Recognitive justice in education – Part 2: Disrespect
https://hail.to/methodist-church-of-new-zealand-emessenger/article/xopRDJP
Part 1 of this blog discussed Axel Honneth’s three forms of positive social recognition: love, respect and esteem. Effectively, maintaining the integrity of the image we have of ourselves depends on us continually receiving these kinds of affirmation in our intersubjective and social interactions with: (i) family, close friends and intimates (love); (ii) the broader civil institutions through which we lead our particular forms of life (rights); and (iii) the various workplaces, activities, pastimes and other valued communities of shared interests, norms and values where we endeavour to contribute, and be recognised for, our unique accomplishments and abilities (esteem).
Conversely, explains Honneth, the absence of any of these three forms of recognition is manifested in one of three equivalent forms of disrespect. Misrecognition or the denial of recognition may be expressed in: (i) abusive or uncaring primary relations and lead to a loss of bodily integrity (Honneth refers to physical abuse; in the context of formal education I would add psychological, affective, and psychic); (ii) the denial of rights and social exclusion, leading to a loss of social integrity; and (iii) denigration and insult, leading to a loss of honour and personal dignity.
Disrespect in any of these forms is negative not just because it is harmful to or restrictive of the individual but because, as Honneth writes, ‘it injures them with regard to the positive understanding of themselves, they have acquired intersubjectively’. We depend for our integrity on the approval of others. Withholding or failing to accord respect to someone harms and, in extreme cases, has the potential to irrevocably destroy our normative self-image. Think here for example, not just of the heartrending testimonies to and findings of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care; but also of the voices of children who day in, day out experience practical forms of disrespect such as racism, adult indifference and peer bullying in schooling, as recorded by The New Zealand School Trustees Association and the Office of the Children’s Commissioner in the landmark Education Matters to Me reports in 2018. More generally, children who struggle to adjust to the demands of schooling may often feel physically defenceless and at the mercy of other adults and peers. This damages self-confidence but also, as a consequence, generates a kind of social shame which itself becomes embodied and affects their interactions and relations with others.
Disrespect for a person’s body or, more likely, for one’s freedom to ‘coordinate one’s own body’ may sound a bit far-fetched when applied to state educational settings today. Nevertheless, some children do live with precisely these sorts of physiological or neurological challenges to attend, engage and conform bodily, while many others encounter dramatic contrasts between the ways they are permitted to conduct themselves in classroom and household and other social settings. Behaviourally oriented discipline and self-discipline programmes such as PB4L here in Aotearoa have demonstrated that they certainly can help engender positive recognition and respect for others but there is also a potential dark side to some such structures and prescriptions, seen in the kinds of strict between class circulation and in-class engagement rules found in ‘zero tolerance’ schools and military academies. For example, the KIPP charter schools acronym SLANT demands that students always: Sit up straight, Listen, Ask and answer questions, Nod for comprehension and Track the speaker.
Relatedly, social integrity is threatened or harmed whenever members of an educational community have experiences that signal to them that they enjoy fewer or lesser rights than others, or that they are excluded from participation as an equal and full member of that community, or ostracised for their defensive self-exclusion. One study of primary school child poverty, for example, reported that children become aware very early on in schooling that living in poverty restricts the number and range of ‘user pays’ educational activities in which they are able to participate, and they become reluctant to even ask the family to cover the cost. On Honneth’s view, this would adversely affect the child’s self-respect. More deeply, their educational experiences may tell them that they are not being accorded the same moral responsibility as their peers. As Honneth puts it, they are denied their expectation to be regarded as someone with who is capable of forming moral judgments. They are seen as incapable of exercising the moral responsibility that they have acquired elsewhere through their early socialisation.
We often also see the third form of disrespect, a loss of personal honour or dignity, being played out in education, for example when one’s funds of knowledge from the home setting or one’s valued cultural capital and ways of being in one’s extended family and community lives are disrespected or excluded from what counts as valuable formal learning. This suggests to those who are disrespected that their mode of life counts for little in early learning, schooling or tertiary education. The person may well be affirmed, esteemed and have honour in the familial, social, faith, craft or cultural setting but not in the formal, cognitively weighted education setting. Just as importantly, their personal accomplishments and contributions to their out of school mode of life are disrespected, which threatens and undermines their self-esteem. Conversely, we know very well that affirming and esteeming a person’s accomplishments in one facet of their institutional and everyday life (be this academic, sporting, cultural or community service), can have profoundly positive effects on their self-esteem in other facets.
Much as we would like to imagine that our educational institutions are infused largely with positive forms of affirmation and recognition, that is the actual lived experience of only some of us. For others, the compulsory institutional educational journey of between one and two decades of childhood and youth (12,000 hours or so) proves toxic to our bodily and/or social integrity, and/or personal dignity.
In a subsequent complementary essay, Honneth’s focus of analysis flips so to speak from the psychological to the sociological or anthropological. He examines the ways in which societal institutions themselves advance or constrain people’s collective ability to learn about, practice, value and embody democratic, ethical forms of mutual recognition that in turn imply shared responsibility and obligation. (It seems to me that ideal progressive educational institutions match this description closely.) For Honneth, these positive and negative instances of recognition are immanent in our institutions precisely because the patterns of social action that sustain them reflect deeply sedimented norms about how we should relate to each other, and why. These norms are manifest in the habitual patterns of everyday classroom, workgroup, and schooling community action. As Honneth puts it, such patterns are standardized yet in a state of continual dialectic contestation and flux in each setting. Bringing about just education for all consequently requires us to focus far more on addressing practical contradictions in mundane classroom experience as opposed to writing abstract and normative education policies and guidelines about the importance of recognition.
In the next blog in the series, we take a closer look at the closely related area of political representation and participation as a key dimension of social justice.
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
Part 4a: Recognitive justice in education – Part 1: Recognition
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.