Title: Choice and control in education: Parental rights, individual liberties and social justice
Abstract: This paper asks what sort of criteria we should use to evaluate those aspects of recent changes in educational policy and legislation which are represented as reducing bureaucratic control and devolving choice and power to the consumer. In most such policy change of the past decade - whether in education or in other areas of social life - any regrettable effects of altering our social and economic arrangements are seen as sufficiently offset by concomitant increases in personal freedom and responsibility. The larger questions that stance raises, of the adequacy of a revived classical liberalism in metaphysical and epistemological terms as well as its moral acceptability as the ground of socio-political theory, cannot be treated here. I shall merely argue that in this one instance - choice and control in education - policy change which makes appeal to individual rights entails retreat from an earlier implicit consensus commitment to social justice. For only by ignoring the fact that individuals are socially located can we suppose that the welfare ofeach may be unproblematically aggregated to result in the welfare of all. Some of the issues raised in this paper - of the justificatory status of varying orders of rights, of the 'postional' nature of many social goods in a complex but stratified society, of the relation of individual freedoms to formal and actual opportunities in a pre-existing social setting - are pertinent to the broader critique which lies beyond the scope of this paper. That critique can profitably be pursued both at the level of high theory and by examining changing social arrangements and their proffered justifications. Since education both reflects and reproduces the society in which it is embedded, as well as preparing individuals for that society, educational policy and practice is a particularly fruitful area for the study of changing social values. And an understanding of these, in turn, is crucial to a proper understanding of educational policy and practice, and hence to its amelioration. This paper therefore examines whether, in education, the primafacie benefit of more choice and power for the consumer is sufficient to
Publication Year: 1989
Publication Date: 1989-11-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 37
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot