Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 39, No.

3, 2005

Rawls Theory of Justice and Citizenship Education

MARIANNA PAPASTEPHANOU
Political liberalism purports to be independent from any controversial philosophical presuppositions, and its basic principles and features are often presented as the most accommodating of difference and heterogeneity, so long as the latter is not illiberal, oppressive and fanatic. Educational theory welcomes this assumption and attempts to utilise it in citizenship curriculum debates, often in a receptive and arguably uncritical way. I shall critique the above by unveiling the contestable epistemological and anthropological theses underlying Rawls difference principle and by discussing the conception of education that they ground. I shall draw especially on sociology of education and its questioning of the racism of intelligence in order to show that political liberalism mistakes its self- and worldunderstanding as a reection of general and undisputed facts. Further, I shall explain how a more critical perspective would give educational theory a more active role by challenging the so-called reproductive conception of education. I shall conclude by assessing the signicance of such a critique for teaching citizenship, putting forward some suggestions for a reorientation of political education.

INTRODUCTION

In educational discourse relating to fashionable philosophical trends, a very simple model predominates: Here is the philosophy, there is the education. Philosophy is applied to education. The tendency of much educational theoretical work is to explore the educational implications of inuential philosophical theoriesand Rawls theory of justice has been no exception. In spite of their merits, such moves often limit education to a passive and receptive role. A concomitant demerit is that in this way the major stakes, dilemmas and debates surrounding the particular philosophical theory are bequeathed to educational theory almost unaltered. In this article, I shall allocate education a more active part, arguing that, in its theoretical dimension, it can operate as a corrective to Rawls
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epistemological and anthropological justications of political liberalism and, in its more practical and applied dimension, as transformative of liberal society. One of the issues that general philosophy hands down to education regarding Rawls recent theory of justice, one that I nd narrow and problematic, is whether political liberalism succeeds in handling radical otherness justly and effectively without conceding too much to it or expecting too much from it. As Geraint Parry puts this, the prime limitation on teaching political neutrality,
. . . which profoundly affects education, is that the liberal state cannot be neutral about its own neutrality. It must seek to instil respect for its fundamental principle in its future citizenry. The problem posed by this requirement is that neutralist liberalism may, in its educational programme, be less accommodating than it claims towards those who wish to bring their children up to share their own non-liberal doctrines and consequently to adopt more negative attitudes to what they variously see to be the spread of the contagion of secularism, anti-traditionalism or laxity of manners (Parry, 1999, p. 33).

Whereas such criticisms or reservations regarding the treatment of radical otherness seem at rst sight to be quite sharp, I believe that, in fact, they are condescending or even patronising for otherness and that they make things too easy for liberalism. The problem is pictured in such a manner that liberalism appears truly to have achieved neutrality or, as a theory, truly to have been political in the Rawlsian sense of being free-standing. Hence, now, its major difculty appears to be how to deal with the nonliberal segment of the population. Within this account, the other becomes the obtrusive and cumbersome case that crops up and disrupts the otherwise solid and strong prospect for a just society.1 Rawlsian justice as fairness has, in its evolution, come to be understood as part of a political liberalism that can be formulated independently of any particular comprehensive doctrine, religious, philosophical or moral. [I]t is not presented as depending upon, or as presupposing any such view (emphasis added) (Rawls, 1995, p. 135). Unmanageable others will be attracted to this kind of liberalism because, after all, they are only human: as such they possess two moral powers, the capacity for an effective sense of justice and the capacity to form, revise and rationally pursue a conception of the good (Rawls, 1999, p. 312). To help them adjust themselves to political liberalism, we liberals recommend a conversational restraintthat is, a bracketing of disputable ultimate questions about the self, life and the world. We are able to do so because our own conception of the political relies solely on the undisputed facts of natural science and social theory. I shall argue that the principles of justice and more recent developments in Rawlsian theory rely in one way or other on many currently or potentially contestable epistemological and anthropological cultural assumptions of Western societies. Elsewhere (Papastephanou, 2004),
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I have argued from a general philosophical perspective that political liberalism cannot avoid comprehensiveness, but here I shall examine a similar claim from a more hybrid point of view, the educational one. In that work, emphasis was placed not on epistemology but on anthropology. Here, in order to avoid covering the ground of the previous work, my emphasis will be on the former. This explains the uneven space these two issues will be given here. Thus the problems of political liberalism go beyond the simple accommodation of radical alterity and touch upon its own self-understanding as political and independent from, that is, as not presupposing, comprehensive liberalism. I see this topic as a case where educational theory can offer much corrective work to general philosophy by showing why some general philosophical tenets might plausibly be questionable from an educational point of view. Such corrective work has been occluded by the fact that the search for the implications for teaching political attitudes and values has so far limited education to the role of passive recipient of some fashionable theories. To conclude my preliminary remarks, I claim that my approach does not aim to diminish the import of Rawls theory and the quality of its architectonic, but to point to problems that I view as inherent in liberalism. Thus I am not saying that there can be a liberalism that is more political than the Rawlsianthat is, that Rawls has, inadvertently perhaps, let some non-political elements slip into his notion of liberalism. Instead, I am saying that any sharp duality insulating the political and granting it priority over the comprehensive overlooks the formers inescapable dependence on some form of the latter (Papastephanou, 2004). In what follows, I demonstrate that the epistemological and anthropological assumptions implied in political liberalism play a subterranean, crucial role in justice as fairness and its principles. Then I discuss how these principles assume a particular conception of education, its connes and potentialities. Further, I explore the possibility and perhaps necessity for a different conception of education functioning as a corrective to political liberalism, showing at the same time the limits of liberalism in general. In this way, citizenship education may direct its efforts to objectives that may partly go further than, or against, the Rawlsian vision of a just society.

