Education and equality PDF
Preview Education and equality
Education and Equality Education and Equality Danielle allen With comments by Tommie Shelby, marcelo Suárez- orozco, michael rebell, and Quiara alegría huDeS The univerSiTy of chicago PreSS Chicago and London Danielle Allen is director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and professor of government and education at Harvard University. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she is the author of many books, including, most recently, Our Declaration, and coeditor of From Voice to Influence and Education, Justice, and Democracy, the latter two published by the University of Chicago Press. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5 iSbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 37310- 2 (cloth) iSbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 37324- 9 (e- book) Doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226373249.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Allen, Danielle S., 1971– author. | Shelby, Tommie, 1967– | Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo M., 1956– | Rebell, Michael A. | Hudes, Quiara Alegría. Title: Education and equality / Danielle Allen ; with comments by Tommie Shelby, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, Michael Rebell, and Quiara Alegría Hudes. Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2015041273| iSbn 9780226373102 (cloth : alk. paper) | iSbn 9780226373249 (e-book) Subjects: lcSh: Educational equalization—United States. | Education—United States. | Education—Philosophy. Classification: lcc lc213.2 .a55 2016 | DDc 379.2/6—dc23 lc record available at http:// lccn .loc .gov /2015041273 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of anSi/niSo z39.48- 1992 (Permanence of Paper). conTenTS Acknowledgments / vii chaPTer 1 Two Concepts of Education / 1 chaPTer 2 Participatory Readiness / 27 commenT 1 Justification, Learning, and Human Flourishing / 51 Tommie Shelby commenT 2 A Reunion / 62 Marcelo Suárez- Orozco commenT 3 “Participatory Readiness” and the Courts / 77 Michael Rebell commenT 4 A World of Cousins / 89 Quiara Alegría Hudes Response to Commentators / 99 Danielle Allen Notes / 117 References / 129 Index / 145 acknowleDgmenTS My thanks first of all to Stanford’s Tanner Lecture Committee, which gave me the opportunity to wrestle to the ground a question that had been plagu- ing me for some time. My thanks, too, to the many wonderful people who hosted me in Palo Alto, including Rob Reich, Josh Ober, Josh Cohen, and Joanie Berry. My collaborators for the volume Education, Justice, and Democ- racy provided the first context for the development of this argument. I am very grateful to them for their input on its early versions; Tony Laden, Harry Brighouse, and Adam Swift made especially significant contributions. Of course, the audiences at the lectures and my four brilliant commentators, whose remarks are included here, made the occasion what it was and gave me the most challenging, most intense, most rewarding three- day intellec- tual experience of my life. Truly it’s a blessing to have the chance to have one’s work read and responded to by such extraordinarily thoughtful, gen- erous, imaginative, and tough- minded readers. Quiara Alegría Hudes’s com- ment brought me to tears on the occasion. Thanks are due next to those who went above and beyond with helpful commentary and guidance when I asked them to read the written version of the lectures: Charles Payne, Glen Weyl, and Leo Casey. Peter Levine, who read the manuscript for the press, and an additional anonymous reviewer offered equally incisive commentary. An invitation from Henry Farrell to comment on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century for Crooked Timber helped me clean up some aspects of my thinking. My colleagues in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) from 2007 to 2015 have lived with this work and in closer proximity to it than anyone else and have provided a superb intellec- tual environment for its coming to completion. I can imagine nowhere else where I could have had the time and range of interlocutors to assimilate the diversity of literatures that was necessary for me to write these lectures. My great thanks, then, to Joan Scott, Michael Walzer, Eric Maskin, Didier Fas- sin, and Dani Rodrik, as well as to the two directors of the institute who sup- ported this work enthusiastically, Peter Goddard and Robbert Djikgraaf. My Humanities and Liberal Arts Assessment (HULA) research team—Maggie Schein, Sheena Kang, Chris Pupik Dean, Melanie Webb, and Annie Walton- [ vii viii ] acknowleDgmenTS Doyle—are a terrific set of intellectual partners. The excellent staff in the School of Social Science at IAS was also indispensable: Donne Petito, Linda Garat, Nancy Cotterman, and of course, my remarkable assistant, Laura McCune. Thanks without measure go to my father, William Allen, who gave me the phrase “humanistic baseline.” Finally, my greatest debt is to Jimmy, Nora, and William Doyle, who have had to tolerate too many absences and who are always, blissfully, the reason that it would be better to be home. ] chaPTer 1 Two Concepts of Education inTroDucTion: The Problem We are currently awash in torrents of public conversation about education. As of early September 2014, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, had 42,400 tweets to her name. For the period be- tween September 2013 and September 2014, the New York Times archive gen- erates 178,000 “articles on education.” And education is among Americans’ top ten political concerns out of a list of some thirty- five issues.1 There is so much talk about education that one can’t help but think that perhaps the most sensible thing to do would be just to get on with it: to quit conversing and get back to teaching. In other words, this book and I are perhaps part of some kind of problem, not a solution. Aside from their sheer volume, the other notable feature of our count- less public conversations about education is how many of them have to do with equality. In 2009, former house speaker Newt Gingrich and black civil rights activist Reverend Al Sharpton famously joined up for a public tour to advocate educational reform. They identified problems in education as the civil rights issue of our time. Similarly, our many public conversations about income inequality inevitably turn to the topic of education. Thus, the French economist Thomas Piketty, in his book Capital (2014), writes, “His- torical experience suggests that the principal mechanism for convergence [of incomes] at the international as well as the domestic level is the diffusion of knowledge. In other words, the poor catch up with the rich to the extent that they achieve the same level of technological know- how, skill, and edu- cation.”2 He is not the first to make this point. The influential US economists Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz do as well, for instance, in their book The Race between Education and Technology. Here, too, I must count myself as part of this problem—or, if it is not a “problem,” then at least part of the phenomenon of a durable societal ob- session with “education” and “equality.”3 For nearly five years now, I’ve been going around giving lectures under the title “Education and Equality.” I haven’t, however, been plowing a single furrow. My arguments have con- [ 1
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