Keywords

Introduction

The ideas of justice and education are as old as Western philosophy itself, and they went hand in hand for much of the journey that brings us to modern thought. This chapter will try to explain how, at some point, they broke ties with their original conceptions and gradually lost the connections that previously bound them together.

Starting from the observation of the pre-eminence of a distributive, instrumental perspective of the relationship between justice and education (social justice through education), the chapter aims to argue, based on the revision of the Platonic Politeia by Gadamer and Foucault, that we need to broaden and sharpen, the view towards intrinsically educational aspects (justice in education). These aspects point at the ethical essence of the educational relationship, as a formula capable of generating fair subjects for more fair societies.

In short, this chapter aims to lay the foundations for a broader, more complete, and more pedagogical approach to the idea of justice in education than the one currently in force. From this more “pedagogical” perspective, linked to the essence of what education is and can be, some relations are established with the historical-anthropological perspective of education developed by Dietrich Benner. Connections and links with the Non-affirmative Theory of Education are pointed out as one of the possible alternatives to overcome the reductionism with which we look at questions of justice in education.

Limitations of a Distributive Justice/Social Justice Perspective on Understanding Education

Nowadays, the question of “justice in education” is usually related to the problem of justice in school education. It is commonly approached under the labels of “equity” and “equality of opportunity,” as originally described by Coleman (1966). Following the view of Fernández Enguita (2006), the school is “invented,” as modern states are constituted, bringing with it a problem of submission of the educational practices that are developed in it to political and economic objectives that, in themselves, “overflow” and pervert the educational capacities that are supposed to be inherent to it.

The trouble arises with the emergence of the problem of “equality,” as Coleman reminds us, from the establishment of what we call “open societies” or modern societies. And, from that moment on, the school has been seen as a main tool, a “lever,” from which to contribute to that equality. Understanding justice in schools from such a distributive perspective is tantamount to restricting the interpretation of educational justice in schools to an instrumental perspective where we try to move towards social justice through activities in schools.

In this sense, and from the pedagogical-anthropological perspective of Benner (2015), we may claim that the school and its educational praxis has been subordinated to political and economic praxis. In other words, following this line of reasoning, modern conceptions of school education arise from the debate on, and attempt to answer, the question of social justice and the role of education in achieving it.

The idea of “social justice” is little more than 150 years old, and it is no exaggeration to say that the recent history of humanity has been marked by the struggle for its achievement. It is safe to claim that social justice is the underlying element of all public policies. Thus, for example, the Spanish philosopher Julián Marías (1974, p. 7) stated that “the 20th century would not be understandable without this term.” However, despite its importance and omnipresence, the concept of social justice itself is far from being a “self-evident” concept and requires clarification.

To clarify the concept of social justice, we carried out a search, or a kind of conceptual archaeological work, on the idea of social justice. This was complemented by looking into more exhaustive studies on the subject (e.g. Barry, 2005; Bierhoff et al., 1986; Brandt, 1962; Fleischacker, 2004; Fraser, 2008; Jackson, 2005; Miller, 1999; Raphael, 2001; Adams et al., 2016; Bell, 2016; Bogotch & Shields, 2014; Capeheart & Milovanovic, 2020; Conklin, 2014; Reisch, 2014; Sabbagh & Schmitt, 2016). Having done that work, the conclusion is that the models and theories of justice to be considered, from which to begin to construct a “discourse” on justice and equity in schools, should be nourished by the main contributions that have been made both from political philosophy and from the sociology of education.

In the latter, sociological perspective, what is found are abundant empirical studies, which point at, with the help of data, the persistent inequalities in education (e.g. in the Spanish context Bonal, 2003; Bonal & Scandurra, 2020; and in a more international perspective, Farrell, 2013), or those of the many supranational organisations (such as the World Bank, the OECD-PISA, UNESCO, etc.).

As a complement, or prior to them, there is work such as that of Hutmacher et al. (2002) or Teese et al. (2007) aimed at establishing and justifying the theoretical relevance of certain indicators in relation to equity in education. This line of work and analysis, fundamentally statistical and quantitative, is usually more typical of sociology and has its roots in functionalist, neo-Weberian and reproduction theorists (the work of P. Bordieu, Passeron and Bernstein is an obligatory reference here).

There is no lack of criticism of this type of analysis, which, at best, is only capable of providing “still photos,” and always “ex post” of the real situations experienced by those who suffer inequality. In addition, this research represents a gross simplification involved in reducing complex lives to “datasets” of variables (no matter how sophisticated these may be).

Generally, this line of work encounters difficulties when it attempts to go beyond the observation of inequality and inequity in education, in order to try to provide explanations. This research experiences even more problems when it attempts to offer proposals aimed at resolving the situation. The reason to this difficulty stems from that these approaches always assume an excessively externally determined perspective of the human being and thus restrict the space for education, starting from a denaturalised conception of what education is and should be. To express the dilemma with Benner’s notions: they ignore the constitutive and regulative principles of education (Benner, 2015, p. 61).

