{"title":"More house on an ever-shakier foundation: An administrator’s perspective on institutional reforms in the context of Christopher Martin’s ideal Right to Higher Education","authors":"Andrew Pulvermacher","doi":"10.1177/14778785231160096","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14778785231160096","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper version of the response I offered to Christopher Marin as part of the symposium on The Right to Higher Education at the 2022 North American Association for Philosophy & Education Conference, I present some practical challenges of post-secondary reforms in the context of Martin’s theory of the right to higher education. Specifically, I address Martin’s three jointly necessary distributive conditions – non-exclusion, adequate options and full public funding – as necessary conditions and significant constraints on meaningful reform toward his ideal of higher education within individual institutions in light of resource constraints in the nonideal, real world. I argue that we ought to aim toward fully realizing adults’ right to higher education yet to do so requires restructuring and reprioritizing post-secondary education on systemic scale.","PeriodicalId":46679,"journal":{"name":"Theory and Research in Education","volume":"21 1","pages":"93 - 100"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42375507","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mills’s account of white ignorance: Structural or non-structural?","authors":"Zara Bain","doi":"10.1177/14778785231162779","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14778785231162779","url":null,"abstract":"Recent philosophical secondary literature on white ignorance – a concept most famously developed by the late philosopher Charles W. Mills – suggests that white ignorance is, one way or another, a non-structural phenomenon. I analyse two such readings, the agential view and the cognitivist view. I argue that they misinterpret Mills’ work by (among other things) committing a kind of structural erasure, and one which implies that Mills’ account cannot capture, for example, cases where white ignorance (and white racial domination) involves historical erasure, especially when perpetrated by sociopolitical institutions. This is particularly salient in cases such as the recent movement against anti-racist education, now widely conflated with critical race theory, in the United States and United Kingdom, which I offer as a brief case study.","PeriodicalId":46679,"journal":{"name":"Theory and Research in Education","volume":"21 1","pages":"18 - 32"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44880491","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pity the unready and the unwilling: Choice, chance, and injustice in Martin’s ‘The Right to Higher Education’","authors":"Philip Cook","doi":"10.1177/14778785231160066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14778785231160066","url":null,"abstract":"For Martin, the right to free higher education may be claimed only by those ready and willing pursue autonomy supporting higher education. The unready and unwilling, among whom may be counted carers, disabled, and devout, are excluded. This is unjust. I argue that this injustice follows from a tension between three elements of Martin’s argument: (1) a universal right to autonomy supporting higher education; (2) qualifications on entitlements to access this right in order to preserve the value of higher educational goods; (3) luck egalitarian motivations in Martin’s distributive ethics. I consider options for avoiding such injustices and their implications for Martin’s argument.","PeriodicalId":46679,"journal":{"name":"Theory and Research in Education","volume":"21 1","pages":"82 - 87"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45060268","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The right to higher education: A political theory","authors":"Christopher Martin","doi":"10.1177/14778785231161943","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14778785231161943","url":null,"abstract":"In The Right to Higher Education: A Political Theory, I argue that post-compulsory education should be an individual right in a liberal democratic society. Here, I respond to a series of criticisms of the right’s justification. I address objections relating to: the autonomy-based justification of the right and liberal neutrality, the right’s scope and limits, the fairness of full public funding for higher education, constraints on the right’s equality-promoting aims, and the meaning of the term ‘higher education’ under the right.","PeriodicalId":46679,"journal":{"name":"Theory and Research in Education","volume":"21 1","pages":"101 - 110"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46511805","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The right to higher education and the gap between ideal theory and non-ideal decisions","authors":"Harry Brighouse, Kailey Mullane","doi":"10.1177/14778785231160063","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14778785231160063","url":null,"abstract":"Christopher Martin argues that an interest in strong autonomy supports a right to debt-free higher education and that making tuition free is the best way of enacting that right. We argue that making higher education tuition free would, in the absence of other countervailing measure, maldistribute strong autonomy, even in ideal conditions. We also argue that even if Martin is right that higher education should be tuition-free in ideal circumstances, it does not follow that in prevailing, non-ideal, conditions higher education should be tuition-free.","PeriodicalId":46679,"journal":{"name":"Theory and Research in Education","volume":"21 1","pages":"77 - 81"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44834123","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Provincializing white racial ideology: Mills’ social ontology and