Educational Justice and the Value of Knowledge

Abstract

How should a liberal democratic society value knowledge and understanding, and does this valuation inform how we ought to reason about the justice of our educational institutions? In scholarly and public discourse, it is orthodox to argue that because educational institutions bring about various goods—goods of character such as wellbeing or economic goods such as social mobility – they ought to be structured by principles of political justice. In this paper, I argue that knowledge and understanding valued for its own sake should also inform judgements of educational justice.