Abstract
In the global context of increasing inequalities between advantaged and disadvantaged social groups, the role of education in achieving social justice has taken on new importance. In this chapter we consider two widely acclaimed books on social inequality, namely: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century (2014) and Daniel Dorling’s Injustice: Why Inequality Persists (2010). We specifically focus on how the authors relate problems of social inequality with educational disadvantage, naming the relation in terms of meritocracy and elitism. We suggest that in the main, Piketty and Dorling hold to distributive accounts of educational disadvantage and to an income/wealth-based evaluation of social inequality. We also argue that the informational basis of Piketty’s and Dorling’s evaluation excludes an appreciation of social justice as ‘recognition’ and thus excludes the importance of ‘epistemological equity’ and of ‘agency freedom’ in pursuing social justice in educational contexts, particularly in higher education. It is through these two foci on recognitive justice that we augment Piketty’s and Dorling’s distributive account.
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Notes
- 1.
The other four beliefs are: (1) exclusion is necessary, (2) prejudice is natural, (3) greed is good and (4) despair is inevitable (Dorling 2010).
- 2.
See Gillborn (2016) and Gulson and Webb (this volume) for an outline and critique of the use and misuse of biological and other sciences to justify inequality on the basis of assumed genetic intelligence.
- 3.
Taylor (1994, p. 26) goes further to argue that recognition is a “vital human need”, while Appadurai (2004, p. 62) urges that it is an “ethical obligation to extend a sort of moral cognizance to persons who shared worldviews deeply different from our own”. These are sentiments we would agree with, although they perhaps take us away from the main argument at hand.
- 4.
For example, the previous Australian Labor Government’s (2007–2013) now defunct white paper, Australia in Asian Century, which specified the skills and ‘capabilities’ (in the broader, more literal sense of the term) required for “all Australians [to] raise our productivity performance and enable all Australians to participate and contribute in the Asian century” (Australian Government 2012, p. 161; see also Gale and Molla, 2015).
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Gale, T., Molla, T., Parker, S. (2017). The Illusion of Meritocracy and the Audacity of Elitism: Expanding the Evaluative Space in Education. In: Parker, S., Gulson, K., Gale, T. (eds) Policy and Inequality in Education. Education Policy & Social Inequality, vol 1. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4039-9_2
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