Papers

Despite recent scholarship in political theory that shifts the focus of injustice from agents to social structures, educational justice scholarship in philosophy of education remains primarily individualistic as regards the causes of injustice. However, it seems that agents’ actions are more constrained than individualistic accounts suggest, and that educational injustice is largely the result of structural processes. Accordingly, it is argued that scholars should focus on the political instead of the moral responsibility of agents for disrupting educational injustice. This is suggestive of an epistemic activist approach to advancing educational justice that utilizes the power of social movements to disrupt the structural conditions that support educational injustice. The example of unjust school punishment in the United States is used as a case in point.

Professional and applied ethicists have evidenced the importance and efficacy of professional ethics education in universities, with some arguing that, in addition to advancing the development of professional ethics standards and individual moral responsibility, professional ethics education should itself be undertaken in an ethical fashion. This paper argues that theorizing ethics enculturation as a multidimensional and dialectical process allows educators and theorists to identify, examine, and redress morally objectionable forms of ethics education. To remain ethical, professional ethics enculturation must identify and avoid morally impermissible approaches that negatively impact those who undergo ethics enculturation and/or those whom the profession serves. Impermissible approaches include moral indoctrination, neglect, corruption, and injury, among others, and operate implicitly and explicitly in professional and educational contexts. Moreover, professional ethics enculturation must remain sufficiently bidirectional to ensure that both developing professionals become properly enculturated within the profession and that the profession is responsive to the needs and concerns of future generations of professionals.

This paper extends Charles Mills’ account of white ignorance and the cognitive processes that sustain it to include attention. Specifically, the paper argues that attention-compromising practices such as algorithms used by social media and other digital technologies to maximize user engagement make it so that we are less able to pay attention to urgent racial injustices and less likely to do something to disrupt them. In outlining how this occurs, the paper discusses three forms of attention compromising—distortion, diversion, and distraction. Moreover, it discusses the wrongs that attention-compromising practices inflict on users. The paper concludes by outlining implications for social justice education.

Despite the increase in ethics education offerings of the past few decades, universities struggle to foster desirable ethical dispositions among developing professionals. Part of the reason is that the values implicit in the enculturation of students in higher education cut against the aims of explicit ethics education. To accomplish desirable ethical dispositions among future professionals we ought to broaden our understanding of what the cultivation of ethical professionals entails from a narrow focus on ethics education to a broad focus on ethics enculturation. This paper offers a framework for theorizing ethics enculturation, using examples from recent engineering ethics education literature to demonstrate how the framework captures elements about the development of ethical dispositions and decision-making skills that literature with a narrow focus on ethics education overlooks.

As the disruptive effects of COVID-19 on education have prompted conversations about remedial learning and learning recovery, the expectation is increasingly that schools are more productive in less time. This raises concerns regarding potential increase in the use of prescriptive curricula. While critiques regarding the usage of such curricula abound, the lack of clarity about what it is that these curricula do and how they impact instructional processes render critiques too coarse-grained to be of value in both normative evaluations and remedial efforts. To resolve this problem, the authors provide a framework that analyzes what prescriptive curricula entail and how they impact teaching and learning. The framework postulates that prescriptiveness occurs along five dimensions and is a matter of degree along each of these. Subtle differences between how these dimensions and degrees of prescription materialize in individual curricula matter for formulating both targeted critiques about what makes such curricula objectionable and for developing adequate and feasible remedies to undo the harmful effects of prescriptive curricula.

In recent years, analytic philosophers of education have been advocating the use of ameliorative conceptual analysis to analyze concepts related to education. This paper advances this end by providing an ameliorative account of “educational justice.” Despite the prima facie ameliorative status of the dominant “fair educational opportunity” conception of educational justice, the author argues that the dominant conception fails to produce socially just outcomes by reifying the unjust social structure and distracting from the pursuit of policy reforms that could better tackle social injustices that are noneducational in kind. Instead of fair educational opportunity, the author contends, we ought to orient our education policy endeavors toward the pursuit of epistemic empowerment and developmental enablement.

