inquirers who convince themselves that they are not eligible inquirers.

Against the backdrop of environmental bad luck and lack of control (in Statements 1 and 2), children can also be afflicted by the occurrence or presence of hermeneutical injustice (Fricker, 2007: Chap. 7). In brief, hermeneutical injustice occurs when a speaker cannot make their experience intelligible only because of a lack of conceptual resources and expressive styles in the collective hermeneutical resources that correspond to the speaker’s experiences. Some children may not yet be competent at articulating their questions and responses and thus may need the support of an educator for critical discussion. However, if educators prejudge the incompetence of children to articulate questions and responses owing to their prejudices, then children may be silenced.

It may be argued that the above hermeneutical predicament in which children get involved may not be the same as hermeneutical injustice, because children may not suffer an absence of common conceptual resources that make proper sense of their social experiences but may struggle to find and use such shared resources (Kotzee, 2017). This suggests that what happens to children above is a distinct hermeneutical predicament that is specific to educational contexts. Children at the stage of becoming acquainted with shared linguistic resources are vulnerable in making their thoughts intelligible as suitable linguistic expressions. As clarified, children normally expect educators to be supportive in considering the possibility that children’s difficulty in articulating their thoughts could stem from their unfamiliarity with the practice of expressing them in public. Thus, if educators provide no proper support for such hermeneutically vulnerable children, children may tend to suffer hermeneutical betrayal as an educational variant of hermeneutical injustice.

Dotson (2012) expanded Fricker’s notion of hermeneutical injustice to show a mixed case of individual agential and structural injustice as contributory injustice perpetuated not only by the absence of shared resources but also by individuals wrongfully refusing reciprocal uptake in communication. Given that environmental bad luck and children’s lack of control over corruptive educational environments, children are susceptible to an educational variant of hermeneutical injustice triggered by prejudiced educators.

A caring obligation for the recognition of epistemic needs

We have seen that testimonial, participant, and hermeneutical betrayals negatively impact children’s epistemic development and that these betrayals often arise in additional background conditions featuring environmental bad luck and lack of control over corruptive educational environments. The question is what educational aim should be set to solve this particular problem. Should educators and the education system strive to: (a) achieve complete (or ‘ideal’) epistemic justice for these children or (b) should it limit itself to a more minimal aim, which is correct for the worst of these epistemic injustices (‘non-ideal’ epistemic justice)? In this article, I hold that the epistemic aim of education should take the non-ideal form to redress epistemic injustices. A non-ideal approach considers the impact of environmental bad luck on children and their lack of control over the corruptive educational environments they are in. In political philosophy, a non-ideal theory of justice factors in the historical and circumstantial conditions of the social world and the limits of human competence in considering what counts as a reasonable obligation for us and what constraints can be legitimately presupposed to achieve justice. Similarly, a non-ideal educational aim concerns a methodology that reconfigures legitimate environmental conditions. ³

I propose that the non-ideal aim should not be the reduction of the implicit prejudices of those guilty of acts of epistemic justice, but should be the fostering of interpersonal and systemic ways to boost all people’s recognition of the epistemic needs of those who suffer epistemic injustices in corruptive educational environments. This is because our implicit prejudices can be spontaneously acquired and exercised outside of our conscious control (e.g. Brownstein and Saul eds, 2016), and we may be moved to consider our interlocutor’s epistemic needs, such as truth and, in real interactions, when they perform an illocutionary act of sincerely telling us something important to them.

An interpersonal approach aims to care for children who are being afflicted by epistemic injustices by having their epistemic needs legitimately recognized by virtuous educators, whereas a systemic approach must offer an educational opportunity for any child (and teacher) to develop critical imagination to recognize the epistemic needs of those who are vulnerable to epistemic injustices.