PHILOSOPHICAL ASSUMPTIONS IN POLITICAL LIBERALISM

In Rawls most recent work, the principles of justice that are constitutive of his justice as fairness are couched in an idiom that purports to be political and not metaphysical. It is political not only because it is divorced from religious legitimation but also because it demands the exercise of public rather than secular reason (Rawls, 1999, p. 583). Secular reason is reasoning in terms of comprehensive non-religious worldviews; the latter resonate with various contestable assumptions about the self and social life. But, as I shall argue, upon closer inspection, the principles of justice themselves presuppose particular and already by now disputed views, the defence of which extends far beyond public reason,
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drawing from the secularand secularised (Papastephanou, 2004) cultural reservoir of Occidental signications. Rawls holds that the principles of justice can be viewed as an understanding between moral persons not to exploit for ones own advantage the contingencies of their world, but to regulate the accidental distributions of nature and social chance in ways that are mutually benecial for all (Rawls, 1999, p. 175). An initial suspicion of philosophical comprehensiveness is raised by the very rst part of Rawls statement. An agreement to avoid exploitation of contingencies for ones own advantage presupposes that before the agreement there must have been such an intention or inclination to self-interest, ormore weaklya strong possibility of this. Granted that Rawls does not share Hobbes conception of human nature, we should opt for the latter, weaker interpretation (Papastephanou, 2004). A possibility for self-interestedness is endemic in humanity according to Kantian anthropological views of human motivation, which maintain that the human being is characterised by unsocial sociability. Rawls may have remained faithful to Kant in other respects of his thought, but there is no guarantee that the above statement reects a commitment to Kants anthropology. A Rawlsian might respond that the fact that the principles of justice hinder exploitation of contingency for ones advantage reveals only an empirical and not a logically necessary effect. This suspicion, then, requires further textual evidence and elaboration. Another suspicion of comprehensiveness, an equally vague one at this stage, arises when we consider the second part of the remark, the regulation of accidental distributions of nature and social chance in mutually benecial ways. I believe that the idea of accidental distributions of nature reveals epistemological presuppositions about giftedness of an essentialist character that are quite far from being undisputed facts. I shall tackle the latter suspicion rst and then move to anthropology because, in Rawls, as will be shown later on, the epistemological self-understanding of the moral person seems to affect signicantly the way the ego is motivated to think of justice and equality.
i. Epistemological Self-understanding

When Rawls analyzes his maximin or difference principle,2 he employs metaphors that pertain to a biologistic essentialist interpretation of good performancemetaphors such as natural assets, native talents, giftedness, natural endowment and so on. Consider the following, for instance:
If the two principles of justice are acknowledged, the understanding is, in effect, that those favored in the natural lottery (that is, the lottery of native talents and abilities) and who know that they have been favored undertake to gain from their good fortune only on terms that improve the condition of those who have lost out. They are not to win advantages simply because they are more gifted, but only to cover the costs of the necessary
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efforts of training and cultivating their endowments and for putting them to use in a way which benets the losers. [. . .] Accepting a society in which the two principles are satised is, then, the best way for the less gifted to overcome their misfortune in the natural lottery. The offer of the more gifted man to acknowledge the second principle would probably be accepted, since doing so would strike the ungifted as a fair way to take advantage of the natural fact of differing native endowments (Rawls, 1999, p. 82, emphasis added).

The strong epistemological assumptions we have here are not limited to the obvious essentialist accounts of talent: along with them there is a selfconception (i.e. they know that they have been favored) on the axis of natural fortune and misfortune that ushers the social actors to their proper social space. This self-knowledge secures a feeling of justice for all, since the social actor who recognises herself as ungifted accepts the advantages of the gifted as means for long-term benets. She even knows that such benets would never be expected if society were politically to read talent along lines of desert (as in some libertarian views, compared to which Rawls position is far more radical). Likewise, the social actor who knows he is giftedhow does one know that really?acknowledges that he cannot be thought to deserve his greater natural capacity (p. 165). Therefore, all advantages to which he is entitled derive only from their being motivationally efcacious in leading him to promoting social wealth and progress. Even in his Kantian Constructivism, which is a text of the middle period, Rawls takes such epistemological assumptions for granted.
An essential distinction is between the unequal distribution of natural assets, which is simply a natural fact and neither just nor unjust, and the way the basic structure of society makes use of these natural differences and permits them to affect the social fortune of citizens, their opportunities in life, and the actual terms of cooperation between them (p. 337, emphasis added).