The other line of reflection on Social Justice, which emerges from the analysis carried out, from a political-philosophical perspective, we should consider the different conceptions and theories of social justice.

From this perspective, three major conceptions of social justice coexist today:

  • Social Justice as Distribution, in which authors such as Rawls (1999, 2001), Martha Nussbaum (2007, 2011) and Amartya Sen (Nussbaum & Sen, 1993; Sen, 1992, 2009), among much others,Footnote 1 are obligatory references

  • Social Justice as Recognition, whose analysis and description can be found above all in Collins (2019), Collins & Bilge (2016) and Fraser & Honneth (2004)

  • and Social Justice as Participation, described mainly by Young (1990, 2000, 2011), Miller (1999) and, once again, by Fraser & Honneth (2004)

The first conception is centred on the distribution of goods, material and cultural resources or capabilities. The second one focuses on the recognition and cultural respect of every single person; on the existence of just relations within society, and the third conception is about participation in decisions that affect their own lives, ensuring that people can have an active and equal participation in society. Obviously, distribution, recognition and participation are not independent concepts, but share many of their approaches. Thus, for example, economic marginalisation is usually associated with classism, which is an example of material non-recognition; the same can be said of those who are discriminated because of ethnicity, gender, ability, or other cultural dimensions, who are more likely to suffer economic exploitation.

Martínez García (2017) clearly points out the limitation of distributive justice perspectives when trying to address the problem of equity in education. He states: “Distributive justice is adequate for thinking about equity issues related to how to distribute economic resources that improve education. But it is absurd to think that equity issues in education can be fully addressed with the tools of distributive justice” (2017, p. 128).

An example that Martínez García (2017) gives are the conclusions we arrive at when comparing from Finland and South Korea using social justice criteria. If we compare Finland and South-Korea, we can see that both countries share the merit of being among the countries whose students seem to perform at the highest level in international tests. Moreover, these two countries share similar levels of equity (OECD, 2018). In other words, the distributional effects of educational achievement are very similar between the two countries. Therefore, in terms of distributive justice or so-called justice through education, the two countries appear comparable.

However, it is when we analyse the type of education, the conceptions, values and aims that animate the education practised in both countries that we can see the importance of the alternative analysis we are advocating here related to justice in education. While Finland as a whole pursues the development of democratic citizenship values as the main value, to which all other competences and skills are subjected, in South Korea, the educational model seems to be more guided by individual excellence, understood as high performance in the most academically relevant subjects. This is what some authors, such as Martínez García, have described as “educational fever” defined as “an unbearable pressure on students to improve their performance, extending the school day with private classes” (2017, p. 146).

It is quite revealing, for example, that there is a difference between the strategies proposed in the two countries for improving school performance in science (OECD, 2018, pp. 129–131). While Finland seems to favour adaptive teaching and direct instruction, together with the provision of specific educational resources, South Korea stands out for promoting more of a disciplinary climate in science classes, as well as the promotion of school competitions and the creation of “science clubs” (which seems to be rewarding excellence and competitiveness).Footnote 2

It is clear that even in such a general analysis as this, apart from distributive equality, the implications in terms of respect for autonomy, emancipation or the primacy of education over other considerations are very different in the two countries.

To conclude this section, understanding justice from a mainly distributive perspective on justice is tantamount to reducing education in schools to having an instrumental role: in essence, the aim is to try to move towards social justice through school action. Through this way, I consider that a door is also opened to utilitarian, neoliberal and performative interpretations of school and education, as Uljens & Yilmaki (2017) have also pointed out recently.Footnote 3

Moving Beyond a Distributive Justice Perspective on Education

It should be observed that the previous critique of distributive justice in education does not deny the importance of advancing towards greater levels of equality and social justice, and I am very aware of the transcendental role that schools play in this.

Even if one takes a socio-utilitarian position, the fact that schools are inherently unjust and that advances in terms of distributive justice have only served to distribute an “alienating” education more equally could be seen as a minor or secondary problem. After all, if the promotion of social equality is ensured (and if it is done with mechanisms that are fair, in terms of distribution, recognition and participation), a great deal of progress is already being made. This approach is undoubtedly correct. However, underlying this problem, the type of education practised, the educational objectives pursued, and the role of the subject being educated cannot be neglected.

The ultimate aim of the concern for justice in education is to achieve a fairer, more egalitarian social ethos, that is, to help move towards societies to become globally fairer. One of the ways, but only one, of achieving this is through education, introducing criteria of distributive and social justice. This means to share knowledge and promote educational equality, contributes to equality, to equity, to developing relations of solidarity and of excellence, which also contributes in general to promoting the well-being of citizens and the societies in which they live. This is indisputably important.

But, we believe that there is another way of understanding justice and its relationship to education that goes beyond the purely distributive (and therefore instrumental) issues of education. Already Plato did identify and clarify an alternative view, a view we will to try to re-explain or reintroduce into the scheme of analysis of justice, through the perspectives and interpretations of the original Platonic approaches, on the one hand, by Hans Georg Gadamer and, on the other, by Michel Foucault.

