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Journal of Education Policy

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Just education
a
Raewyn Connell
a
University of Sydney , Sydney , Australia
Published online: 29 Aug 2012.

To cite this article: Raewyn Connell (2012) Just education, Journal of Education Policy, 27:5,
681-683, DOI: 10.1080/02680939.2012.710022

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2012.710022

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 Journal of Education Policy
Vol. 27, No. 5, September 2012, 681683

VIEWPOINT
Just education
Raewyn Connell*

University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

(Received 1 June 2012; nal version received 22 June 2012)
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Education is dangerous. Authoritarian governments and religions have persistently

tried to control the content of education and ration its distribution. In the colonial
world, education was always a site of struggle as the colonizing powers sought con-
trol and modernization, and the colonized sought some balance between protecting
local cultures and winning new knowledge and resources.
Education is dangerous, because schools and colleges do not just reproduce cul-
ture, they shape the new society that is coming into existence all around us. Social
justice in education therefore not only concerns equality in the distribution of an
educational service (important as fair distribution is). Social justice concerns the
nature of the service itself, and its consequences for society through time.
Inequalities produced by school systems are familiar; the sociology of education
has tried to measure and explain them. What is not sufciently appreciated is that
the mechanisms of inequality themselves change historically. The racial exclusions
of a colonial education system are replaced by the class privileges of a postcolonial
regime; the locus of gender privilege shifts; and the boundaries between public and
private education are re-drawn.
Currently, a major shift is happening between old forms of inequality based on
institutional segregation and new forms of inequality based on market mechanisms.
Schools and colleges are re-dened as rms, and forced to compete; students are
dened as competitive individuals. Even the teaching workforce is made more hier-
archical, and payment by results emerges from the gloom of history to become the
newest bright idea. Education becomes a zone of manufactured insecurity, with
achievement through competition as the only remedy. But in a zero-sum
competition, achievement for one means failure for all the rest.
We cannot sensibly dene a socially just education system by removing our-
selves from this scene, as if justice could only be realized on another planet. We
need to think principles through in relation to the real problems of contemporary
education.
Justice, for instance, is connected with responsibility; when we act unjustly
towards someone, we fail to take responsibility for the effects of our actions on
them. Just social relations involve mutual responsibility, and a just society contains
dense webs of mutual responsibility, especially shared responsibility for children.
In modern education systems, our mutual responsibility for children (and for
adult learners) is mediated through a school system. Just education can be regarded

*Email: raewyn.connell@sydney.edu.au

ISSN 0268-0939 print/ISSN 1464-5106 online

2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2012.710022
http://www.tandfonline.com
 682 R. Connell

as a system designed to make this responsibility effective. The neoliberal turn in

education is ethically damaging precisely because it undermines this web of
responsibility.
In this historical context, socially just education will be education that
emphasizes mutual responsibility: institutionally, in the form of a public school and
university system not a privatized one, and pedagogically in classrooms that
emphasize mutual aid in learning and development.
The neoliberal market agenda, reducing all areas of life to market-like forms,
requires measures of success and failure. In education, this means a competitive
testing regime, and in the last generation immense effort has been invested to build
up such regimes, which now operate on an international as well as a national scale.
Large-scale quantitative testing requires a standardization of curriculum, to produce
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common performances that can be tested. This hoists curricular decision-making out
from local settings and locates it in centers of social power.
Just education, by contrast, would respond to the deep diversity that actually
exists in large school-going populations. The equity campaigns of the last few
decade have familiarized us with a list of educationally relevant differences:
poverty, gender, ethnicity, disability, rurality, sexuality, migrant status, etc. The
response required is not just one of recognizing human rights, which is only a
beginning with problems of justice. We need above all educational responses to
deep diversity.
This means at least two things. One is curricular justice; that is to say, a curricu-
lum organized around the experience, culture and needs of the least advantaged
members of the society rather than the most advantaged, as things stand now.
Socially just curriculum will draw extensively on indigenous knowledge, working-
class experience, womens experience, immigrant cultures, multiple languages, and
so on; aiming for richness rather than testability.
This is impossible unless the main decision-making about curriculum is decen-
tralized, right down to classroom level, and classroom teaching itself is separated
from the audit mechanisms of competitive testing. But decentralized decision-
making needs solid institutional support. Teacher education would be shaped around
the skills and resources needed for producing curriculum; and educational research
would center on the generative mechanisms underlying curriculum.
The second is an emphasis, in policy as well as philosophical thinking about
education, on the social encounters that make up an education system. This is
where the abstract idea of diversity becomes a concrete matter of experience, and
the possibilities of mutual aid become shared learning and creative experiences.
Encounter between people, and encounter between groups, is the means of building
culture; and just education becomes a means by which culture regenerates itself
from below, rather than through commercialization or the strategies of power.
Encounters between people and groups only become educationally productive if
there is mutual respect. Philosophers in the last few decades have emphasized that
justice does not only refer to material equality, but also to respect and recognition.
A just education system therefore does not dene some students as good clients
and others as rabble, and it does not under invest in some social groups and over
invest in others.
A just education system, nally, can allow itself to trust: to trust learners, with-
out the whip of examination, and to trust teachers, without the club of auditing. It
seeks security rather than insecurity, knowing that a basic security allows both deep
 Journal of Education Policy 683

learning and intellectual and cultural adventuring. That has been possible in the past
for privileged minorities; but an education based on privilege is a corrupted educa-
tion. We now know how to do better.

Notes on contributor
Raewyn Connell is University Professor at the University of Sydney, a fellow of the
Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and one of Australias leading social scientists. Her
most recent books are Southern Theory (2007), about social thought beyond the global
metropole; Gender: In World Perspective (2009); and Confronting Equality (2011), about
social science and politics. Her other books include Masculinities, Schools & Social Justice,
Ruling Class Ruling Culture, Gender & Power, and Making the Difference. Her work is
widely cited internationally, and has been translated into 14 languages. She has taught at
universities in Australia, Canada and the USA, in departments of sociology, political science
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and education. A long-term participant in the labor movement and peace movement, she has
tried to make social science relevant to social justice.