Achieving the public interests in education through educational pluralism

This inquiry explores some implications of Rawls' political liberalism for the school choice debate, arguing that a system dominated by government-operated common schools is fundamentally at odds with the profound respect for pluralism that is central to political liberalism. As a result, such a system is unable to achieve the most compelling public interests in education, especially the development of civic virtue.;Supporters of government schooling make two fundamental mistakes. The first is to believe that they can truly respect pluralism within a monolithic system by maintaining "neutrality." Not only is neutrality impossible in education, but attempting to be neutral has resulted in a steady erosion of explicit moral content and a drift toward implicit secular values such as consumerism.;The second mistake is to believe that civic virtues such as tolerance can be effectively and legitimately cultivated by systematically exposing children to diversity in government schools. The liberal educational philosophers who promote this tolerance-through-diversity thesis fail to see the underlying illiberality and intolerance of this approach and how it undermines the real foundation of civic virtue: social trust.;In contrast, a clear understanding of the educational implications of political liberalism and Rawls' moral psychology leads to the conclusion that civic virtues such as tolerance can be effectively and legitimately cultivated only by creating a just educational system---one that truly respects and supports schools embodying different ideals of life and education.;In the course of the argument, several related topics are considered, including the history of government schooling in America, the role of community and mediating structures in a truly pluralistic society, an interpretation of Rawls' work called discourse ethics, and the potential effects on equity of recent voucher proposals. The inquiry concludes by noting that Rawls recognizes three spheres in the basic structure of society---political, economic, and moral-cultural---and that education is naturally part of the moral-cultural sphere. But government schooling places education in the political sphere, a sphere increasingly dominated by economic interests. Educational pluralism will help release education from the grip of these foreign interests and restore its integrity.