Participatory justice - Part 2: Inclusion and representation
https://hail.to/methodist-church-of-new-zealand-emessenger/article/xopRDJP
As defined by Iris Marion Young, participatory justice is a process-oriented view of social life that requires us to struggle against the prevailing socio-economic settlement to enact the practical conditions that improve inclusion and representation of all groups in society. This is a practical political disposition in the sense that it concerns how diverse groups with multiple world views reach agreement on decisions that affect them all. An educational example might be the politics of framing and taking concrete decisions around curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. Consequently, we can readily envisage the politics of education operating ubiquitously at system, community, institutional or classroom levels. Issues and tensions of inclusion and representation affect and are affected by the habits of students, families, educators, trustees, officials and professional politicians. On this view, education is irredeemably politicised yet ironically, for Young, the maintenance of our contemporary suite of universal public services has, in fact, required depoliticising the processes and relationships of state education. How could this apparent paradox be so?
The establishment of comprehensive public services is consequently a compromise, says Young. Under market liberal capitalism the economy is privileged and operates largely unhindered while social policy conflict and discussion is limited to a relatively narrow range of distributive matters. So, for instance, In Aotearoa we have legislated to create statutory fiscal constraints and responsibilities for governments but not equivalent social responsibilities and obligations. Our child poverty reduction, affordable housing, and environmental sustainability targets are therefore all mutable, being reliant on what the market economy generates and what ‘taxpayers’ will tolerate. Limiting public policy decisions in this way ‘defines the citizen primarily as a client-consumer’, says Young, and encourages people to evaluate government in terms of how well it provides them with goods and services. The creation of programmes targeted at specific interest groups encourages lobbying and competition between groups for limited resources. Groups that start with more ‘cultural capital’ (in Bourdieu’s terms) tend to do best in this competition.
Young calls this scenario interest group pluralism, which she says makes no distinction between ‘the assertion of claims based on selfish interests and normative claims to justice and right’. Forcing interest groups to compete, to lobby, bargain and strike deals displaces the public deliberation that Young asserts is ‘a hallmark of the political’. We see this lack of deliberation and its consequences in education: early learning, schooling and tertiary education sectors all operate as quasi-markets, at system and local levels. Today, national curriculum, pedagogy and assessment policies are all subject to lobbying by academic, sole trader and corporate interest groups. Ministers commonly make major policy choices based on the advice not just of their officials but also those who happen to have their ear: the small fractions of preferred parents, educators, academics, business interests, and policy entrepreneurs with whom they choose to interact. Young calls this a privatised form of representation and decision-making. In reality, it also reduces the polity effectively to a tiny, professionalised and networked cadre.
Meanwhile, as they have been for several decades, the mass of parents in civil society is encouraged to consume education services based on expected summative rates of academic progress and achievement, league tables of national assessment and credential results and supposedly objective Education Review Office reports. In turn, students are exhorted to work diligently towards curriculum outcome benchmarks, qualifications, and further and higher education to work pathways that will give them the best labour market prospects. At the same time, parents and students are excluded from direct participation in public decision-making about the ends and means of education, that is its governance. Participation in governance is for the most part orchestrated, time-constrained and designed to take as given existing processes and relationships, hierarchically determined responsibilities and accountabilities. This is increasingly true at classroom, staffroom and boardroom levels, where decision framing and taking exercises are regularised, bureaucratised and scheduled and, at least in the case of children, often insultingly tokenistic.
In Young’s view, the wider public service is structured to act as a ‘containment function’ precisely to avoid the exercise of deliberative decision-making of the kind that might lead to deeper and socially critical questioning of official education policy settings. Absent such deliberative participation on fundamentally important matters of educational ends and means, it would seem plausible to suggest that everyone in education today (learners, families, teachers, paraprofessionals, senior leaders, trustees, specialist professionals, officials, even politicians) is subject to what Young calls ‘structures of domination’. In working towards participatory justice, Young argues that we need actively to re-politicise the processes and relationships that constitute state education to counter such domination.
A major paradox in terms of the logics of participatory justice is that the state education system today is premised on bureaucratic neutrality, hierarchical authority, and an ideal of rules-based impartiality in processes and relationships. At all levels, the system depends on its actors (students, educators, families, trustees, officials) being willing to follow the rules and the decisions that flow from these; rules over which most people have no say and which in many instances seem to be created for the convenience of others. However, rules must still be interpreted and applied in specific cases and instances according to the subjective judgment of those in superordinate positions. At the same time, the system encourages deference to technical and professional expertise, which is claimed to be value-neutral and objective. On this rationality, any decisions are ‘necessary and correct’ as Young puts it. But, the New Public Management-inspired education system we have cultivated defines what is reasonable and normal in ways that prioritise the universal over the particular, that ignore the heterogeneity and locality of public life, and that subdue group difference and diversity. Where choice and flexibility exist, this tends to be justified in terms of responsiveness to individual family and sectional interest preference, not to what is socially just in terms of participation and representation.
