Inadequate for democracy: How (not) to distribute education

Alexandra Oprea
Additional contact information
Alexandra Oprea: 170491The Australian National University, Australia

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 2020, vol. 19, issue 4, 343-365

Abstract: There is widespread agreement among philosophers and legal scholars that the distribution of educational resources in the US is unjust, but little agreement about why. An increasingly prominent view posits a sufficientarian standard based on the requirements of democratic citizenship. This view, which I refer to as democratic sufficientarianism, argues that inequalities in educational resources or opportunities above the threshold required for democratic citizenship are morally unobjectionable if and only if all children are provided with an education sufficient to meet those demands. In the article, I argue that democratic sufficientarianism faces a democratic education dilemma. Either the philosopher specifies a precise and demanding threshold with antidemocratic implications, or she insists upon democratic equality irrespective of educational achievements, thereby undercutting the search for anything but a minimal educational threshold. As an alternative, I defend a new sufficientarian standard that is reflexive, education-specific, and democracy-compatible. This reflexive sufficientarian standard can act as a guide to democratic deliberation about education policy. The article also sketches possibilities for litigation on behalf of children who have received insufficient primary education.

Keywords: education; democracy; adequacy; equality; sufficientarianism; egalitarianism; relational equality; democratic education; distributive justice; education finance litigation; education policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1470594X20924667 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:pophec:v:19:y:2020:i:4:p:343-365

DOI: 10.1177/1470594X20924667

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Politics, Philosophy & Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().