We think that the other fundamental leg of justice in education, which we also consider the fundamental and truly educational one, is based on the type of pedagogical relations occurring between educator and student. Depending on the nature of these pedagogical relations, we can then understand how another form of justice appears, which is related to the very act of education and with the way it is done.

We refer to a form of justice that authors such as Robert McClintock (2019) have called formative justice. This leads to what would no longer be equality, equity, solidarity and excellence, that are the criteria of distributive justice, but to the development of the person, to the constitution of the individual in itself, let us say, with the formation of the subject. Ultimately, what all this does is define a just subject. This set of ideas reminds us of the need for an ethical or moral education which would be, in our view, a necessary complement to and requirement of social justice so that we can really move towards a fairer and more egalitarian social ethos.

Our main thesis is, therefore, that if we do not address the issue of the justice of the educational-pedagogical relations practised in schools, the school cannot become a just institution, nor can it contribute to the development of more just societies. It is not enough to look at the effects of the school, in terms of social results or in terms of indicators of social equality during or after passing through the school. Rather, it is also necessary to pay attention to the internal, essential, main analysis of whether the education that is promoted in schools is just, in the original sense of the term.

It is this idea that we try to argue for by attempting to recover some of Plato’s ideas interpreted through Gadamer and Foucault. Before doing so, however, we must take the time to briefly analyse the original concept of justice.

The Original Concept of Justice

The idea of justice is a human problem. No animal wonders about the “justice” of its actions. It is consubstantial and exclusive to our human nature. In other words, the idea of justice has always accompanied human beings, even before we had a more or less elaborated conceptualisation of it.

This idea, that of the consubstantiality of justice to human nature, can be found, for example, in the account given by the Platonic Protagoras, in a debate with Socrates. The object of this dialogue (Protagoras) is precisely to reflect on whether virtue (justice) is teachable or not. In this framework of reflection, the sophist resorts to Hesiod’s TheogonyFootnote 4 as an argument in favour of the teachable nature of the human being, in all dimensions, including virtue.

What is important to note about this myth is that for the fullness of the human being it was not enough to have certain manual skills or a certain “technical or manual wisdom” (what we could call the “Promethean nature”). Instead, what really makes us human is the “gift” of justice (which allows us to decide on right and wrong) and, in addition, modesty (or moral sense), which forces us to review ourselves and to adjust our behaviour as moral subjects.

But the myth and the dialogue also contain another message: this possibility of conscience (which defines the sense of justice and modesty), inherent to our human condition, does not appear as the result of an automatism, but must be developed, and education plays an essential role in this (Protagoras, 323c).

Starting from this myth, the question that underlies all this Platonic dialogue is that establishing this “conscience,” nourished by the sense of justice (diké), is the true object of education. The idea of justice (diakosyné) evolved from the original idea of justice, the diké, which was an expression of order in the cosmos, and was projected from the cosmos towards the subject. Later, with Socrates, a different idea of justice appeared: the idea of justice derived from himself.

With Socrates, the human being becomes the source from which the idea of Justice emanates. Justice became the result of the intimate convictions, that tells the human being, the bearer of these convictions, what is just and what is unjust. Justice is that which derives from his soul, which is the idea that Plato later took up and synthesised in the phrase that what is just is above all the virtue of the soul.

With this affirmation, the Platonic intuition points to the need to transcend the merely relational questions of justice, to add a quality, proper, internal to the “just” subject that confers, from the point of view of pedagogical theorisation and the processes of subjectivation, an unquestionable importance to its approach to justice. As Annas (1981, p.12) stated: “Plato makes justice more important than we might expect, and his theory of justice has a much wider scope than some.”

This idea of justice as something interior has to do with the idea of virtue. It is later taken up by Aristotle and transformed and developed in a broader way, generating a whole theory of justice that tries to integrate a general perspective and a particular perspective of justice. Aristotle’s theory of justice starts from the idea of universal justice that would embrace the idea of Platonic virtue and then describes a series of particular modalities of justice that have a relational character. What Aristotle is presenting here are the two perspectives of justice that we introduced earlier: social justice, which is of a relational character, and universal justice, that is general and shared but internal to the subject, understood as virtue.

It is important to highlight that Aristotle’s differentiation is of the utmost interest for everything that has to do with theorising justice. This is especially true from the perspective of social justice as related to the constitution of modern states under the rule of law. It could be said Aristotle’s distinction served to “cover up” in some way the importance of the other justice, the general justice, the virtue, which was taken for granted.

Centuries later, with the constitution of modern societies, when we began to worry about equality, the concern for justice was recovered, but the predominant discourse was that of particular, relational or distributive justice. We were unable to realise the importance of the prior view, which is justice understood as education for virtue. With that, the educational connections to the idea of justice were lost. It is to explain this ¿idea? that it may be useful and convenient to recover some forgotten relations between justice and education.