Here, Rawls interprets differences in performance in a naturalist and morally neutral way and assumes that there is no alternative construal (I extrapolate that from his term natural fact). An alternative way to view such a difference would be to treat it as a result of existential dissimilarity, and with this term I describe the complex set of conditions of existence that are unique for each individual (Papastephanou, 2003). Social origin, family, language, narrativity, identication, the relational position of ones race or nation in the wider social context, culture and worldviews are some constitutive factors of existential dissimilarity that condition performance and success at what society cherishes. In this context nature is minimally or not at all informative and the unequal possession or development of abilities can be explained through some initial social injustices, discrimination and exclusion or even through some axiologically neutral relational terms.3 Unlike Rawls commitment to innateness, an account of existential dissimilarity does not require a robust and
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encompassing notion of natural difference. Thus the passage from natural difference to political inequality, which sustains an analogy that justies the latter through the former, is not allowed within the alternative account that I provide. As to the distinction between naturalness and its social treatment that Rawls has drawn in the previous passage, it shows, or so it seems to me, his intention to avoid the libertarian leap from existential dissimilarity to political inequality (that is, to connect naturalness and desert). Overall, however, this distinction is not elaborated in such a way as to break free from naturalistic essentialism and so to avoid the charge of a similar kind of naturalistic fallacy. The difference principle can be regarded as an agreement to consider the distribution of natural assets as common property and to share in the benets of this distribution, whatever it turns out to be. Those who have been favoured by nature, whoever they are, may gain from their good fortune only on terms that improve the situation of those who have done less well. The naturally advantaged are not to gain merely because they are more gifted, but rather in order to cover the costs of training and cultivating their endowments and for putting them to use in a way that helps the less fortunate as well. No one is thought to deserve his greater natural capacity or to merit a more favorable starting place in society (Rawls, 1999, p. 165). By seeing existential dissimilarity as a natural fact rather than a social construction and qualitative appraisal of difference, Rawls ends up in justifying inequality on naturalistic grounds (in a way deriving the Ought from the Is) even when he tethers this to moral nal purposes. For, ultimately, he argues that those who are naturally endowed may enjoy some kind of favorable inequality in order to be motivated to make their talents available to all for the common good. A crucial question here, of course, is how or why all this matters in Rawls original position. In his words, we assume that in the original position the parties have the general information provided by natural science and social theory (p. 236). As Johnston puts it, going into the original position, we know only a few facts of moral psychology/ sociology . . . and nothing about our particular selves, communities, or societies (Johnston, 2005, p. 210).4 This means, amongst other things, that the parties do not know their own personal luck in the natural lottery but they know generally that, inevitably, in their society, some people will be naturally more gifted than the rest. That this is a natural fact is corroborated, in Rawls mind, I assume, by science or common sense, but, with hindsight, this paradigmatic conviction of the Rawls of the 1970s can be explained as the myth of a society that employed science as a tool for specic ideological purposes. If we recall the numerous tests by which the American immigration policy tried to sift the incoming population, the well-known arguments by Jensen about a supposedly intrinsic intellectual inferiority of black people, and more general efforts based on streaming to separate the wheat from the chaff (often keeping the chaff!), we realise that when Rawls committed himself to this kind of innateness he was led
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astray by the spirit of the times. By this I do not mean that he subscribed to any of the above mentioned blatant forms of exclusion and discrimination but rather that those were more extreme articulations of a general and popular innateness conviction. The Rawlsian kind of innateness breaks with any speculative or theological metaphysical worldview, but its foundations share something with those of biologism and scientism. Thus, when Rawls contrasts the metaphysical with the political and opts for the latter, he means, more or less, that there is no psychic kernel in the idealist metaphysical sense. He does not wish to imply that the self is ontologically prior to the facts about persons that the parties are excluded from knowing (Johnston, 2005, p. 211) in the original position. Nor, however, does he realise that the description of those facts as natural, according to a particular, and by now disputed, set of scientic theories, might equally be metaphysical. In any case, the reliance on natural science and social theory is hardly political as such, but the fact that this reliance is on controversial questions that different ideological camps answer in different ways proves that here we have a clear case of liberalist dependence on comprehensiveness (Papastephanou, 2004). All the same, one may notice in Rawls texts occasional shifts in his accounts of natural assets, for example, of intelligence. True, these shifts may prove that he does not have a crude or naive notion of intelligence, but they also unveil the extent to which polemics intervene in the shaping of a theory that purports to be political and in a certain sense impervious to comprehensive (for example, ideological) inuence. Rawls exaggerates the supposed naturalness of intelligence when he feels compelled to justify the accommodation of some inequalities that he nds inevitable, and he downplays it only when he sees it as leading away from his theoretical priorities and becoming a conceptual weapon for the opponent. Here is a telling example. In rejecting the idea of a lump sum tax on natural abilities (an idea that derives from the Marxist precept from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs), Rawls emphasises the nonmeasurable and unxed character of natural assets and their precarious and changing social use:
Intelligence, for example, is hardly any one such xed native ability. It must have indenitely many dimensions that are shaped and nurtured by different social conditions; even as a potential, as opposed to a realized, capacity it is bound to vary signicantly in little understood and complex ways . . . Thus potential earnings capacity is not something independent from the social forms and the particular contingencies over the course of life, and the idea of a lump sum tax does not apply (Rawls, 1999, p. 253).