Since the publication of Miranda Fricker’s seminal book Epistemic Injustice, philosophy of education scholarship has been mostly limited to analyses of culprit-based epistemic injustice in education. This has left structural manifestations relatively underexplored with great detriment to those who are most vulnerable to experience such injustice. This paper aims to address this oversight and open avenues for further research by exploring approaches to theorizing structural epistemic injustice in education and envisioning efficacious remedies. The author identifies three approaches: one that focuses on educational institutions, one that focuses on institutional processes that impact educational outcomes, and one that focuses on epistemological processes that are internal to education. While the approaches differ as to their explanatory power and ease of implementation, it is argued that all three demonstrate that epistemic injustice in education is often the result of structural factors which cannot be attributed to individual epistemic agents. The author concludes by suggesting that educational philosophers must examine each of these approaches in greater depth to make significant progress in disrupting the impact of epistemic injustice in education.

Interventions instated to disrupt the destructive effects of the school-to-prison pipeline on students of color were repealed as a result of the US Education Department’s 2018 Federal Commission on School Safety report. Using a critical policy and critical discourse framework, this paper examines how the language used in the report facilitated the process of repeal while concealing the insidious effects that the repeal could have on students of color and especially black students. Based on this analysis, the paper argues that education policy discourse is influenced by and supports the covert operation of white supremacist ideological structures that hinder the struggle for equity and justice in education.

While white ignorance is primarily produced and reproduced through social-structural processes, philosophy of education scholarship has focused on agent-centered educational solutions. This article argues that agent-centered solutions are ineffective and that education for disrupting white ignorance must be structure-centered. Specifically, the article contends that (1) social-structural processes often render being in a state of white ignorance reasonable and that (2) assigning white ignorant agents individual responsibility for overcoming their ignorance is often unreasonable. Consequently, epistemic virtue-based approaches to education are insufficient and inappropriate. Instead, the author proposes prioritizing political forms of education. This includes educating students on how to participate in political action and using political action to educate the public.

The current retributive system of school punishment conflicts with the aims of democratic education because it impedes the cultivation of essential democratic values and capabilities. To be legitimate, however, school punishment in democratic societies ought to align with, or at least not impede, the aims of democratic education. This suggests that punishment should be consistent with the communicative and inclusive nature of democracy and support the cultivation of essential democratic capabilities. Restorative justice provides such a model of school punishment by prioritizing communication and inclusion, facilitating the cultivation of democratic capabilities, and legitimizing punishment as a means of communicating remorse instead of inflicting retribution to wrongdoers. The authors argue that for school punishment to align with and support the aims of democratic education, it must shift from the retributive justice model currently employed in most schools to a restorative justice model.

John Dewey’s lifelong quest for a worthy education was characterized by a fervor for collapsing false dualisms. One such dualism — that between traditional and progressive education — led him to embrace a vision of the teacher as interpreter and guide of the student. Notwithstanding Dewey’s emphasis on the salient role of interpretation, there are no comprehensive accounts that explain how Dewey envisioned this very interpretive task that teachers are expected to undertake. In response to this lack, A. C. Nikolaidis draws from the corpus of Dewey’s work to reconstruct a Deweyan “theory of interpretation.” This theory brings together hermeneutic elements in Dewey’s work — akin to those of Hans-Georg Gadamer — and his commitment to scientific experimentalism. In doing so, it presents a new perspective on the way we think of Dewey’s relation to Continental philosophy, extending similar contemporary scholarship such as Paul Fairfield’s. Moreover, it provides important insights on Dewey’s pedagogy as this relates to classroom practices, curriculum development, and more.

Rule violations are expected in schools, and assessments of the severity of those violations and the appropriate disciplinary responses are a significant aspect of educators’ responsibilities. And while most educators and policy makers reject rule violation as a permissible behavior in schools, is such a categorical rejection always a suitable response, and are there circumstances that might merit an alternative response? In this article, A. C. Nikolaidis and Winston C. Thompson argue that under unjust circumstances, noncompliance with school rules may be permissible, and even desirable. Building on a contractual framework placing systemic injustice at the center of inquiry, they show that under unjust conditions schools forfeit their ability to hold students accountable for role-dependent violations.

