Recognitive justice in education – Part 1: Recognition
https://hail.to/methodist-church-of-new-zealand-emessenger/article/xopRDJP
This is the fourth in a series about social justice in education - complete blog list below
With reference to a ‘fairer’ allocation of and access to limited resources in state education, the previous blog discussed the endemic distributive injustice in our society (financial and physical assets are disproportionately owned by a small minority of very well-off people and families), and its progressive counterpart, redistributive justice (where some of this disproportionate wealth is taxed and transferred to the great majority in society who are continually challenged just to make ends meet). Examples of targeted redistribution in education policy in Aotearoa today include (i) the Childcare Subsidy in early learning; (ii) Equity Index funding, free school lunches and the schools donation scheme subsidy; and (iii) means-tested student allowances in tertiary education.
This blog focuses on another essential building block or cornerstone of justice in education: recognition. Recognition, or recognitive justice, has come to prominence in recent decades as marginalised or invisible cultural groups have struggled, voiced, organised and demanded acknowledgement, legal rights, and respect for who they are and how they wish to live from dominant groups in society. Examples of recognitive justice in education would include: (i) conceptualisation of the early childhood curriculum te Whāriki around the four principles of whakamana (empowerment), kotahitanga (holistic development), whānau tangata (family and community), and ngā hononga (relationships); (ii) the requirement in the Education and Training Act 2020 for schools to give practical effect to te Tiriti o Waitangi in their governance and operations, and meaningfully to acknowledge the language, culture and identity of students; and (iii) the gradual normalisation of culturally responsive curricula, spaces and support services for Māori students and for Pasifika students in tertiary education settings, and the very recent appearance in Aotearoa of mostly philanthropically-funded ‘first in family’ scholarships to attend university.
Calls for recognitive justice have also grown alongside a decline in political and civil society support for the principle that we are morally obligated to redistribute resources from the better off to those who live in socio-economic disadvantage. As a society, we often gloss over or explain away the very obvious effects and consequences of poverty and material hardship, including child poverty. This decline is reflected, for example, in the gradual change of our ‘benefit’ terminology from social security, to welfare, and now to workfare. The contemporary term workfare conveys the brute ideology that some of the structurally disadvantaged in society are more deserving of our charity and compassion than others, and that when state resources are limited or constrained, we should support only the ‘deserving’ poor, those whose work is finding work. Sadly, the normative principle that every person has the right to lead a dignified life of their choosing with their most basic physical, psychological and spiritual needs assured by society seems to have been consigned to the dustbin of history.
Like several others in the series, this blog is in two parts: (i) the justice of recognition; and (ii) the injustice of disrespect. Examples from the classroom, staffroom, community and education system at large illustrate how these two abstract aspects of recognitive justice relate very concretely to the individual and collective lived experience of state education, one of our major social institutions.
The blog draws on the framework and terminology of recognition as they appear in the work of the German political philosopher and critical theorist, Axel Honneth. As he put it once, critical theory is concerned with the ways in which social power and society are constructed as relations of domination. This led him to redevelop the Hegelian notion of human life as not just a struggle for basic existence but, more than this, a morally motivated social struggle against such domination, and against the experience of humiliation or disrespect, to be recognised by others and to be able to lead an ethical life in community alongside others. A dignified life, in other words. As used by Honneth, the term recognition implies a positive attribution of respect and status to persons and groups who do not appear to be like those of us who benefit in so many unstated ways simply from being one of ‘the majority’. More than this, though, relations of mutual recognition are viewed as essential to the moral and practical functioning of social institutions and communities.