philosophy of education","authors":"Sheron Fraser-Burgess","doi":"10.1177/14778785231164082","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14778785231164082","url":null,"abstract":"Social ontology examines the nature and mechanisms in human society of concepts that pertain to various kinds of social collectivities. A pioneer in the development of this philosophical field, Mills theorised a social metaphysics of racial constructivism for modern philosophy in order to explain the enduring orthodoxies of its Anglo-centric dominance. This paper invokes the term, supervenience, to further elucidate the causal bearing of race on individual and social facts. Turning to the philosophy of education, the ontological bifurcation of asymmetrical racial worlds is a salient divide to which discourses of normative individual ethics, analytic critical thinking, and generalized social justice contribute. Given the pervasiveness of supervenience, in the unwillingness to traffic in the ontology of race, educational philosophy hamstrings the creative and critical dimensions of advancing education for a racially equitable and pluralistic democracy.","PeriodicalId":46679,"journal":{"name":"Theory and Research in Education","volume":"21 1","pages":"33 - 51"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45578319","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The ethical costs of using higher education for economic mobility","authors":"Dustin Webster","doi":"10.1177/14778785221142865","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14778785221142865","url":null,"abstract":"A great deal of recent scholarship on economically disadvantaged students and higher education works under the foundational assumption that going to college can and/or should serve the goal of economic mobility. This article considers a cost of using higher education for this purpose – specifically, the impact on the decision-making of poor students. I argue that the narrative of higher education for economic mobility places poor students in a problematically restrictive normative framework as compared with their wealthier peers in which decisions involving the pursuit of future economic goods change from matters of preference into ethical dilemmas. In turn, poor students are forced into a narrow cost–benefit, consequentialist mode of decision-making. This is especially problematic because higher education for many students is a transformative experience – a type of experience which is particularly unsuited to consequentialist reasoning. The solution involves reframing the way in which we think about decision-making in higher education, which is at least partially contingent on increasing social supports to shift the burdens of poverty off individual students.","PeriodicalId":46679,"journal":{"name":"Theory and Research in Education","volume":"20 1","pages":"237 - 258"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47051117","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Political dissent and citizenship education during times of populism and youth activism","authors":"Sarah M. Stitzlein","doi":"10.1177/14778785221134235","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14778785221134235","url":null,"abstract":"To maintain and improve our democracy, we must better prepare students for understanding, valuing, participating in, and responding to political dissent. This is especially the case in light of recent developments in political life that have made displays of public outcry more widespread, though not always well-done. This article reflects on recent growth in populism and youth activism to make a case for improved ways of understanding and teaching for good political dissent.","PeriodicalId":46679,"journal":{"name":"Theory and Research in Education","volume":"20 1","pages":"217 - 236"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42682041","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book review: Caitlin Howlett, Against Sex Education: Pedagogy, Sex Work, and State Violence","authors":"S. Robinson","doi":"10.1177/14778785221140181","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14778785221140181","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46679,"journal":{"name":"Theory and Research in Education","volume":"20 1","pages":"294 - 295"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42437497","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The broad and the narrow account of education – A false dichotomy? Marley-Payne’s suggestion for amelioration of the concept of education","authors":"Christian Norefalk","doi":"10.1177/14778785221143841","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14778785221143841","url":null,"abstract":"In his article ‘An Ameliorative Analysis of the Concept of Education’, Jack Marley-Payne sets out to provide an ameliorative analysis of the concept ‘education’. Marley-Payne draws an important distinction between what he labels the ‘Broad’ and the ‘Narrow’ account of education. His conclusion is that an ameliorative conceptual analysis of education favours the narrow account. The main argument is that a narrow approach, tightly connected to formal schooling, provides a better basis for pursuing an egalitarian agenda. Contrary to Marley-Payne, I will argue that an amelioration of the concept education need not favour either a wide notion or a narrow notion. I believe that there are other alternatives to choose from, that in fact leads to an amelioration of what education can and ought to mean. The problem with Marley-Payne’s conclusion is thus, not only that it builds upon a false dichotomy but also that it is not emancipatory enough. We need an amelioration that is inclusive rather than exclusive.","PeriodicalId":46679,"journal":{"name":"Theory and Research in Education","volume":"20 1","pages":"289 - 293"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46519616","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}