To expand on the interpersonal approach, special attention must be paid to epistemic care for children who are suffering from an educational variant of epistemic injustices. As clarified in Section ‘Environmental bad luck and children’s lack of control over corruptive environments’, Tessman (2005) and Dillon (2012) considered that moral and epistemic (critical) virtues that encourage children to resist discrimination and injustice can be ‘burdened’ in that they do not always lead children to flourish; instead they sometimes lead to children sacrificing themselves through such resistance. In the case of children who are afflicted by epistemic injustice, children are still existentially vulnerable and less powerful than adults in asymmetrical power relationships in education, so they have little or no option to either (a) combat or (b) even escape from corruptive environments; hence, what we as educators ought to do is provide epistemic care for them.

‘Epistemic care’ refers to our attending to the epistemic needs of vulnerable people, which can be clarified by analogy with the concept of care in ethics. ‘Care ethics’ is concerned with the needs of existentially and morally vulnerable people. For instance, infants are existentially vulnerable, and their practical needs, such as the desire for food, shelter, or clothing, must be met. As Gilligan (1982) proposed, in a caring relationship, one is motivated to care for others in need by responding to their needs. ⁴ For instance, infants cry to get the attention of their caregivers, and the caregivers may change their diaper in response. Similarly, epistemic care can be characterized as a motive to care for epistemically vulnerable people by responding to their epistemic needs.

What is epistemic care for children who are suffering epistemic injustices? Although children are wronged differently depending on testimonial, participant, and hermeneutical betrayals, they all struggle to have their epistemic needs legitimately recognized by good educators. Take the case of hermeneutical betrayal. Children who suffer an educational variant of hermeneutical injustice are unduly prevented from articulating their questions and views in the classroom despite their interest in doing so. Their questions and views may be obscured merely because of their unfamiliarity with orthodox hermeneutical resources, such as the form of asking questions to others. Nevertheless, they may remain unintelligible without good educators’ care about their hermeneutical needs.

From where does such epistemic care derive? In care ethics, Kittay (1999) presented a model that explains our moral obligation to care for vulnerable agents. According to this model, one is held responsible for caring for the needs of vulnerable people in the presence of an individual. Consider the case of a small child who is being bullied at a park but is too vulnerable to cope with the situation despite his moral need to do so. If a neighbor notices him being bullied, then she must intervene in the bullying even if they are not voluntarily motivated to do so. In this case, the child’s need is legitimate; hence, the neighbor is obliged to respond to his need – that is, to help him because he is vulnerable in their presence. In this way, an obligation to care about others’ moral need lies in the fact that one is obliged to care about the legitimate needs of vulnerable people in the presence of a person if one is in a good position to do so.

In analogy with Kittay’s conception of caring obligation, educators can be epistemic agents responsible for caring about the epistemic needs of vulnerable children if they are in a close educational relationship with them and are in a good position to do so (e.g. Johnson, 2020). As clarified in Section ‘Environmental bad luck and children’s lack of control over corruptive environments’, the educational relationship between children and educators is often asymmetric; thus, educators who enter an interpersonal relationship with victimized children have an obligation to recognize their epistemic needs. Consider the case of the epistemic needs of a student participant in a collective inquiry in a classroom. When a student’s question seems irrelevant to the inquiry involved, caring educators may need to consider the possibility that they have difficulty in articulating the questions they want to ask because of the unfamiliarity of the practice of asking questions. Furthermore, even if educators deliberately judge a student’s question as irrelevant, they may trust them and praise them for their attempt to express her view in front of other students (Brick 2020). These cases show that educators need to be responsible for caring about the needs of children in their presence.

So far, I have shown the possibility of epistemic care for vulnerable children with basic epistemic needs and have demonstrated that they must have their epistemic needs recognized by educators. However, there is a limit to epistemic caring obligations. First, educators’ fulfillment of this obligation is required only under the condition that vulnerable children are in their presence. It is conceivable that they care about the needs of the children they are in charge of while remaining indifferent to children who suffer misrecognition in a distant place. Second, although epistemically caring obligations may well be effective between educators and vulnerable children in direct interactions, not all educators can successfully recognize the needs of children. For instance, educators must possess sufficient knowledge about various discriminations, such as racism, sexism, and heterosexism as well as relevant sensitivity to reliably notice the different behaviors of children based on their cognitive developmental stages. This suggests that educators must be epistemically virtuous regarding the recognition of the epistemic needs of vulnerable children to satisfy a given caring responsibility.

