Elaine Unterhalter

Distribution of What for Social Justice in Education? The Case of Education for All by 2015

The chapter considers how assessments are made concerning global social justice and education. It explores the need to consider not only international patterns of access to and very narrowly defined achievements in education but also to assess the distribution of other aspects of education deemed valuable, particularly given complex global class, gender, race and ethnic inequalities. It uses the example of the movement to achieve Education for All (EFA) by 2015 associated with UN agencies, international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and the work of many governments worldwide, and looks critically at the indicators that have been developed to evaluate this. We argue these are inadequate to capture what would rightly count as “education for all.” We argue instead for the appropriateness of the capability approach, particularly taking issue with its Rawlsian critics such as Thomas Pogge, who defend a resourcist alternative. We highlight how thinking about distribution and capabilities requires a range of different ways of evaluating social justice in the provision of education. This opens up institutions to critique and we offer some thoughts toward how this approach to evaluation might be developed to assist in critical policy work.

Be yourself: class, race, gender and sexuality in South African schoolchildren's accounts of social relations

Abstract The article examines understandings of class, race, gender and sexuality in the writings of secondary school students in two working-class schools in Durban. The analysis of students questions and responses to a problem page ‘agony aunt’, indicate how class and race come to be expressed through accounts of sexuality. In the letters many children highlight the importance of family relationships and their belief in schooling. These themes, while not surprising in themselves, contrast with the neglect of these issues in the literature on the sociology of education in South Africa, which has mainly been concerned with class and race inequalities.

Poverty, education, gender and the Millennium Development Goals: Reflections on boundaries and intersectionality

The article considers the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) concerned with poverty, education and gender (MDG 1, MDG 2 and MDG 3). Despite considerable achievements associated with the MDG approach, which entails international and national target setting and monitoring, a sharp distinction between areas of social policy is entailed. In addition the approach suggests sufficiency, for example providing a minimum level of education or gender parity, rather than a fuller notion of equality, is good enough. These processes of classification, which entail horizontal and vertical boundaries, are examined, partly drawing on Bernsteinian ideas, and partly through reflections on the concept of intersectionality. Data collected from discussions in Kenya and South Africa with administrators in national and provincial government and teachers implementing the poverty, education and gender MDGs are explored. These show a tendency to work primarily with ideas based on lines, associated with the MDG targets rather than to think more complexly about structure, agency and context in addressing inequality. Thus professionals who confront problems of poverty, gender inequality and inadequate education in day-to-day work lack appropriate resources or processes for gathering information or reflexively engaging with it. The missing resources are partly financial, in that there are not budgets of time or money to attend to making connections. But in addition they are conceptual. Ideas which take a direction to social justice. In the place of a reasoned and reflexive professional language of practice, everyday ideas that connect poverty with gender and schooling are expressed. These tend to reproduce social distance and blame. Putting intersectional ideas to work in ways that consciously and creatively challenge existing sites of exclusionary power appeal key in success or frameworks to the MDGs.

Measuring Justice: Education for primary goods or for capabilities?

The contention of this chapter is that both Rawlss social primary goods theory and Sen and Nussbaums capabilities approach offer some resources to guide our thinking. One natural move is to say that education is a social primary good in Rawlss sense. Amartya Sen develops the capabilities approach in response to various problems, none of which have directly to do with education, in the social primary goods approach. The primary goods approach, on its face, is ill- suited to dealing with involuntary differences in individuals abilities to make use of a fixed amount of resources. The main argument made in the chapter is that neither the primary goods approach nor the capabilities approach, in its current state, is adequate to the task of guiding policymakers in deciding what the content and distribution of educational opportunities should be.

Primary Goods versus Capabilities: Considering the debate in relation to equalities in education

Thomas Pogge has recently argued that the capability approach cannot be justified, and that John Rawls’s social primary goods way of thinking about the metric of justice that is superior to the capability approach (Pogge 2003). The burden of this paper is to respond to his objections drawing on issues that arise when thinking about distribution and equality in education. We should say at the outset that we do not have a strong view about which of the approaches is superior, all-things-considered. Sometimes the language of capabilities better illuminates what matters than does the language of primary goods. And frequently both approaches are hard to apply.