The Forgotten Relations Between Justice and Education

As a matter of fact, today we typically do not consider virtue as an issue related to justice, but to other types of issues in education: quality education, good education, education in values, etc. In this section, I try to explain justice as education for virtue. To this end, we must refer back to the original, Platonic idea of justice.

When turning to the subject of justice and education in Plato who, as said, is the one who, in the first place, raised the issue of the relationship between justice and education understood as the development of virtue, Gadamer’s works are valuable. Hans-Georg Gadamer analyses the dialogue Republic in two of his works: Plato und die Dichter, that appeared in 1934 (Gadamer, 1934) and Platos Staat der Erziehung, published in 1942 (Gadamer, 1985).

In Plato und die Dichter, Gadamer attempts to interpret Plato’s criticism of poetry and poets in the Republic. Gadamer argues that this rejection has no meaning in relation to the value of poetry per se (it seems that Plato himself in his youth pretended to be a poet). Gadamer says that this rejection should rather be interpreted in terms of the object of his reflection in Republic, which is the question of education for the development of citizens with a sense of justice compatible with the proper development of political and social harmony in the polis. Gadamer argues that Republic has sometimes been interpreted as a fully-fledged political project, but it is not.

Plato does not intend to offer a political program for the constitution of a genuine state, but refers to a state in thought, not on earth: “ein “Urbild im Himmel” für den, der sich selbst und seine innere Verfassung ordnen will” in the original text of Gadamer (1934, p. 14). The true scope of the reflections on the education and government of philosophers in Republic must be interpreted in terms of “an archetype in heaven for those who wish to order themselves and their inner condition.” This interpretation of Republic, in which the state (the polis) is only a model from which to inquire into “internal” justice, is also defended by Annas (1981) and by Foucault (2005). In essence, therefore, what we are talking about here is subjectivation, formation (Bildung) and education in relation to justice.

For Gadamer, Plato, with his criticism of the poets, who represented “the curriculum” of his time (del Valle, 2000), intended to denounce the fact that the sophistic educational model had led to the inadequate development of virtue. This is what leads Plato (the Platonic Socrates) to recall the true excellences of “the just” (Gadamer, 1934, p. 16, translation is ours):

[…] justice is not the right that each one has against the other, but a just being of each one with himself and with all the others; that justice is not the situation in which each one watches over all others, but that in which each one watches over himself and watches over the just being of his inner disposition.

In other words, justice would be the ethical self-construction of the citizen. This is the key idea that we are trying to rescue for our argument. Justice in education is not, and cannot be, only a question of distributive justice, referring how much education we distribute to each and what effects it has on us, but must also contemplate the idea of how to be just with oneself, in the process of one’s formation.

Justice in education, therefore, from this perspective, is to answer the question: what do I do with myself? Or, to put it another way: justice in education begins by contributing to the development of just educational practices, aimed at developing well-ordered people in their inner disposition.

Gadamer’s work Plato und die Dichter was followed up in 1942 by Platos Staat der Erziehung (Gadamer, 1985). In this work, the discussion of sophistic and traditional approaches to justice is revived. The central notion of this text by Gadamer, redundant with the one already anticipated in Plato und die Dichter, is that of justice (dikaiosýne), understood as the primary political virtue and the foundation of the community.

In this sense, justice consists in the correct civic mode of being, that could be accessed through education. Gadamer affirms that for Plato Justice is not only foundation, faculty, and virtue, but also “the aim of all education” (Gadamer, 1985, p. 252). It is a certain kind of knowledge that demands from the soul the effort to attain a vision of the community, of that that is common and of the idea of the good.

The Platonic justice, for Gadamer, is not a moral but a political virtue, a certain kind of practical knowledge, that education makes possible, but which paradoxically is not and cannot be taught, but achieved in community, in dialogue and by recognition of the injustice already existing in the polis. According to Gadamer, the great Platonic audacity lies in positing that education is not only the means to unveil the absence of justice, but the prerequisite for “attaining and preserving it” (Gadamer, 1985, p. 252).

Synthesising what Gadamer has said in the two works of reference, we find five fundamental ideas. The first is that just education cannot be based solely on utilitarian or distributive approaches, it transcends relational justice. The second idea is that just education in the original sense of the term is that which allows the subject to constitute himself as a moral subject. The third idea that Gadamer puts forward is that a just education and the development of just citizens can only be achieved with an educational scheme based on dialogue that promotes the work of each one on oneself: “the care of oneself” that leads to the establishment of one’s own morality but connected to the care of those of others.Footnote 5

The fourth idea is that education for justice (for virtue) would be something totally different from a “fantastic and powerful psychagogyFootnote 6 directed towards a predetermined aim or goal”Footnote 7 (Gadamer, 1934, p. 17).

