Mardi intime: The Nationalist Bias in Theories of Educational Justice

Julian Culp (University of Frankfurt, Berhaim Fellow)

In this presentation I will argue that the dominant contemporary conceptions of educational justice in Western thought suffer from a nationalist bias. More specifically, I will show that democracy-based (Anderson, Gutmann, Satz, Nida-Rümelin), distribution-/fairness-based (Brighouse, Swift, K. Meyer) and recognition-based (Stojanov) theorists of educational justice focus primarily on the functional importance of educational public policies for realizing social justice at the national level. Thereby these theorists arbitrarily neglect the ways in which educational public policies can contribute to or hinder the realization of justice beyond national borders. By way of conclusion I reflect upon the mutual dependence of philosophy of education and political philosophy.