Education, Justice, and Democracy

“In their introduction to this superb book, Danielle Allen and Rob Reich note that just about everything we do in education or say about it is freighted with assumptions about how our educational practice is related to the ideals of democracy and justice. Unfortunately, the pervasiveness of these assumptions is not matched by much rigorous and imaginative thought about their validity. One cause of the poverty of our educational thought is disciplinary fragmentation. The social scientists write about education with little understanding of its ethical meaning, and the philosophers write about it with blithe indifference to how our highest ideals are to be realized in an empirically complex world. What would our educational thinking look like if it captured the best social scientists and philosophers in real conversation with each other? If you want to know, then read this book. It will be an exhilarating and inspiring experience.”

“Danielle Allen and Rob Reich have assembled an outstanding collection of essays. Each chapter tackles essential normative and empirical questions about educational justice within a democracy: what it means, what it would look like, and how to make progress toward achieving it.  These are important insights. The book’s most significant accomplishment, though, emerges from reading it as a whole. It models ways of doing normatively engaged social science research, and empirically engaged political theory, that all students and scholars of justice, education, and democracy should immediately heed.”

“Education, Justice, and Democracy is an important book.  By bringing together a range of well-known scholars from different disciplines, it provides exceptionally thoughtful analyses of the limits and possibilities of an education that is connected to democratic egalitarianism. Danielle Allen and Rob Reich are to be commended for their fine efforts in putting a book such as this together.”