In contrast to the idea of rhetoric psychagogy, education instead consists precisely in a new experience of justice arising from the critical questioning of inherited morals and customs. In no case can education be expected to be the product of an authoritarian education, imposed from the power of an educational organisation (identified by Plato in the dominant sophist education). Education comes to life only through questioning and interrogation (what we could describe as “work of oneself, on oneself”).Footnote 8

So, what Gadamer denies is the possibility that we can serve true education through a rhetorical psychagogy (what Ball, 2017, calls “a simple pedagogy”). We will come back to this later.

The fifth fundamental idea is that it is not possible to care for others, to relate justly to others, if we have not first taken care of ourselves, and that requires self-care. Therefore, inner justice, virtue, requires care for oneself, through an educational relationship of a dialogical nature, not imposed, not curricularised “a priori,” which clearly questions the current school model. And yet, the school model that we have, and which is hardly questioned, is precisely the one that seems to be contrary to what is needed for “just education.”

All those ideas that are implicit in Plato and that Gadamer synthesises in these two works are telling us about a conception of education that has little to do with the conception of education that we have today, as something based precisely on a mere transmission of knowledge and values of a more technical than ethical nature. How did we come to this? In order to find out how we forgot about the ethics of self-care, we will turn to Michel Foucault.

Emergence and Decline of the Ethics of Self-Care: The Triumph of the “Great Didactic”

Michel Foucault, in his Hermeneutics of the Subject (Foucault, 2005), which is the course he taught in the academic year 1981/82 at the College de France, provides us with one of the best synthesisations regarding the ethics of self-care, that gave rise to all the Platonic discourse that appears in Republic.

According to Foucault, this ethics of self-care, the principle of taking care of oneself (the epimeleia heaoutou), appears in the fifth century B.C. It runs through Hellenistic Greek and Roman philosophy as well as Christian spirituality until the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. Gradually it was reconverted and reinterpreted, until it was understood in a completely different way. Following Foucault, the process by which the original ethic of self-care was eventually transmuted into the much less ambitious and devalued idea of “know thyself” occurred in three stages:

  1. 1.

    The Platonic Socratic moment, which is the one to which we are going to devote a little more time now through the analysis of the dialogue Alcibiades presented by Foucault

  2. 2.

    A second period, which is what he calls the golden age period of the culture of self-cultivation around the first and second centuries A.D.

  3. 3.

    A third period which is the transition in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. from pagan asceticism and philosophical asceticism to Christian asceticism

So, as noted above, this first period, which is that of the constitution of the ethics of self-care, is described according to Foucault, in the dialogue Alcibiades. In Alcibiades, we can find a reflexive movement that, in a way, lays the foundations of what we are interested in highlighting here. The first idea is that we have a young man (Alcibiades) who wants to rule others, he wants to be the leader of his polis and Socrates makes him understand that he is not ready because he is ignorant. Then Alcibiades laments and Socrates tells him not to worry, because he is ignorant but that he has time. He has time but, for what? Socrates’ answer is very revealing: he has time not to learn, but to take care of himself, and this is where Plato introduces, according to Foucault, an important difference between learning and taking care of oneself, that we must bear in mind.

In other words, self-care is not a mere accumulation of knowledge that we could identify with sophist education, but what is actually implicit in it is something more.

That “something more” is what Foucault calls the spiritual dimension of education, which for Plato was considered fundamental; the basis and aim of education. Foucault explains what he means by spirituality in the following way: “By spirituality, I understand […] that which precisely refers to a subject acceding to a certain mode of being and to the transformations which the subject must make of himself in order to accede to this mode of being” (Fornet-Betancourt et al., 1987, p. 125).Footnote 9

It is this spiritual dimension that ends up implying a real transformation, a transfiguration of the learner as a consequence of reflection and questioning. The transformation operates through the work of oneself upon oneself. It is a consequence and a requirement of true learning.

What this means is very well described by Ball (2017, pp. 75–85), through what he calls pedagogical parrhesia, which refers to the idea of ethical education. In other words, in order to arrive at truth, at true knowledge (which is the object of true education), the cognising subject, through the experience of knowing, must somehow be transformed into something else. In this process, Foucault reminds us the figure of the teacher is a fundamental, but not for teaching as transmitting knowledge or values (teacher’s values), but to induce, to ensure that the learner takes care of himself. It is not a question of “educating” them, where teacher is assumed the leading role and, in some way, being solely responsible for the education of the others. No, what the teacher must do is to be there to remind the one who has to be educated of the need to do so, to remind to take care of him/herself, in an ethical relationship oriented towards ethical development.

The final idea in Alcibiades, perhaps the most important, among those highlighted by Foucault, is the one that occurs at the end of Alcibiades’ dialogue. It concludes with the following idea: to take care of oneself is to take care of justice understood as virtue; that is,...in the end the final result of taking care of oneself, of education, is going to be inner justice, virtue and this is the requirement to be able to govern others with justice, that is to say, for social justice (Foucault, 2005, pp. 71–72).Footnote 10

A brief digression is made here to point out that what emerges from a reading of Gadamer’s and Foucault’s texts is a confluence of interpretations and conclusions that is most surprising. These two authors who do not quote each other, who seem to carry out a totally independent investigation and reflection, who are also experts in Plato’s work and have a great capacity to interpret it, still end up arriving, each from different starting points and reading different dialogues (one Republic and the other Alcibiades), at practically the same conclusions.

