Motivational adequacy and educational faith

Abstract

Justice is often thought to require that students receive educations that are, in some important sense, equal. I lay out, and raise questions about, an argument that seems to support this conclusion. The questions I raise about the argument suggest that what justice requires is not equality, but adequacy, of education. More specifically, I contend that justice demands that education be motivationally adequate. It must position students to appreciate and be moved by the intrinsic interest of the subjects they are studying and by the extrinsic rewards that come with age-appropriate mastery of them. I then argue that, if an education is to satisfy this condition, students must have reasonable faith that the educational system and society’s distributive scheme satisfy robust standards of fairness.