But one may reverse this argument and turn it against Rawls theory too. Why should intelligence then be informative at all for political theory if it is so elusive and dependent on contingency? How does a person know if she is gifted or ungifted? Why should intelligence be classied as a natural given and be taken for granted, thus setting an ontological limit to
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educationally formative or reformative effects on people? Rawls himself has, as we have seen in some previous citations too, fallen elsewhere5 into the positivist trap of the measurable and the locatable. Therefore, the concession here appears to serve only polemical purposes instead of being a consistent shift of perspective. Education assists us in unmasking the concealed comprehensive character of political liberalism as well as the mistaken epistemological framework that informs the self-understanding of the Rawlsian moral subject. Current sociology of education, inuenced by Pierre Bourdieus research, not only questions ideas of giftedness and natural talent but also exposes their ideological functioning as mechanisms for the reproduction of consolidated social power structures and inequalities. Good school performance is not explained as a sign of innate intelligence but as a product of the concurrence and coordination of cultural capital and teaching expectations. More explicitly, children from educated strata enter education already equipped with an informal and subtle cultivation that is called cultural capital. Such capital is not directly measured in schools, but it is nevertheless a non-thematised advantage. This is so because childrens attempts to decipher the communication code of the teacher and the transmitted knowledge depend on the extent to which their own vocabulary and cultural experience match the upper-middle class origin of the taught material and the teaching method. Educators mistake that initial success for a token of charisma and natural giftedness, and interpret failures as signs of inherent inability thus imposing on the bad pupils the self-image of the ungifted (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1985). This often produces a self-fullling prophecy. At a later stage of education, cultural capital is accompanied by symbolic capital, which is the intellectual aura that the charismatic enjoy due to the academic titles they have obtained from prestigious institutions, and by social capital, which denotes the social afliations and acquaintances that open ways to power. Thus, using apparently egalitarian and meritocratic methods, education selects and supports those pupils whose social origin has endowed them with the capital of hegemonic discourse. By declaring this success an indication of natural giftedness, it produces in them that elitist self-understanding that is necessary for the justication of their social position. But more importantly, it ensures that those who have not succeeded in the selection process will internalise the failure as a personal inadequacy, remaining thus unsuspecting of the hidden character of the selection mechanism itself. In this way, the natural disguise of social privilege guarantees compliance and legitimates inequality and its ancillary procedures by giving them ontological citizenship, that is, by accounting for performance in physiologist or geneticist essentialist terms. The route to wealth and enjoyment of culture is largely predetermined for the possessors of cultural capital by their initial social positioning. Successful progress to higher education and political power is not obstructed by cultural ignorance along the way; it poses, however, as a deserving and inevitable personal development of natural individual excellence. Such legitimation of privilege is almost invulnerable, and Rawls theory is a good example
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of that. Arbitrary inequality on the grounds of property must be ousted, but inequality on the grounds of merit and talent is not only tolerated but also made good for society. Bourdieu considers the racism of intelligence as the worst of all racisms (Bourdieu, 1984). Additionally, the natural endowment conviction has also been questioned and its undesirable pedagogical implications exposed by educational theorists of persuasions that share very little in common with Bourdieu and Passeron. Charles Jencks has shown that any egalitarian school reform is doomed to fail so long as there is no further and more drastic change at the level of societal and economic conditions. Thus, he has attributed differences of performance to the latter conditions rather than genetic endowment. Even before Jencks, James Coleman had explored social factors intervening in learning outcomes and fought against the racism of intelligence. Along with other theorists, they attacked Jensens assumptions about genetic racial differences and argued that the only way to check whetherand to what extentheredity of intellect plays some role would be through rst ensuring that all social variables are equal for many generations. More recently, sociologists of education such as Michael Young, Geoffrey Esland and Nell Keddie converge in the problematisation of categorisations based on such notions as talent and competence and the exposition of the social construction of knowledge (Blackledge and Hunt, 1989). True, there are problems in Bourdieu and Passerons conception of education as reproduction and several difculties with what is now called new sociology of education, and those cannot be dealt with in this article. However, what is crucial here is that this whole discourse shows that there is no unanimity regarding those epistemological issues that Rawls takes for granted. Consequently, their supposed generality can no longer ground the claim that liberalisms reliance on them is political rather than comprehensive. As Parry puts it, the once clear liberal notion of education preparing for the career open to the talents has become obscured as the central ideas of merit and talent have joined the ranks of contested concepts (Parry, 1999, p. 24). What is perhaps more important is that even within the innateness hypothesis there is a variety of positions, some of which assume universal competences and attack the individualist theoretical differentiation of them as elitist and racist. Noam Chomskys (1975) work in his Reections of Language is a signicant example. Jacques Maritains conception of natural intelligence (D Souza, 1996) as universal is another case that proves that the assumptions of winners and losers in the natural lottery are not taken for granted even within more traditional educational theories. Thus, for my argument here, it sufces that these assumptions are contested. Controversial substantive positions belong to the sphere of the comprehensive rather than the political (Papastephanou, 2004), and this demonstrates that such positions operate withinand sometimes throughthe principles of justice. Showing this constitutes an immanent critique. The challenge to the established epistemological admissions about who the moral subject is and who she believes herself to be as a
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knower in relation to existential variety and difference exposes liberalisms unavoidable dependence on comprehensiveness. This challenge is immanent because it does not draw from a supposedly incommensurable language game of illiberal radical otherness, inferior, fanatic and burdensome, but from sources upon which liberalism itself has bestowed authority. A further issue is, evidently, whether this immanent critique drastically affects Rawls conclusions about the necessity of a dose of inequality in the basic structure of society. We may indirectly reach some answer to this question after the examination of the second set of assumptions, that is, the anthropological. By the end of that discussion we shall also be able to move to the active role of education. I now proceed with a discussion of those tacit accounts of human nature underpinning justice as fairness that will prove once again that political liberalism is not as antiseptically devoid of comprehensiveness as Rawls would expect it to be.
ii. Anthropological Implicit Assumptions

For my anthropological argument and the way it connects to the aforementioned cognitive dimensions, the following quotation is revealing: in his 1969 text The Justication of Civil Disobedience, Rawls says about the original position:
The parties do not know their position in society, past, present, or future; nor do they know which institutions exist. Again, they do not know their own place in the distribution of natural talents and abilities, whether they are intelligent or strong, man or woman, and so on. [. . .] What the parties do know (or assume) is that Humes circumstances of justice obtain: namely, that the bounty of nature is not so generous as to render cooperative schemes superuous nor so harsh as to make them impossible. Moreover, they assume that the extent of their altruism is limited and that, in general, they do not take an interest in one anothers interests (Rawls, 1999, p. 178).

