The accounts of social freedom offered by G. W. F. Hegel and Axel Honneth identify the normative demands on social institutions and explain how individual freedom is realized through rational participation in such institutions. While both offer normative reconstructions of the market economy, public sphere and family, they both derive the norms of educational institutions from education’s role in preparing people for participation in other institutions. We argue that this represents a significant defect in their accounts of social freedom because (...) they both fail to account for the distinctive aims and norms of education. Only educational institutions bring individuals into a both shared and autonomous standpoint necessary for participation in social life. We thus argue both that Hegel’s and Honneth’s accounts are empirically inadequate and that they neglect the normative demands on schools to contribute to individual moral and intellectual development. (shrink)

Many principles characterize educational justice in terms of the relationship between educational inputs, outputs and distributive standards. Such principles depend upon the causal pathway view of education. It is implicit in this view that the causally effective aspects of education can be understood as separate from the normative aspects of education. Yet this view relies on an impossible division of labor between empirical and normative work in educational research: it treats the causal roles that are understood and explained objectively through (...) empirical research as separate from the normative theorizing that informs the assessment of particular policies and practices. Such principles therefore rely on unreliable causal claims and are unable to make prescriptions about practices even according to their own conceptions of justice. Furthermore, such principles obscure other relevant considerations of justice that pertain to the internal processes of education and the structural relation of education to external social conditions. (shrink)