Some educators, or people in general, may fail to acquire such a virtue as they may unwittingly possess prejudices against children’s social identities. To reduce this risk, a systemic approach is called for.

Indirect interactions, combined with questioning, for critical imagination

Let us move on to the systemic way to ameliorate epistemic injustices in education. A non-ideal approach needs an educational methodology for any child and the educators to develop critical imagination to recognize the epistemic needs of those who are vulnerable to epistemic injustices. Although a systemic approach may have variations, such as teacher education and institutional arrangements, I focus on a curriculum of indirect interactions, combined with the proper epistemic practice of questioning. As explained in Section ‘Introduction’, the standard approach to vice rehabilitation presupposes that education can be effective in the form of direct interactions between children and educators. The aim of the standard approach to vice rehabilitation is to reform either the unjust epistemic attitude that teachers take to students. However, not all educators are sufficiently virtuous to be capable of such reform; some educators may possess implicit prejudices that can escalate corruption in education. Given this, entrusting the responsibility of redressing epistemic injustices solely to individual educators is risky. Rather, shared resources, such as reputable TV shows, movies, and novels that feature good educational practices may be effectively used. I draw on recent social psychological studies of an indirect contact hypothesis to characterize indirect interactions.

Let us begin by explaining indirect contact theory. Since Allport (1954) formulated a theory of intergroup contact hypothesis to reduce the prejudices of an individual, some positive results have been reported (e.g. Tausch and Hewstone, 2010). These studies have revealed that several conditions must be met at the minimum for direct interactions to have an expected effect on reducing people’s prejudices. First, interactive situations must be designed for any participant to be fairly treated regardless of their social identities. Second, they must include opportunities to work cooperatively by allowing each participant to take advantage of their distinctive epistemic abilities. Third, they must provide participants with a shared goal. Finally, social and institutional authorities must monitor their activities. Although each condition may be an important factor to enable educational interactions to reduce the prejudices of an individual and the resultant epistemic injustices, I do not think that the listed conditions are exclusive and necessary for preparing good environments. Rather, the point seems to be that unless some of the above conditions are met, direct interactions can be ineffective in reducing prejudices.

Note that inadequate direct interactions can even backfire on those who suffer epistemic injustices. For instance, they may suffer secondary harm by being gaslighted by the majority groups among participants unless social and institutional authorities organize a meeting or a class addressing the injustices. McKinnon (2017) articulated this secondary harm as a serious testimonial injustice that can develop psychological disorders in children, such as post-traumatic stress disorder. Similarly, as members of minorities and socially powerless groups often suffer epistemic injustices, they may face epistemic exploitation if people in the majority groups do not show an empathetic understanding of their testimony (Berenstain, 2016).

Inadequate direct interactions may also put participants at risk. Even if participants are willing to correct their prejudices, they may choose to avert direct interactions for fear that their careless words may unintentionally hurt the victims, and that they may severely be blamed for such spoken words. People are vulnerable to such external factors; thus, their susceptibility to such fears or worries may outweigh their goodwill to correct their prejudices. Moreover, participants may be afraid that if they show empathy for prejudiced minorities, they may be exposed to the distorted interpretation of ‘they try to be a saint’ and may face insidious retaliation by the privileged in an inner group, such as harassers at school or office and corrupt politicians.

