In this paper I will elaborate on a concept of educational justice alongside to the conceptual difference between distribution, participation, and recognition as basic normative principles of justice. My motivation for that attempt lies basically in the assumption that by talking about educational justice we cannot simply extent the dominant distributive theories of social justice (like the ones of John Rawls and Roland Dworkin) to the domain of education, because these theories are resting on the presumption of the individual autonomy of the actors. Neither Rawls “original position”, nor Dworkins “ethical individualism” can grasp the immaturity of children and the asymmetry of educational interactions. However, the crucial questions for a concept of educational justice are: what does equal individual autonomy precisely mean, and how education can cultivate it? Authors, who endorse the distributive-egalitarian approach answer to these questions that, first, this autonomy does mean equality of opportunities for pursing one’s own life plans as well as for success in the competition for goods and social positions. Second, the equality of opportunities presupposes according to those authors a distribution of recourses in favor of children whose family backgrounds, or whose talents imply difficulties for the development of their autonomy. According to this perspective school education should neutralize inequalities of “brute bad luck” (Dworkin) in order to secure equal opportunities for social rewards deserved by actions and decisions their actors can be reasonably held responsible for. The non-egalitarian critics on that understanding claims that these inequalities cannot be really overcome, and that they are indeed not primarily on stake at the concept of educational justice. Instead, these critics emphasize a threshold of capabilities that should be reached by every single child in order to get capable of an autonomous social and political participation. Another possible answer of the questions raised above would claim that “autonomy of all” does not presupposes in first place equality of recourses, but rather equality of respect. This answer is recently being elaborated within the recognitional paradigm. According to this paradigm cultivating individual autonomy is not primarily a matter of distribution and re-distribution of goods, but of securing sustainable experience for all children with certain forms of intersubjective recognition. In my following considerations I will argue that while the first answer echoes central injustices in the US-American, and probably in the British educational systems, the second one is rather inspired by some basic forms of educational injustice in Europe, and especially in Germany. However, I will also attempt to show that there is a common ground between the recognitional approach and the egalitarian version of the distributive model, and that a common egalitarianism distinguishes the both concepts from the non-egalitarian threshold model. My claim is further, that while the distributive-egalitarian model articulates merely a intuition that educational inequalities that are due to family background are more unjust than all other educational inequalities, the recognitional approach offers a conceptual explanation for that intuition, which has been largely neglected by the threshold model.

Coneptual analysis

Even if educational related inequalities lie above the threshold of democratic participation or above the threshold of central human capabilities they might be unjust. This is the case when these inequalities reflect the family backgrounds of the children. Those inequalities might be caused either by poor recourses of schools in underprivileged neighborhoods, or by a disrespect in regard of children from socially and culturally deprived families; a disrespect, which an institutional segregation of children in different kinds of schools implies. As the international-comparative PISA-Survey shows, Germany, whose school system is designated by that segregation, is the country in the OECD (to which also the United States belong) with the strongest educational inequalities due to family background – despite the fact that in Germany there are no such discrepancies in the school financing as in the United States. This outcome can be interpreted as evidence that lack of respect has a greater impact on educational injustice than the unequal distribution of material recourses. Hence, the recogintional paradigm seems to be more suitable to a theory of educational justice than the distributive one. A further argument for that claim is that the recognitional paradigm offers an explanation why inequalities due to essentialist postulations of talents are also unjust. These postulations violate the principle of social esteem. However, the development of individual autonomy presupposes individual’s constant and reliable experience not only with respect, but also with social esteem. That is why a just education would provide all children with these two forms of recognition. This would mean in first place that there would not be any child, who would be treat as determined in her education by her family backgrounds or by her “talents”.