Now, turning to Foucault and his development of what happened with the “ethics of self-care,” Foucault describes how this ethic of self-care is transmuted over time. It acquires a series of connotations that cause it to fall into a kind of decline, especially since the advent of Christian ethics, which introduces the idea of detachment from the self, so that the idea of self-care does not fit very well into this new ethos. This transmutation leads us subsequently to what Foucault calls the Cartesian moment. At this moment, the history of truth and the process of truth enters what we could call the modern period. The idea that triumphs at this point is that what gives access to truth, the conditions according to which the subject can have access to truth, is knowledge and only knowledge. In this view, there is no need for what Foucault called spirituality, the transformation of the cognising subject.

In other words, the idea imposed is that access to truth only requires simple recognition of the “truth” by a subject, without the need for any transformation on his or her part. This is what leads Foucault to the statement that “the modern age of the relations between the subject and truth begin when it is postulated that, such as he is, the subject is capable of truth, but that, such as it is, the truth cannot save the subject” (Foucault, 2005, p. 19).

It is in this moment that Foucault identifies as important when the spiritual dimension of education is somehow lost. More precisely, this moment is the culmination of a process that had been going on before since the Stoics and before that with Aristotle. Even Platonism itself implicitly carried the idea of the rationalisation of the processes of knowing and, paradoxically, with it also its own erasure. In any case, from the seventeenth century onwards the Cartesian moment indicates the development of a new way of understanding the relations between the knowing subject and knowledge, which, in turn, leads us to a rationally oriented way of understanding the processes of subjectivation.Footnote 11 This, subsequently, opens the door to devaluing ways of understanding education.

From the seventeenth century, the importance given to the educational relationship based on inducing self-care, which is much broader, much more complex, much more sophisticated, and a relationship in which the teacher is developing a relationship of an ethical nature, was lost.Footnote 12 This was substituted by approaches that Ball (2017, reading Foucault) calls more “simple pedagogical” and a kind of “non-education” which McClintock (2019) identified and represented in the approaches of Comenius (and other methodologists that emerged around the seventeenth century) who go on to interpret education as a mere question of teaching technique.

Since the seventeenth century, the “Great Didactic” was the mother of all pedagogical prescription. It would be enough to read Comenius’ presentation of his Didactica Magna to understand the simplification of the approach:

The whole art of teaching all things to all [people] ….., that all youth of both sexes, without exception, may become quickly, agreeably, and thoroughly learned in the sciences, pure in morals, trained in piety, and thus instructed in all things necessary for the present and future life, …., an easy and safe method is shown, by which it may be brought agreeably into existence. (Comenio, 1998; translation is ours)

Of course, it is not intended to affirm that Comenius is solely responsible. Many factors contributed to the creation of modern schools with the model of the Didactica Magna as the main referent.

We believe it was in the process of shaping modern societies, that is, when the problem of equality starts to become important and where mass education had to be provided, that the Cartesian approach that knowledge existed as external and independent of the subject, conceived as if it were a “quasi-material” entity that could be distributed, fitted very well with Comenius’ approach that education is easily distributable with a mere technique.

The educational implication of the separation between “knowledge as external” and “the cognising subject” is that the only task for the teacher is to establish, by means of an adequate technique, some procedure by which the subject can acquire knowledge without having to go into problems of transformation, transmutation, transfiguration, etc. That is to say, from an educational point of view, the “Cartesian moment” was introduced through a symbiotic association with the educational conceptions that can be traced in Comenius’ didactics, which provided the ideal educational form, the technique to do so.

Fernando Bárcena (2012) describes the kind of education that emerges from such educational conceptions based on the premise of the learner as a precarious, lacking and incomplete subject as a kind of “pedagogical imposture.” Jacques Ranciére (1991) alludes to the same idea, describing such education as being “based on explanatory logic” which always implies an “affirmative” perspective on education.

For Lévinas (1991) too, the idea of teaching that begins to become generalised from this type of approach and which ends up in giving rise to modern school systems carries the germ of injustice with it.Footnote 13 The instrumental view corrupts the freedom of the pupil by not approaching the other person head-on but obliquely; it is violence par excellence and therefore injustice.

Lévinas says, literally, in Totality and Infinity (1991, pp. 70–72) that “to renounce the psychagogy, demagogy, pedagogy rhetoric involves is to face the Other, in a veritable conversation. […] We call justice this face-to-face approach, in conversation. […] And in this sense justice coincides with the overcoming of rhetoric.”

Certainly, the rationality introduced by Didactica Magna is important and will not disappear. But we must rethink our understanding of what education is and the act of educating, avoiding the possible injustice (in the sense that we have been discussing it) that it could entail.