Therefore, a systemic way of redressing epistemic injustices should consider the potential risks of direct interactions and the susceptibility of vulnerable people to secondary harms and retaliations. For this reason, I propose that indirect educational interactions may hold the key to systemically fostering epistemic care. Recent social psychological studies on the indirect contact theory have been helpful in articulating the idea of direct interactions (Turner et al., 2008). Indirect contact theory has shown some effective ways of reducing the prejudices of an individual without a direct interaction between victims and participants. ⁵ A proffered methodology is to provide participants with an opportunity to use resources such as reputable TV shows and movies that feature the reality of discrimination. Consider the case, again, in which Miura, who is a multiracial Japanese student with ethnic roots in Uganda and Japan, suffered from a series of microaggressions from Japanese classmates who made racial discriminations based on her appearance of black skin and dreadlocks (Wallace and Inuma, 2021). Miura was not only insulted by the prejudiced classmates but also victimized by her homeroom teacher who offered a prejudicial comment that, because she was different from other students, their reactions to her were natural. This online article would be a valuable teaching resource for children and educators to understand the mechanisms of prejudicial stereotypes and their resultant testimonial injustices, manifested as thoughtless speeches and behaviors.

More importantly, indirect interactions via movies and novels allow children and educators to cultivate imagination. As Warnock (1978) and Johnson (1993) explained, people have finite perceptual abilities to represent the world in the here and now, but imagination enables us to access possibilities, including representations, that are not present beyond the given perceptual reality. Diamond (1991) observed that novels can serve as a better resource for developing ethical thinking than practical reasoning because it inspires us to imagine other different ways of life. Moreover, Lebron (2015) contended that showing real cases of racism can touch children’s imagination, which inspires them to imagine differently in anti-racist education. Given this, in the present context, beyond merely acquiring relevant knowledge about epistemic injustices, imagination can help students in recognizing the epistemic needs of the vulnerable people they will encounter in new situations.

Certainly, simply watching TV shows or movies may not be sufficient for children to accurately imagine others’ epistemic needs. However, the practice of indirect interactions can repeatedly utilize multiple proper educational resources that feature different aspects of epistemic injustices, such as being exposed to the real and polyphonic voices of those who are suffering epistemic injustices in different ways (e.g. Nikolaidis, 2020). More effectively, critical imagination can be developed by combining indirect interactions with the proper practice of questioning. Questioning may allow children to not only elicit necessary information from their classmates and educators but also share their different perspectives and exchange views so that one can reconfigure their implicit stereotypical assumptions (Sato, 2023). Take the case of anti-poverty education in Japan as an example. In each class, students watch parts of relevant TV shows, documentaries, recorded news, and so on, about the different dimensions of poverty in Japan, such as working poor families. Afterward, they are encouraged to read relevant documents about the background of the featured events and to engage in questioning in a group. Through this questioning practice, students are expected to think of the issue from various perspectives, beyond the scene featured by the media.

Hence, the proper combination of practices of questioning with watching educational resources can prompt students to critically consider what the epistemic needs of vulnerable persons are and what they can do to help them. This suggests that critical imagination among children allows them to imagine different relevant epistemic needs of those who suffer epistemic injustices in new situations.

Concluding remarks

In this article, I investigated what teachers, schools, and the education system as a whole should do to ameliorate epistemic injustice. I held that, faced with the reality of epistemic injustice, our educational aim should be the non-ideal aim of redressing epistemic injustices in corruptive educational environments. I proposed an approach to this task that focuses on the recognition of the epistemic needs of those who are vulnerable to epistemic injustices instead of directly reducing the prejudices of epistemically unjust actors (both teachers and other students) in the educational system. As such, I outlined both an interpersonal approach that focuses on care for children who are being afflicted by epistemic injustices and a systemic approach that aims to develop other children’s critical imagination to care for the epistemic needs of children who are vulnerable to epistemic injustices. I do not intend to claim that my exposition is the only formulation of an epistemic-need centered approach, but I showcase a model toward restorative epistemic justice that affords vulnerable children due recognition of their epistemic needs. Epistemic care and critical imagination will be considered key elements of such epistemic justice.