According to Honneth, I must come to see myself in ‘the other’ and appreciate that I will only be able to fulfil my aims and goals in life if my ‘interaction partners’ are also able to realise theirs. Even though many ‘others’ appear quite different to me, and to people like me, we nevertheless share certain characteristics as persons and life goals as members of specific communities and of society as a whole. I need to care about others being able to live out their characteristics and goals, and they mine if, together, we are to develop the necessary freedom and capability to lead the kinds of lives we each aspire to. It is a perspective in which respectful relations with others and the development of personal identity, or what Honneth calls our ‘practical relations to self’, are mutually interdependent. Seen as such, we are irredeemably social beings, not the self-interested, self-maximising ‘homo oeconomici’ that libertarian views of the world would have us believe, and which deeply ingrained and largely unquestioned educational structures of competitive individualism (e.g. ability grouping, streaming, ranking) unhelpfully reinforce.
Honneth draws on social psychology theory and research to argue that the possibility of us developing an ‘undistorted relation’ to self depends on three distinct forms of recognition. Social conflict emerges when we are denied this recognition, when instead we experience one or more of three parallel forms of disrespect. If we choose to think about it, these various forms of recognition and disrespect can readily be seen in the differentiated ways that many children from minoritised groups experience the early learning setting or classroom on a daily basis, compared to the experiences of their majority group peers. Our sense of self develops gradually through life as we engage with others in the social institutions, practices and relations that comprise our forms of life. This is one reason why the ideal of open enrolment, socially mixed, local neighbourhood kindergartens and schools has been so essential in terms of encouraging and enabling engagement with children from other backgrounds, circumstances and cultures as part of the expansion of state education from some to all.
In Honneth’s framing, there are three forms of respectful relations of recognition: love and friendship, legal rights, and solidarity. Each of these relates to a major societal institution: family, the law and community. From the perspective of a social psychology of learning and development, early relationships in the family provide emotional support, enable children and young people to express their needs and feelings and encourage basic self-confidence. In part, this is why we read and hear so much these days about the importance of ‘the first thousand days’ in a child’s life. Outside the family, engagement with other social institutions, such as early learning settings and schooling, gives opportunities to learn that, through our membership of these institutions, we enjoy the ‘cognitive respect’ of legal relations and equal rights with others. This, says Honneth, encourages the development of our sense of moral responsibility towards others and self-respect. In this sense, school rules around body adornment, for instance, need to be inclusive of diverse valued cultural or religious traditions. So too the tacit and explicit disciplinary processes that accompany these, if minority students and families are to have confidence that they do enjoy the same legal relations and rights as the majority. More broadly, for example, membership of a community of value (e.g. faith, culture, interest, sports, arts) enables a person to experience social esteem for their own personal traits and values and encourages self-esteem. That is partly why access to and participation in sports, performance, cultural, education outside the classroom, and other co-curricular activities should never be dependent on the family’s ability to pay.
Hopefully, what becomes evident from this summary is that Honneth’s conception of recognition makes sense at individual, family, institutional and system levels. Positive relations of approval and recognition may also be said to depict inclusionary educational practices: from the most innocuous everyday intersubjective interactions among children, or between learners and educators, to the abstract ‘moral grammar’ that is expressed through our system-level policy texts. Collectively, these positive relations show the potential of education actively to enable children and young people to develop an undistorted relation to self, as Honneth puts it.
Similarly, most of us understand all too well that formal educational settings are commonly sites of conflict characterised to greater or lesser extents by social relations of power and domination, both visible and invisible. We know too from the accounts of family and friends that compulsory schooling can be a profoundly unsettling and confidence-sapping experience for some and even a humiliating one for some others. For example, the child who gets constant messages from peers and adults that they do not ‘fit’; or the family whose interactions with teachers, administrators and trustees tell them they do not really ‘belong’. In Honneth’s terms, as we shall see in Part 2, this conflict is generated at heart by disrespect, an absence or denial of recognition.
Links to blog series
Part 1: The dimensions of social justice in education
Part 2a: Fairness in education – Part 1: John Rawls
Part 2b: Fairness in Education – Part 2: Beyond Rawls
Part 3a: Redistributive justice in education – Part 1: Maldistribution
Part 3b: Redistributive justice in education – Part 2: Redistribution
Bio: John O’Neill researches in the area of critical education policy scholarship. For many years he has been an education spokesperson for Child Poverty Action Group and the Quality Public Education Coalition.