I. Introduction
For both G. W. F. Hegel and Axel Honneth, the possibility of individual freedom depends on participation in rational social institutions. They thus share an approach that is committed to explaining, on the one hand, how institutions enable autonomous development and sustain well-founded allegiance, and, on the other hand, what normative criteria such institutions must satisfy. That Hegel and Honneth are able to work from a shared approach, despite their different historical contexts and moral commitments, suggests that they work with a productive model for the critical analysis of society. This model accommodates contestation over the aims of social institutions across different times and places, and provides a framework for understanding progress in our social and moral commitments. So Hegel and Honneth provide a model for healthy individuality by showing how it fits within a social world that enables persons to realize their rational aims, and at the same show how we can critique social institutions in terms of the normative requirements for establishing intersubjective relationships of mutual recognition.
Strangely, neither Hegel nor Honneth devote much attention to formal educational institutions within their social theories.Footnote 1 They offer normative reconstructions of the market economy, the public sphere and the family, but there is no significant discussion of education and educational institutions are assigned no distinctive role. Education is of course mentioned but typically as something that plays a role in allowing other social spheres to function properly. The market, the public sphere and the family require participants who have received forms of training in order to play their roles adequately. For Hegel, alternately, the general notion of education is philosophically important as the process by which Spirit is raised to a fully self-conscious standpoint, and that by which persons are shaped into taking on the standpoint of their culture. Honneth shares a similar philosophical commitment to the latter process, in which persons are brought into participation in the social world. But as Hegel and Honneth characterize these educational processes, they do not concern formal schooling. So educational institutions are treated as if they are incidental to carrying out the proper ends of education, and, insofar as they are mentioned, schools’ role in society is to serve the ends of other institutions. Educational institutions take their norms entirely from what is needed to prepare people for participation in other aspects of social life.
In this paper we argue that Hegel and Honneth’s shared treatment of education manifests a significant flaw in their theories of social freedom. By treating education either as having a derivative relationship to other major social institutions or neglecting it altogether, they fail to account for the distinctive aims and norms of education. More importantly, this failure entails a huge gap in the account of freedom. Educational institutions, we argue, play a significant independent role in the development of healthy, autonomous individuality, so any account of social freedom that neglects them will fail. Schools teach individuals to reconcile the various kinds of normative demands that they are subject to, to assert their own identities and find those identities confirmed by others, to make their own demands on the social world, and of course to gain the cognitive skills that have become essential to a developed personality. An account of social freedom must therefore explain schools’ unique role in bringing individuals into autonomous standpoints. Without such an explanation we lack both a satisfactory account of human freedom and a basis for critiquing educational institutions with respect to their role in society as a whole. A comprehensive social theory thus requires more attention to education than either Hegel or Honneth provides.
In what follows, we first offer a reconstruction of the account of social freedom shared by Hegel and Honneth. We focus on a level of generality at which they share the same account, but occasionally point to differences. We then explain their limited and marginalized treatment of education either as a derivative, secondary institution, or as a process that takes place with only incidental institutional involvement. Next, we give two sets of arguments against this treatment of education. We argue, first, on the basis of the actual character of modern institutions in complex, differentiated societies. Educational institutions do not merely derive norms from other social spheres. They have their own inherent norms and influence individual development in ways that are not mere preparation for participation in the market or the public sphere. Indeed, educational institutions give norms to other spheres. Through the shaping of personality, education restructures what it means to be a family member, a worker or a political participant. Our second set of arguments identifies more fundamental philosophical defects of neglecting the normative demands on schools to contribute to personal, moral and intellectual development.
Only educational institutions bring individuals into both a shared standpoint necessary for participation in social life and an autonomous standpoint capable of negotiating the social demands upon them. We conclude by discussing some of the practical implications of Hegel and Honneth’s theoretical neglect.
II. Hegel and Honneth’s account of social freedom
In this section we offer a reconstruction of Hegel and Honneth’s account of social freedom in order to identify their common approach. In doing so, we must abstract away from important differences.Footnote 2 It is possible to offer a single account here, however, not only because of structural similarities, but also because of an explicit historical debt. Honneth notes his indebtedness to ‘Hegel’s model of a “struggle for recognition”’ (Honneth Reference Honneth1995: 1) and specifically to ‘Hegel’s conception of freedom’ (Honneth Reference Honneth2014: 43), which, following Frederick Neuhouser (Reference Neuhouser2000: 5), is referred to as ‘social freedom’.Footnote 3
An account of social freedom explains the role of institutions in actualizing the freedom of individuals.Footnote 4 One might think that such institutions constrain action and therefore serve as a barrier to individual freedom. According to both Honneth and Hegel, however, social institutions, by providing a structure to social life, can create the conditions under which individuals are able to make sense of their freedom. Through participation in social institutions, individuals can find opportunities for meaningful activity, legitimate their reasons and set worthwhile ends by appeal to public standards, and develop and confirm their identities through interactions with others. Of course, most forms of social life and thus most institutional orders fail to provide the conditions for individual freedom. So the difficulty in offering an account of social freedom is to explain just which institutions are necessary, what contributions they make to a shared way of life and how those contributions count as realizations of freedom. These contributions, furthermore, must not only establish particular objective conditions but also allow for individuals to identify with aims and norms of the institutions in which they participate. Freedom requires that individual members of the social world can view the social order as the product of their own autonomous wills.
