An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Philip Cook (Sabbatical Fellow, 2026)
What is a Just School?
We often regard schooling as simply a means to deliver education. But schooling involves much more than receiving an education. It involves social relationship within and beyond the school. These can be matters of justice in addition to the education children receive at school. There are numerous conflicting theories of justice and injustice in schools: from those who regard them as mere instruments of capitalist exploitation, to those who see them as irredeemably oppressive of children’s freedom, while others consider schools as germinators of future democratic citizens. In this presentation, I present an idea for a grant application that seeks to step back from these substantive debates about justice in schooling. I argue that each of these views involves implicit assumptions about the nature of schools. Thus, to understand this debate properly, we must understand the metaphysics of schools properly. However, to understand the metaphysics of schools properly, we need to ask an even more fundamental ‘meta-metaphysical’ question: ‘what are we doing when we do metaphysics?’ My project aims to draw on recent work in metaphysics to develop a new approach to analysing the nature of schools. I propose that a clearer idea of what we are doing when we theorise about the nature of schools has significant implications for how we think about justice in schooling in the real world.
Meeting ID: 384 971 962 716 1
Passcode: nV6Rg79e