According to Stephen Ball (2017), the alternative to both the “non-education” that arises with modernity and the denial of the existence of a “true pedagogy” in what we call “schooling,” is to reclaim the basic idea that education is only education if it is education for freedom. However, the model of schooling that emerges in Modern States, aligned with Social Justice (generally understood as a meritocratic distribution of equal opportunities) we believe is not a path of freedom but one of domination and submission and, therefore, of injustice.

Instead, as Ball, interpreting Foucault (1987), states “the ‘proper task’ of education is: ‘to define the conditions in which human beings ‘problematise’ what they are, what they do, and the world they live in” (Ball, 2017, p. 79). Such an ambition represents, in our opinion, a possibility to a more “just” education, in the original and full sense of the idea of justice.

At this point, we consider that we can find a way beyond a limited, distributive justice perspective in education, applying the powerful and purely pedagogical argumentation found in Benner’s historical-anthropological foundation of educational praxis and its constitutive and regulative principles. Indeed, when Benner explores the context of the discovery of constitutive principles, he reminds that these are closely connected with the emergence of the problem of social freedom and equality in modernity (Benner, 2015, p. 65; translation is ours):

The conceptual formulation of the constitutive principles of pedagogical thought and action, which will now be discussed, is inseparably bound to the modern idea that man finds and gains his destiny through education. It is not a discovery of individuals, but a historical experience that only became possible in the context of the emergence of modern bourgeois society and is closely related to the modern question of freedom and equality.

Thus, it clearly links the problem of the modern interpretation of educational processes to the core problems of social justice: freedom and equality. By this more pedagogical (non- affirmative) way, we can perhaps find an alternative educational conception, more educational and fairer, in the original and genuine sense of these two terms.

The Non-affirmative Education as an Alternative Way to Justice in Education

In order to connect the described discourse, based on the relations of justice education in the perspective of Gadamer and, above all, of Foucault, with the contributions made from the non-affirmative theory of education, we will begin by drawing on the work of Justen Infinito (2003), entitled Ethical self-formation: A look at the later Foucault. This work is interesting because it solves the problem that, although Foucault, in his discourse, offers perspectives and approaches of great educational significance, he never manages to make a direct approach to pedagogical or educational issues. Infinito does this interpretative work, drawing some ideas and conclusions.

A quote from Infinito’s work, particularly revealing for the next step of my argumentation is:

We remain always in the world – we take it as a “given” but that does not mean that we “give in” to it. […]. The connection to the present is not lost, but it does not turn into a conservative desire to hold on to it. Our cultivated awareness keeps us rooted in our contingency from which ethical action – that is, acting in the world without “totalizing” – is possible. (Infinito, 2003, p. 169)

Implicit in this quotation is both the essence of the problem of the transition from teleologically determined educational models (typical of pre-modern societies) to the educational complexity of the advent of modern societies, and the educational paradox that this entails.

Indeed, with modernity, it was no longer possible to continue thinking of human education as an orientation towards a determined morality, but it became necessary to conceive it as a reflection on the very fact of morality and to enable, in the processes of subjectivation, each subject to develop his or her own morality, freely. And, in this space, what is understood as the fundamental paradox of modern education emerges: how to “influence” the formation of the individual while respecting his autonomy and orienting him towards a future that appears to us as uncertain and undetermined.

The solution to this paradox, implicit in Infinito’s quotation (which, I insist, attempts to make a reading of Foucauldian discourse in an educational key) is very similar to the one described, among others, in Uljens (2002) and Uljens & Ylimaki (2017), remembering the ideas of recognition, summoning to self-activity and Bildsamkeit, developed primarily by Fichte, Hegel, Herbart and Schleiermacher.

For Infinito (2003), an educational praxis that seeks to align itself with these approaches, related to education as the ethical self-construction of the learner, features three essential elements or characteristics:

  1. 1.

    An environment that encourages experimentation with the self (what Infinito calls “appropriate educational spaces”)

  2. 2.

    An awareness or recognition of one’s current condition as defined by the given culture and historical moment (what she, following Foucault, defines as “curriculum as genealogy”)

  3. 3.

    An attitude or disposition to criticise

It is clear that a perspective such as the one put forward here moves quite far from the characterisations of affirmative education models and brings us closer to what authors such as Benner (2015), Uljens (2005, 2015), Uljens & Kullenberg (2021) and Uljens & Ylimaki, 2015, 2017) describe as a non-affirmative theory of education.

The similarities between Infinito’s statement and Benner’s position are obvious. They appear clearly in the following quotation from Schleiermacher, which Benner calls “the starting point” for non-affirmative theory of education:

A large part of the activity of the older generation extends to the younger, and it is the more imperfect the less one knows what one is doing and why one is doing it. Therefore, there must be a theory which, starting from the relationship of the older generation to the younger, asks itself the question: what does the older generation really want with the younger? How will the activity correspond to the purpose, how will the result of the activity correspond? On this basis of the relationship of the older with the younger generation, what is incumbent on the one in relation to the other, we build everything that falls into the area of this theory. (Benner, 2015, p. 150; our translation)

By assuming educational relations as a space of dialogical enquiry and problematisation between the two generations, Schleiermacher views the praxis of education as a space of possibility opening for ethical education, as defined in this chapter.

