Abstract

Although philosophers have written extensively about justice and education, no contemporary theorist has proposed a comprehensive theory of educational justice itself. This chapter discusses why and how we should theorize educational justice on its own terms and what we would be theorizing about in doing so. Through analyzing one richly described case, it argues that any coherent theory of educational justice will: recognize and include non-compliant and irrational agents; accommodate instability and change; integrate corrective and distributional considerations; and set boundaries around the social construction of difference, among other features. Insofar as extant ideal theories of justice about and for adults rest on very different principles about agents and institutions, the chapter concludes that educational justice requires its own original normative theory.