In this passage, a very specic conception of human nature appears to hold for the actors themselves whose self-image is that of the rational egoistperhaps not in the anthropologically stronger libertarian sense but in the more mitigated one of Humean and Continental liberalism (Papastephanou, 2004). For liberalism to be convincing in claiming that its assumption is politicalthat is, it does not rest on controversial grounds6what is necessary is to show not only that it is shared by all but that such universality is not the outcome of mere conformity or hegemonic enforcement. It is true that the liberal notion of the self as interest-seeking enjoys much empirical and theoretical support; however, it is especially from a deontological cognitivist ethics such as Rawls that one expects a distinction between validity and social currency. Even within Occidental thought itself, there have been alternative scenarios about the self
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(for example, the Stoic, the Rousseauist, to some extent the Marxist, and some anarchist conceptions) most of which have operated as undercurrents and counterfactual theoretical possibilities. Whether those or other contemporary or future accounts of the self are more justied than the liberalist and might have better implications for a radical politics is a matter of external critique of Rawls. For the purposes of this article, it sufces that the sheer existence of such alternative views problematises the supposedly uncontroversial character of political liberalism and offers a springboard for an internal critique. The political implication of the Rawlsian coupling of epistemological and anthropological self-depiction is that all should agree that the gifted of society will be motivated to make their talents available to society, not out of altruism but out of egoism. This is so because the difference principle exists precisely in order to provide to them that kind of satisfaction that stems from recognition of their superioritya recognition that is vouchsafed by accommodation to inequality. Proof of that is the following passage from Rawls Justice as Reciprocity, written in 1971:
If there are inequalities which satisfy the conditions of the second principle, the immediate gain which equality would allow can be considered as intelligently invested in view of its future return. If, as is quite likely, these inequalities work as incentives to draw out better efforts, the members of this society may look upon them as concessions to human nature: they, like us, may think that people ideally should want to serve one another. But as they are mutually self-interested, their acceptance of these inequalities is merely the acceptance of the relations in which they actually stand, and a recognition of the motives which lead them to engage in their common practices. Being themselves selfinterested, they have no title to complain of one another (Rawls, 1999, p. 203).

The way by which a theory of human nature demarcates ideals is another example of the Is-Ought fallacy, one that illustrates the dependence of political liberalism on anthropological views of comprehensive liberalism. By declaring themselves facts, these anthropological views don the guise of the political. This becomes clearer in a passage that explains how, in justice as fairness, the conception of the moral person is a companion ideal of that of a well-ordered society. Like any other ideal, it must be possible for people to honour it sufciently closely; and hence the feasible ideals of the person are limited by the capacities of human nature and the requirements of social life. To this extent such an ideal presupposes a theory of human nature, and social theory generally, but the task of a moral doctrine is to specify an appropriate conception of the person that general facts about human nature and society allow (p. 321, emphasis added). A crucial political implication is that the transformation of society is thereby determined.7 For Rawls, certain social and economic inequalities exist either as requirements for maintaining social arrangements or as incentives satisfying the relevant standard of justice (p. 245). Why do we
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need such an incentive if it is possible for people not to be motivated by inequality? Thus, in a negative way, we see that there is an implicit account of human motivation delineating impossibilities, one of them being the other-oriented stance. The anthropological limits of ideality along with the epistemologically assisted transition from existential dissimilarity to political inequality shape the liberalist conception of a desirable society and the positioning of education in it.
THE ROLE OF EDUCATION

Rawls ideas about education and its role in connection with his aforementioned epistemological and anthropological assumptions emerge rst and foremost in his dismissive discussion of the principle of redress. This is:
. . . the principle that undeserved inequalities call for redress; and since inequalities of birth and natural endowment are undeserved, these inequalities are to be somehow compensated for. Thus the principle of redress holds that in order to treat all persons equally, to provide genuine equality of opportunity, society must give more attention to those with fewer native assets and to those born into the less favorable social positions. . . . In pursuit of this principle greater resources might be spent on the education of the less rather than the more intelligent, at least over a certain time of life, say, the earlier years of school (p. 165).

This principle shares the dominant interpretation of variant performance of cognitive tasks but treats it in a more charitable manner and subjugates it to a more egalitarian political ideal. Education within its context is more interventionist than in the Rawlsian framework. It is expected to work less in favour of societal reproduction and more in favour of a perfectionist ideal of human individuality and collectivity. Still, this kind of redress leaves the physiologist or geneticist essentialism untouched, and, therefore, the kind of off-setting education it suggests is problematic. The real causes of the translation of dissimilarity into inequality may be obscured, resulting in an educational inability to address the social and cultural origins of the categorisation of people into the advanced and those lagging behind them. Thus, without considering the principle of redress a preferable alternative to the Rawlsian maximin, I have discussed it here nevertheless in order to facilitate the exposition of Rawls conception of education. Rawls contrasts the two principles, that is, the difference and the redress, as follows:
The difference principle is not, of course, the principle of redress. It does not require society to move in the direction of an equality of natural assets. We are not to try to even out handicaps as if all were expected to compete on a fair basis in the same race. But the difference principle would allocate resources in education, say, so as to improve the long-term expectation of the least favored. If this end is attained by giving more attention to the better endowed, it is permissible; otherwise not. And in making this decision, the value of education should not be assessed only in terms of its productivity effects, that is, its realising a persons capacity
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to acquire wealth. Equally important, if not more so, is the role of education in enabling a person to enjoy the culture of his society and to take part in its affairs, and in this way to provide each man with a secure sense of his own worth (p. 166).