In Inclusion and Democracy, Young argues for a democratic approach that incorporates both ends and means, by ensuring that everyone who will be affected by them is able to participate in framing and taking decisions. She believes such an approach has the potential to mitigate, and ideally overcome, the inequities associated with more typical majority group domination of processes and relationships. For Young, majority group domination often lies at the heart of participatory injustices. She distinguishes two basic models of democracy, the aggregative and the deliberative. For her, the deliberative model is more likely to enable people to enact and support the ideals of self-determination and self-development. In this sense, the deliberative model may addresses some of reasons behind the understandable scepticism of many minoritised and indigenous groups towards majoritarian forms of democratic decision-making. Basically, majoritarianism privileges numbers in favour over reasons for.
In the aggregative model, democracy is seen as a competitive market-like process of accumulating the strongest or most widely held preferences on an issue. Young identifies several problems with this approach: (i) individual preferences are simply take as given with no consideration of their motivations; (ii) the process does not require those with differing preferences to interact with each other and there is therefore no conception of a public attempting to reach a shared decision; (iii) aggregation produces a ‘thin and individualistic form of rationality’. Any outcome is the result of the weight of preferences not sound reasoning; and (iv) differing arguments from other groups are dismissed on the grounds that they simply reflect the subjective, self-interested preferences of those groups.
Against this, Young argues that ends and values are integral to a just political process. Deliberative democracy is a form of practical reasoning in which participants offer their proposals for how best to solve a problem or meet a legitimate need. Ends and values are made explicit and ‘democratic process is primarily a discussion of problems, conflicts and claims of need or interest’. Dialogue permits proposals and arguments to be tested by all participants to determine which proposals are agreed collectively ‘to be supported by the best reasons’. Young claims that when they engage in deliberative democracy the parties practise the normative ideals of inclusion (all those whose basic interests and options for action may be affected participate), political equality (deliberating participants are included on equal terms, with equal opportunity to speak, free from domination), reasonableness (participants agree to participate believing that it is possible to reach agreement in good faith and with mutual trust) and publicity (the processes and relationships of deliberation themselves form a ‘public’ forum in which participants hold each other accountable and express the reasons for their positions in ways that others understand and could accept, even if they disagree with them). As Young describes it, the deliberative model aims to move individuals and groups from ‘self-regard’ to what is ‘publicly assertible’. It is also about transforming the divergent positions of participants through public discussion.
Young acknowledges that because it is dealing with often very different, competing rationalities, the deliberative model needs ‘care-taking’ for it to work, specifically, caring for those who are routinely positioned as ‘Other’. (See for example, Susan Bailey’s account of her inner-city Dublin primary school ethical teaching approach in The Levinasian Teacher). In other words, there are matters of necessary etiquette or protocol that need to be attended to in pursuit of participatory justice, and these differ markedly from standard institutional process and relationship norms under the strictures of New Public Management. For instance, quite apart from issues of external exclusion, where individuals or groups are simply prevented from participating at all, internal exclusion can also occur in ways that marginalise or disrespect some of those who are present.
She offers three modes of respectful political communication to ‘aid the making of arguments and enable understanding and interaction in ways that argument alone cannot’. These three modes are: (i) greeting or public acknowledgement in order to assert the equality of all those involved and establish the mutual trust needed to proceed. (What proportion of IEP meetings do this, for instance?); (ii) affirmative rhetoric, or the acceptance of emotional, imaginative, metaphorical and atypical forms of political expression from individuals and groups who are otherwise commonly excluded through decision making protocols that privilege highly literate, formally articulate and abstract forms of expression. (What proportion of stand down, suspension, exclusion and expulsion procedures do this?); and relatedly, (iii) a valuing of narrative and situated knowledge, or testimony, from those groups experiencing domination or oppression. (What proportion of family or whānau conferences, or consultations on Board policies do this?)
What becomes evident from Young’s analysis and reasoning is that we need to assume that unremarkable everyday processes and relations in education, however well intentioned, always have the potential to exclude, dominate and oppress already disadvantaged, marginalised and minorities groups and individuals. Our work as actors within the education system is to ensure that those who do not normally participate in decision-making, the division of labour and culturing the institution are enabled and supported to do so on terms that maintain their integrity and dignity. Young identifies the importance of imbuing these processes and relationships with care. The next blog in the series continues this motif, looking at the justice dimension of affective equality in education.
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
Part 4b: Recognitive justice in education - Part 2: Disrespect
Part 5a: Participatory justice - Part 1: Domination and oppression
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.