Again, we must refer to the possibilities offered by the interplay between the two constitutive principles of the pedagogical relationship (Bildsamkeit and summoning to self-activity) as the way to overcome this intrinsic injustice of affirmative educational relationships.

Moreover, the purely educational approach of non-affirmative education, considered as an Allgemeine Pädagogik, offers us a basis from which to transcend the space of the purely relational, ethical question between educator and learner (subjectivity and intersubjectivity). Thus, it allows us to introduce into the analysis the elements of the society-individual problematic that must inevitably be present in any theorisation of modern education. Indeed, while the discourse we have been developing clearly points to the problems of a solipsistic, Kantian subjectivation (or, as Foucault called it, linked to the “Cartesian moment”), it does not offer us many clues as to how to overcome it. In this sense, the set of constitutive and regulating principles of a modern conception of education help us to understand and explain the “leap” from social educational demands to the processes of subjectivation of the individual, and the non-affirmative position also allows us to overcome the reductionism and instrumentalization of education, conceived merely as a mechanism of distributive justice.

Conclusions

In this chapter, we have tried to point out the inadequacy of an instrumental interpretation of education as a promoter of distributive/social justice. We have claimed that the idea of justice in education should be expanded towards a conception of justice that is not only relational, but also constitutive of the “just subject,” understood as the ethical self-formation of the individual (development of virtue), resorting to the original approaches with which the idea of justice made its appearance in Western thought. To do so, we have resorted to the analysis of the Platonic politeia and paideia, seen through the eyes of H. G. Gadamer, which have helped us to argue the indissoluble relations, the existing link, between the ideas of justice and education. With Michel Foucault, we have tried to describe the ontological ethics that supported the original Platonic positions, through the “ethics of self-care.”

In the original formulations of Western philosophy, education and justice were inseparable elements of education, the induction of the ethics of self-care, in which the teacher played a fundamental role, was the path to virtue, the creation of a just soul, and individual virtue in turn was the path to social, relational justice in the polis.

It was about achieving a just ethos through the development of just citizens. Just education was an education that induced supporting growth of an ethical nature, or the spiritual dimension of education of which Foucault speaks, and which subsequently led to justice for others in the just city.

Over time, just education, especially from the moment when it occurs as a school phenomenon in modern societies, came to be conceived as a question more related to its distributional qualities. Paraphrasing Foucault (Fornet-Betancourt et al., 1987, p. 125), we could say that in the political thought of modernity (and above all, from the nineteenth century onwards), the political subject begins to be thought of more as a subject of rights than as an ethical subject, and this conditions the processes of subjectivation and, of course, educational conceptions. And this "transmutation" of the original educational conceptions, linked to the constitution of the ethical subject, was facilitated by the renunciation of the indissolubility of knowledge from the spiritual transformations or ethical development necessary to access it (Cartesian moment) and didactically supported by the conceptions of education that we have synthesised in the didactical model proposed by Comenius. This way, education is institutionalised and generalised, but it is no longer an ethical act, but a technical one, above all.

The first conclusion of all this is that an education that focuses only on the mechanisms of knowledge distribution, on equality of opportunities or what we know as equality of capacities, without paying attention to the intrinsic meaning of these opportunities or these capacities and how education contributes to the ethical construction of the learner, abandons the educative dimensions of education. Abandoning the educative dimensions will unlikely lead to what is really important, which is the ethical self-formation of fair subjects for fairer societies.

A second important conclusion is that the ethical nature of education is therefore the cornerstone on which we must begin to think about the construction of justice in education in order to achieve social justice through education.

The third conclusion is that a school system that is more equitable in the sense that it distributes a minimum amount of instruction more fairly is better than one that is not. However, we should not be satisfied with just improving those distributive features. For school education to become fairer, we should start to incorporate some of the ideas that we are putting forward here.

Seeking justice in education requires broadening our vision and ambition to seek pedagogical relationships that really become educative, not only because that is what would move us forward in terms of educational justice, but also because with it we would better contribute to social justice, as Plato and Aristotle had already intuited.

Finally, non-affirmative education, in which the curriculum is understood as a space of “problematization,” rather than a space or place of imposition, seems to us to be a possible path towards “just” education. In non-affirmative education and associated pedagogical leadership, the leaders responsible for the different levels of “curricular” decision-making enjoy adequate autonomy and are not totally subordinate to affirm the “official” curricular proposals. Dialogical educational relations, summarised in what Uljens, in the introductory chapter of this book, drawing on F. D. E. Scheleiermacher, has identified as the Herbartian tradition of “educative teaching,” allows the development of ethical subjects: “The idea [of non-affirmative education] is to support the learner’s growth as an intellectual, moral, social, historical and political subject, her development as a person and citizen.” This is what we believe defines a true educational act, and, in essence, is what makes education more just, in the original sense.