Let us comment on the conception of education that Rawls epistemological assumptions allow, as displayed in the above citation. Education appears to be an institution that does not aim to even out something that precedes it: differences in performance are not the outcome of education itself. They emerge from differences in natural endowment that pre-exist enculturation. Far from being responsible for their existence, education, therefore, stands in a subject-object relation to them. It takes them as given and has the function of channeling them in such a way that collective prot will emerge from them. It is even legitimate for education, according to Rawls, to concentrate on the better endowed, if that would promote the long-term end of improving the life of the least favoured. It is obvious here that the cogency of Rawls difference principle not only presupposes a comprehensive genetic account of talent but even stands or falls by the latters validity. For, if the debatable assumption about natural giftedness proves wrong and social theory is right in claiming that qualitative difference of intellect is exclusively the outcome of social asymmetry and often injustice, the difference principle will be nothing but a further legitimation of inequality. Likewise, the Rawlsian conception of education would produce an institutional apparatus for the perpetuation of inequality, unconscious of its role in social reproduction and unable to address the problem of the initial articial separation of the sheep and the goats, judged in terms of knowledge. Justice as fairness would block interventionist efforts and off-setting educational treatment of cultural capital. It would be incompatible with a political teaching for reforming purposes. So the educational dilemma is either to cling to liberalism or to contribute to its reformulation. Also, since the anthropological assumptions underlying justice as fairness reect the individualist tenets of liberalism, it is predictable that education will serve the accommodation of competitiveness as a constant of interested selfhood in the social context rather than change it. On dealing with the arrangements of the institutions of a constitutional democracy in a way that justies the two principles of justice, Rawls explains that approximations are possible,
. . . provided the government regulates a free economy in a certain way. More fully, if law and government act effectively to keep markets competitive, resources fully employed, property and wealth widely distributed over time, and to maintain the appropriate social minimum, then if there is equality of opportunity underwritten by education for all, the resulting distribution will be just (p. 140).

Below we shall discuss whether the goal of equal opportunities exhausts the signicance of education for justice. To summarise what we have
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explored so far, Rawls theory not only is more comprehensive than it admits, but, in the wake of this comprehensiveness, holds a particular conception of education that is unaware of its own complicities and reproductive function. Couched in a framework that understands difference in natural qualitative terms and assumes a concomitant motivational ground of social/moral action, education would be compelled to undertake only a very limited and long-term reforming task regarding social justice. As I mentioned previously, another point where Rawls account of education emerges concerns equal opportunity.8 The egalitarian formalism underlying the role given to education becomes clearer in the following formulation: we suppose that, in addition to maintaining the usual social overhead capital, government provides for equal educational opportunities for all either by subsidising private schools or by operating a public school system (p. 141). Egalitarian educational formalism signies the idea that schools must have a standard formal approach to all students didactically and with regard to the course materialin order to secure meritocracy and equal opportunity to achieve distinction. We encounter this idea in Talcott Parsons sociology of education, which has attracted criticisms to the effect that he loses sight of the fact that equal standards of teaching and assessment cannot neutralise uneven performances that derive from social inequalities (Blackledge and Hunt, 1989). Rawls view that equality of opportunity is a certain set of institutions which assures equally good education and chances of culture for all and which keeps open the competition for positions on the basis of qualities reasonably related to performance (Rawls, 1999, p. 143) echoes Parsonian social theory.9 Rawls understands equal educational opportunities only as the eradication of discrimination and favouritism in classrooms because his epistemological assumptions commit him to a naturalist interpretation of talent, ability and effort:
Assuming that there is a distribution of natural assets, those at the same level of talent and ability and who have the same willingness to use them, should have the same prospects of success regardless of their initial place in the social system, that is, irrespective of the class into which they were born. In all sectors of society there should be roughly equal prospects of culture and achievement for everyone similarly endowed and motivated (p. 161).

Had Rawls questioned the naturalist account of endowment, he would have been compelled to reconsider the functionalist socio-theoretical basis of the difference principle and perceive its complicity in the symbolic and practical reproduction of inequality. Overall, Rawls overlooks the active involvement of education in the shaping of subjectivity (including aspects of it such as ability and motivation) and this leads him to a vision of education that is more reproductive of social inequality than transformative. The reforming effect of education can be better served through a vigilance that uncovers the
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ways in which some interpretations of existential dissimilarity, on the one hand, and political inequality, on the other, become secret accomplices. To summarise, I have so far argued that: i. Rawls promotes a political liberalism, one that does not, he claims, presuppose any contestable metaphysical accounts of the self and the world. ii. To explain why some inequalities are allowed within his second principle of justice, he assumes, epistemologically, that there is such a thing as natural intelligence and, anthropologically, that human beings are rational egoists. He considers these assumptions intuitive as well as undisputable facts of science and social theory. iii. Yet, despite their intuitive force in the Western worldview, those epistemological and anthropological assumptions have been contested, precisely as ideologicalthat is, metaphysical after all justications of the status quo. iv. Regardless of whether these assumptions prove right or wrong in future, that they are by now contestable renders them ill-placed in Rawlsian political liberalism. The justication they provide for inequality has negative political implications. v. Educational theory can expose some of the problems in these Rawlsian assumptions and contrast them with new interpretations of the human self. vi. Thus, my aim has not been to refute Rawls assumptions empirically but to show, rst, that their place in his theory of justice betrays the fact that his liberalism is not political (in the Rawlsian sense) and, second, that they are not as enabling as they are usually taken to be. Exploring the counterintuitivethat is, those assumptions that go against the Rawlsian intuitive onesmay point to a new springboard for organising political education and reforming the political system, and to an ethic that would offer no legitimation to inequality.
TEACHING CITIZENSHIP