Scholars of epistemology have identified two conceptions of epistemic injustice: discriminatory epistemic injustice and distributive epistemic injustice. The former refers to wrongs to one’s capacity as a knower that are the result of identity prejudice. The latter refers to violations of one’s right to know what they are entitled to. This essay advances a third conception, formative epistemic injustice, which refers to wrongs to one’s capacity as a knower that are the result of or result in malformation—the undue restriction of one’s formative capacities. The author argues that formative epistemic injustice is a distinctly educational wrong and that it brings to light important epistemic injustices that standard accounts of epistemic injustice either downplay or are unable to capture. This third conception of epistemic injustice is an important analytic tool for theorizing both epistemic injustice and educational justice.

The fight against educational injustice guides most educational endeavors in research, policymaking, and practice. However, its implicit heterogeneity as a concept renders responses to educational injustice diverse and often contradictory. The author suggests that such contradictions compel us to reject the possibility of an all-encompassing conception of educational injustice. Instead we need to conceptualize educational injustice in more limited terms that highlight the distinctly educational problems that we face as a society. The author provides such a conception and argues that it is better able than other conceptions to capture the wrongs of educational injustice.

Willful ignorance has been established as a valuable concept that accounts for the cognitive and affective dimensions of unjust conduct. As privileged groups and individuals conveniently remain ignorant about the harms of their conduct to preserve their undeserved privileges, the injustices inflicted on marginalized groups and individuals proliferate. However, willful ignorance also faces limitations, most notably, its inability to account for educational, and sometimes material, harms inflicted on willfully ignorant groups and individuals. To shed light on these harms, this paper argues for conceptualizing willful ignorance in terms of formative epistemic injustice, a form of educational injustice inflicted on those whose epistemic and formative capacities are compromised as a result of ignorance-producing ideologies. The concept of formative epistemic injustice highlights that such educational harms are urgent and merit attention both because they are severe harms in their own right but also, and more importantly, because they are antecedent to many of the more severe harms experienced by marginalized groups and individuals as a result of willful ignorance.

This article presents a pedagogical approach for disrupting epistemic injustice. In it, A. C. Nikolaidis first demonstrates that different forms of epistemic injustice — testimonial, hermeneutical, and contributory — are the result of limited or distorted conceptual resources and then argues that concept proliferation can be a promising educational means for overcoming such limitations and distortions. Concept proliferation involves a combination of increasing exposure to diverse, especially marginalized, concepts and providing students with necessary critical tools for questioning harmful and erroneous concepts. Concept proliferation is beneficial for both individual students and society at large. It liberates students from the confines of harmful concepts that limit their self-understanding, but also provides them with skills necessary to challenge hegemonic concepts that distort collective (social) understanding and contribute to epistemic and systemic injustice.

Despite the rising popularity of scripted curricula in United States public and charter schools, there has been little to no research that explicitly addresses how this phenomenon influences the democratic aims of our educational system. Using the six democratic values that Meira Levinson developed/employed to evaluate the movement toward standards, assessment and accountability, the authors examine both the potentials and real-world impacts of scripted curriculum. Although arguments in favor of scripted curriculum suggest that its usage increases the democratic promise of education by rendering instruction more equitable and efficient, the authors suggest that patterns of usage and outcomes are in fact at odds with such values. Furthermore, the authors argue that the pre-structured and highly controlling character of scripted curriculum is inherently undemocratic because it severely constrains the intellectual participation of both teachers and students in the classroom. The authors conclude that greater teacher autonomy and curricular flexibility are necessary elements in the education of future citizens in a democratic society.

In The Child and the Curriculum, John Dewey stresses the importance of interpreting students’ experiences and potentialities with the purpose of directing them appropriately. This paper claims that interpretation is not only necessary, but also unavoidable and essential in preserving the child’s agency in the educational process. For this reason we need to be mindful of how we approach it. In order to understand how we can do this, the author inquires into the implications of interpretation and the problems that arise from it. Finally, he provides an account (theoretical and practical) of how to address the aspect of interpretation within an educational setting.