Book review: Michael S. Merry, Educational Justice: Liberal Ideals, Persistent Inequality, and the Constructive Uses of Critique

Abstract

In this highly readable and densely written book, Michael S. Merry develops a constructive critique of contemporary conceptions of educational justice. The book is subdivided into three main parts. The first part provides an introduction to the complex debate about educational justice in political philosophy and philosophy of education while presenting the theoretical underpinnings of his own critique. This critique rests on three interrelated methodological pillars, focusing on central blind spots of the currently dominant liberal egalitarian paradigm in the debate about educational justice. The first pillar concerns the debate between ideal and non-ideal theory. According to Merry, one of the major shortcomings of controversies over educational justice is the lack of a sufficiently complex integration of principled normative theorizing and empirical social research. While he repeatedly emphasizes that we cannot and should not do without ideal theory tout court, Merry plausibly argues that with respect to real-world problems standard ideal theories provide only very limited orientation for an adequate, empirically informed assessment of what educational justice requires. Throughout the book, Merry shows how difficult and messy things get in any serious attempt to apply normative frameworks and principles in concrete contexts (as opposed to often stylized, hypothetical cases). Confronted with empirical evidence, liberal egalitarian arguments and assumptions indeed in some cases seem to be based on more or less fantastic, ahistorical constructions (for instance, the ‘ideal’ public school), bearing little resemblance to actual sociopolitical conditions and functions of the educational systems in most, if not all, contexts. This point alone makes the book an absolute rarity in the debate about educational justice and non-ideal theory, especially if the latter is more than just a label which merely signifies that one also and often highly selectively takes empirical research into account in order to confirm one’s normative beliefs. This problem is related to the second pillar, which constitutes an ideology critique: Merry assumes that currently dominant modes of theorizing educational justice within the liberal paradigm are prone to a variety of unconscious biases and related unquestioned empirical assumptions. These include, for instance, cognitive dissonance as the tendency to downplay the relevance of countervailing empirical evidence which does not fit into one’s normative framework. Due to these and other tendencies to which we 957835 TRE0010.1177/1477878520957835Theory and Research in EducationBook reviews book-review2020