Let us pull together the main arguments. Rawls principles of justice depend on comprehensive liberalist assumptions about the knowing and ethical self that are so deeply entrenched in hegemonic discourse about subjectivity as to give the impression that they map indisputable natural facts. Educational theory in its hybrid drawing from diverse disciplines such as sociology and philosophy could play a more active part than is usual and provide alternative accounts of the self, thereby exposing the comprehensive character of Rawls political liberalism. Educational theory also demonstrates that, regrettably, as an institution, education has a more serious and consistent involvement in shaping subjectivities along the divisive lines that the dominant epistemology of giftedness and inherent self-centeredness establishes. In this way, education has a political responsibility for existing inequalities. From this, it follows that educationalists also have a moral duty to reconsider its reproductive role
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and to contribute to social change instead of accommodating and serving unequal enculturation. Such a conception of education presupposes a sense of inequality redress that puts it at odds with Rawls account of education for equality. Organising citizenship education in a political liberalist fashion, either as a separate curricular provision or as a general pedagogical attitude-orientation, enervates the critical and social-reforming potential of pedagogy. It becomes ethnocentric in presenting liberalist convictions as true descriptions of the human condition. When such education faces the neutralist predicamentthat is, the robust demand on all cultures to commit themselves to neutralism10this subtle ethnocentrism becomes manifest, since the management of non-liberal otherness conveniently appears to be the only challenge to liberalisms apotheosis. What kind of citizenship education does this critique of Rawls point to? Using the above summary as a background, I shall move to my suggestions. First, a more interventionist and transformative education can be approached both theoretically and practically through a rejection of liberalist epistemological and anthropological essentialism. Teaching citizenship should not comprise only the transmission of values, substantive or otherwise, nor simply familiarisation with civic virtues or acquisition of political scientic knowledge. A more expressive, active and participative practice (Mills, 2004, pp. 260 and 276) may effect more involvement in decision-making but it cannot change, by itself, a politically suspect self-image. For, teaching and practising tolerance and respect may contribute to the cultivation of rened and sensitive political attitudes. If, however, a persons political conception of herself as intellectually superior and interest-driven remains unaltered, her attitudes will lapse into condescension and competitiveness. Likewise, the feeling of intellectual inferiority of the losers in the natural lottery will effect an internalisation of social failure. This will never let them question established Occidental divisions such as the mentalist privileging of the intellectual over the manual or the performative over the non-measurable, and it will never allow the inequalities to be revealed and more radical social change to be pursued. Political education then should give priority to the de-schooling of those presuppositions that inuence the affective and the imaginary, that is, our feelings about ourselves and others and our visions about what is possible for humanity. When political thinking is determined by such presuppositions, it accommodates inequality at a deeper level; it gives it ontological citizenship, so to speak. It renounces inequality politically, only to reintroduce a version of itthe Rawlsian principle of difference has served as an example of thisas a motivating force for naturally gifted people to make their talents available to the less gifted, for the benet of all. The Rawlsian justication for economic inequalities, even where this is found in mitigated forms, is not independent of political inequalities, in my view, and it must be combated both theoretically and in practice. To combat such political implications, citizenship education must enlarge its perspective by turning to the connection of the public sphere with the way in which pupils understand themselves and their positioning
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in society. It must use the negating of essentialism as a springboard from which to explore the possibility of alternative, more daring and more just political and social bonds in the future. In more concrete educational terms, teaching citizenship for critique and social change rather than adaptation and social maintenance should involve an open questioning of the way the self is pictured epistemologically and anthropologically. Such questioning can be carried out theoretically as a part of a (meta)-critical thinking approach within a citizenship course where students will be directed towards examining, or questioning, the political implications of their self-image for issues of justice and equality. Students could also be invited to consider possible worlds and utopias in which our assumptions about the human condition would be different. A strategy of exchange of positions and narrative imagination regarding ones perception of ones performance and its social signicance as well as an attempt to explain non-essentialistically ones progress would be helpful. A very early and simple example of this is Heraclitus dictum that he would not have had the intellectual quality that characterised his life if he had been born a slave, or a poor citizen, or a woman. Even if not taken at face value, since the aspects that affect ones life history are more multiple and complex than such categories of social differentiation, this example has a political pertinence for citizenship education. It points to a contemplation of ones own existential position and a capacity to imagine oneself in an alternative, less favourable condition that are often missing today, even in discourses belonging to the politics of difference. For, arguably, such discourses seem more frequently to shift the attention of citizenship education to participatory, inclusive, even charitable models of treating otherness to the neglect of the theoretical perception and construction of otherness in hegemonic discourse that lies behind these.

