Contributive justice — Equity through Education

https://hail.to/methodist-church-of-new-zealand-emessenger/article/xopRDJP

This is the seventh in a series about social justice in education.

Previous blogs have discussed social justice in education as fairness, redistribution, recognition, participation, and as care. In this blog we consider the dimension of contributive justice. The term contributive justice conveys the normative ideal that everyone irrespective of our formal role or position should be able to make meaningful contributions to our shared work and joint endeavours, in this instance education. The term is taken primarily from the work of American philosopher Paul Gomberg, and English social theorist and political economist Andrew Sayer. As Sayer puts it, ‘contributive justice concerns what people are allowed, expected or required to do or contribute’. Applying a contributive justice lens to compulsory schooling, say, enables us to challenge our deepest assumptions about what fair learning, teaching, assessment and curriculum should look like, and lead to.

For the purposes of this blog then, we will be treating institutionalised education broadly as work (which may be paid or unpaid). Students and whānau are consequently education ‘workers’ because they make essential contributions to the shared enterprise of educating. The basic argument is that all the social actors involved in making the institution of state education function as intended should experience a sense of purpose and meaning in their work. They should also have reason to believe that their unique contributions, what they do, make a material difference to the quality and effects of the social labour of educating. On this view, students, just as much as their teachers, should experience education work as affirming, should participate in meaningful educational decision-making, and witness everyone pitching in when it comes to the essential mundane and repetitive education tasks that keep the community orderly, functional, productive, and uplifting.

Realising contributive justice means that we would make no arbitrary distinctions between the value of professional and manual work, academic and vocationally oriented pathways, procedural and skilled tasks, waged or unwaged activity, contractual or voluntary participation, full-time or part-time presence. Equally, while particular roles or positions may require specific higher order knowledge or skill sets, that does not mean that the routine or procedural aspects of making an education institution work should not be shared more equitably across the members of the community. Nor does it mean that we should simply accept that the way relations currently play out in terms of the quality and allocation of work, are inevitable and unchangeable.

On this account, all contributions should be regarded as important and essential. In principle, everyone should have opportunities to contribute to the appealing, creative and fulfilling aspects of institutional life and work. By the same token, everyone should take a share in the unappealing, repetitive and less fulfilling aspects.

The administrator greeting a prospective or newly arrived student and their family in the school’s reception area has just as much opportunity to make them feel welcome as does the principal or classroom teacher. The person responsible for maintaining the natural environment of the school can model responsibility for and curiosity about flora and fauna to children and young people just as much as the teacher in the classroom. Formal peer mediation and informal peer norms of recognising and caring for others more generally contribute meaningfully to physically, psychologically and spiritually safe learning and play environments. These can be nurtured for children and young people by children and young people, not just adults. How we care for paraprofessionals and encourage and enable them to share membership in the work of the institutional community, without at the same time exploiting their goodwill, reflects our relative appreciation of and commitment to contributive justice. Children have a right to a holistic schooling that nurtures their capabilities, and helps them develop in the round, as both future workers in the paid and unpaid work economies, and as active participants in civil society. This too informs a commitment to contributive justice in education, and to the inculcation of what Nel Noddings calls ‘an uneasy conscience’ when such commitment appears to be neglected or absent.

These and many other forms of cultural messaging matter in the institutional reproduction of educational work, and especially to what students come to perceive as necessary, important, valued and appreciated work. In addition, writers such as Axel Honneth and Rahel Jaeggi view work as part of a ‘work-democracy-cooperation’ conceptual triad (Honneth), and as a pragmatic means of participating in society through engagement in a particular ‘form of life’ (Jaeggi). Education on this view is a social institution where participants learn how to interact, develop and maintain relationships with those who are different from them, and to practise democratically oriented work activities. This work allows participants to contribute to what Jaeggi calls the ‘universal resources of society’, and for them and others to benefit from those resources. Educational institutions promote and exemplify how we want people to act and interact in the economy, civil society and in public life. This requires us to intentionally consider whether and to what extent our educational institutions practise contributive justice.

For Paul Gomberg, ‘Four norms – duties and equal opportunity to contribute labor, and duties and equal opportunity to participate in social decisions – are the core of contributive justice’. With respect to education, for example, we all have a duty to contribute to a ‘cooperative venture from which we all benefit’.

Relatedly, we all need to share routine or mundane work in order to create time and opportunity to develop more complex abilities. Gomberg observes that no-one’s life ‘should be consumed by routine labour’, that we have a responsibility to share our mastery of complex talents with others and a duty to teach them in order that they may also have the opportunity to develop theirs. Applied to education, these observations resonate strongly with what we know about teacher expectation theory and research. And this in turn engages us in debates about the relative merits or failings of such deeply sedimented and normalised practices as test-determined ability grouping in primary school classrooms or streaming and setting in secondary schooling.

Building on Golberg’s approach, Sayer links work and wellbeing in the Aristotelian sense that ‘What we do is what we become; our work has a major influence on our character, capacities and hence our well-being’. Mindless, repetitive educational work is unlikely to contribute to the flourishing or wellbeing of either students or teachers, yet mass media representations of good schooling appear all too often to be based on antiquated folklore about the need to prioritise the three R’s, rote learning, unquestioning obedience and regurgitat facts. Related to this, writes Sayer, is the precept that the more our capacities are challenged and extended through complex tasks, the more likely we are to realise, improve and enjoy them, and to be curious beyond the instrumental demands of any particular task. Third, we need to have some involvement in conception of our educational work, not just its execution. And fourth, for our work to be meaningful, essential routine or mundane aspects must link with and contribute to a larger project, purpose, goal or good.

A broadly similar list of the elements of contributive justice to those already discussed is elaborated by Cristian Timmerman, who then identifies four benefits of addressing this particular dimension of injustice, ‘these being its potential to promote autonomy, personal development, empowerment and productivity.’ We can readily apply each of these to the institutional labour of educating and becoming educated. Autonomy and self-determination are increasingly seen as important goals of the teacher-student relationship. According to Article 29 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, education ‘shall be directed to the development of the child’s personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential’. And according to the human development approach championed by Martha Nussbaum, justice involves attending to both innate and trained or developed capabilities, in other words the ability, freedom and opportunity to pursue one’s interests in one’s own context or setting. And productivity we might perhaps helpfully see expressed over time through a rich record of work as learning, learning that is both broad and deep, a record of learning that scaffolds the learner confidently towards the next stage of their family, work and local community and civil society lives.

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

Part 6: Participatory justice - Part 2: Inclusion and representation

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.