CONCLUSION

Thinking about epistemological and anthropological issues has important implications for teaching citizenship,11 for the following reasons. First, the scope of political education depends on how we understand the role of education in general. For instance, a fatalist indictment of education as inescapably reproductive of existing structures of inequality, ultimately attributable to human nature, is bound to elicit less radical expectations from citizenship education than a more interventionist conception. How much we concede to educations capacity to redirect interests and shape better subjectivities is a crucial determining factor of what citizenship should mean today. Second, the aims of political education vary according to the way we comprehend the reforming effect of schooling. In spite of the importance of the fact that, as Johnston (2005) convincingly argues, a Rawlsian educational theory encourages pluralistic dialogue and debate, a political education modeled on Rawls liberalism would promote social integration and socialisation, but to a lesser degree social change. In fact,
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the demands of a neutralist political education are greater in reconstructive terms on those who espouse non-liberal doctrines than they are on liberals themselves, where they are likely to have a reinforcing effect that extends to the comprehensive dimensions of liberalism (Parry, 1999, p. 34). Finally, answers to ultimate questions about the self and the world, far from being circumventible, determine political education both in content and purpose. If abilities and dispositions are to a large degree natural and pre-given, political education preparing future citizens for justice and equality will consist in imparting the political attitudes that favour the unobstructed deployment of individual talents for the sake of the public weal. If one questions the innateness assumption and the liberalist account of human motivation, however, one is likely to become an advocate for a political education that prepares future citizens for more critical conceptions of justice and redistribution of wealth. Ultimately, what is at stake is the positioning of citizenship education between the Is and the Ought: in other words, what should citizenship education aim to achieve? Should it be closer to a morally-disposed management of existing realities or to a commitment to change those realities for the sake of a more profound ethical worldview? I have argued that, if thought through to its end, this positioning relies on, or, perhaps, is conditioned by, implicit comprehensive depictions of the knowing and moral self. As a nal illustration of how this applies to Rawls theory, consider his notion of what a realistic utopia might be in one of his last works, The Law of Peoples. The vision of a reasonably just constitutional democratic society is a realistic utopia on two conditions, the rst of which is relevant here. To be realistic, a liberal conception of justice must rely on the actual laws of nature and achieve the kind of stability those laws allow, that is, stability for the right reasons. It takes people as they are (by the laws of nature), and constitutional and civil laws as they might be, that is, as they would be in a reasonably just and well-ordered democratic society (Rawls, 2002, pp. 1213). What does it mean to take people as they are (by the laws of nature)? I hope to have shown that, for Rawls, this means to hold the epistemological and anthropological ideas that he takes as general facts of natural science and social theory, and to allow science (natural and social) to decipher for us the constraints that reality imposes on the imagination. As I have argued, however, ideas that are taken as facts by some trends in some sciences are questioned by other trends within those sciences or by other sciences. By contrasting those ideas to alternative views and exposing their contestable status, I hope also to have shown that the only sense in which the myth of realism they offer is realistic is that it blocks the imaginative reach of normativity. By this I mean that these ideas are employed by liberalism in order to demarcate what is feasible and worth pursuing; in this sense they appear as realistic, that is, sensitive to how things actually are. Yet, ironically, they are realistic only in another sense: in their unwitting reinforcement of reality as it is. In other words, a theory that takes accounts of how people are for granted serves the afrmation and conservation of the actualthe status quoas against the possible. It seeks the best feasible vision within the
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naturalised connes of existing reality. Education might rather want those connes shattered.12 Correspondence: Marianna Papastephanou, University of Cyprus, Department of Education, PO Box 20537, Nicosia 1678 Cyprus. Email: edmari@ucy.ac.cy

NOTES
1. As Kenneth Strike remarks, Rawls holds that comprehensive doctrines are necessary for people having a conception of the good but at the same time he regards them as the problem (Strike, 1998, p. 222). 2. The difference principle: all differences in wealth and income, all social and economic inequalities, should work for the good of the least favored (Rawls, 1999, p. 163). The difference principle is also a reciprocity principle expressing a natural condition of mutual advantage (ibid.). 3. Evidently, cases of physical damage or special needs that some people may carry from birth belong to a different category and should not be conated with the assumption of natural talent. A discussion of the former goes beyond the scope of this article and is left aside. 4. Hence, the fact that the principles of justice are not founded on the social position or natural endowments of the particular social agent does not entail, as one might think, that they are independent from the very assumption of natural endowments. On the contrary, as we have seen, the content of the difference principle relies on a naturalist essentialist conception of talent. 5. It is perfectly true, as some have said [with reference to HayekM.P.], that unequal inheritance of wealth is no more inherently unjust than unequal inheritance of intelligence (Rawls, 1999, p. 143). 6. In Kantian Constructivism Rawls admits in passing (while arguing for something else) the following: in justice as fairness the rst principles of justice depend upon those general beliefs about human nature and how society works which are allowed to the parties in the original position (Rawls, 1999, p. 351). Thus he admits a dependence on philosophical assumptions, but the crucial point for him is their generality. 7. In justice as fairness, the main ideals of the conception of justice are embedded in the two model-conceptions of the person and of a well-ordered society. And, granting that these ideals are allowed by the theory of human nature and so in that sense feasible, the rst principles of justice to which they lead, via the constructivist procedure of the original position, determine the long-term aim of social change (Rawls, 1999, p. 352). 8. In his words, it is necessary that the various ofces to which special benets or burdens attach are open to all. It may be, for example, to the common advantage, as just dened, to attach special benets to certain ofces. Perhaps by doing so the requisite talent can be attracted to them and encouraged to give its best efforts. But any ofces having special benets must be won in a fair competition in which contestants are judged on their merits. If some ofces were not open, those excluded would normally be justied in feeling unjustly treated, even if they beneted from the greater efforts of those who were allowed to compete for them (Rawls, 1999, p. 51). 9. Arguably, Parsonian functionalism is not the only possible inuence on Rawls views. Sociology of education drawing from Theodor Schutzs theory of human capital can also be shown to be compatible with Rawls position. 10. As Parry puts it, contemporary political liberals hope to produce an education which will encourage future citizens to sustain a form of politics which is limited in its scope and neutral in its dealings with the diversity of conceptions of the good life which exist within modern pluralist societies (Parry, 1999, p. 23). 11. Consider the following passage in Rawls Political Liberalism (1993). Political liberalism will ask that childrens education include such things as knowledge of their constitutional and civic rights so that, for example, they know that liberty of conscience exists in their society and that apostasy is not a legal crime, all this to insure that their continued membership when they come of age is not based simply on ignorance of their basic rights or fear of punishment for offences

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that do not exist. Moreover, their education should also prepare them to be fully cooperating members of society and enable them to be self-supporting; it should also encourage the political virtues so that they want to honor the fair terms of social cooperation in their relations with the rest of society (p. 199). 12. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Philosophy of Education Seminar of the London Institute of Education on 5 November, 2004. I would like to thank Terry McLaughlin for the invitation to present this work on that occasion, Paul Standish for his valuable critical suggestions, John Colbeck for proof-reading the paper, Richard Smith for some previous discussions on issues concerning the possibility of a more active employment of education in relation to philosophy, and Antonis Hatzistavrou, John White and Patricia White for their many helpful comments.

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