An account of social freedom has four main elements on which we wish to focus. Such an account will explain how objective institutions provide the social conditions under which individuals can realize their aims, explain how individuals can develop their own identities through the available forms of social participation in which they relate to others, explain how within relationships of mutual recognition people can have their dignity and various self-relations confirmed, and, finally, identify how social institutions make reason effective and say what the normative requirements on those institutions are.
First, an account of social freedom specifies the objective institutions that allow individuals to realize their aims. Hegel’s social theory locates the conditions of individual freedom in the family, civil society and the market, and Honneth follows Hegel in providing a contemporary analysis of how these social spheres can serve as the conditions of freedom. In Freedom’s Right (2014), Honneth engages in a normative reconstruction of the household, the market, and the public sphere because these social spheres each play a particular role in the development of individual persons. By reconstructing these three social spheres, Honneth identifies the social movements that, in the context of just institutions and the development of healthy personalities, enable persons to actualize their ends (Honneth Reference Honneth2014: 126–29). In part, institutions function simply as instrumental conditions for freedom: they facilitate individuals to realize the aims that they already have. More deeply, however, institutions transform the conditions under which rational activity becomes meaningfully available. Institutions have aims that surpass the subjective desires of individuals. Through participation in these institutions, one can realize one’s subjective desires in co-ordination with the standpoint that the institutions represent. In this way, individuals’ pursuits take on a different character by becoming responsive to public reasons and thereby make new kinds of personal fulfilment possible. Objective institutions thus serve as constitutive conditions for individual freedom and an account of social freedom should identify the institutional order that is both ‘self-sufficient’ (PR §258A) and ‘absolutely necessary’ (PR §75).Footnote 5
Second, an account of social freedom must explain how individuals develop a sense of personal identity since this form of self-knowledge is a condition for autonomy. To be capable of rational self-determination, one has to be able to navigate one’s own interests and work toward one’s own goals. And this in turn requires awareness of one’s intentions and other aspects of oneself that contribute to shaping goals prior to their active pursuit. This awareness, according to an account of social freedom, comes about not through inner reflection but through public engagement. As Hegel expresses it, my abilities to claim rights and take on moral interests ‘must have the ethical as their support and foundation’ (PR §141A). How I conceive of myself as an effective agent depends on the roles that are available to me, how others react to me, and what aspects of my personality are confirmed by others as valid. I can strive for more in life than is expected from me, but even such a commitment relies on the pre-existing recognition of my life as having particular aims that I understand through my role in institutions. In these ways my engagements in intersubjective relations are the condition of autonomy itself (Fraser and Honneth Reference Fraser and Honneth2003: 258–59; Honneth Reference Honneth2002: 516).
Third, an account of social freedom explains how intersubjective relationships of mutual recognition provide the basis for personal identity formation. Honneth frames this point as that which marks the emergence of distinctively social freedom:
A subject is only ‘free’ if it encounters another subject, within the framework of institutional practices, to whom it is joined in a relationship of mutual recognition; only then can it regard the aims of the other as the condition for the realization of its own aims. (Honneth Reference Honneth2014: 45)
Identity formation takes place when one’s relationship to oneself is mediated by one’s relationship to others. More specifically, according to Honneth, we can understand this process in terms of the specific elements of a healthy personality. Only if another recognizes my particular qualities will I be able to gain self-confidence, self-respect and self-esteem, and these relations-to-self are the basis of personal identity (Honneth Reference Honneth2002: 512–13; Honneth Reference Honneth2007: 138–39). Particular institutional spheres, furthermore, provide the forum for these forms of recognition to take place. For instance, the household is where self-confidence, the emotional capacity to express one’s needs to others, develops within loving, intimate relationships.Footnote 6 The market is a place where self-esteem, the feeling that one’s abilities and traits are valuable, develops from one’s participation in co-operative activities with a shared aim.Footnote 7 The public democratic space is where individuals develop self-respect, the feeling that one is on an equal footing with others, from their equal participation in legislative processes in which they can raise claims and get protection of their needs.Footnote 8
Fourth, an account of social freedom will also identify how social institutions make it possible for individuals to decide for themselves how they want to live and effectively to follow through with those decisions. ‘Established and routine practices’ are needed to create the social relations that ‘enable individuals to implement and realize their reflexively determined aims at all’ (Honneth Reference Honneth2014: 45). With a view of established practices and how they contribute to supporting the pursuit of ends, furthermore, one can begin to articulate what the normative requirements on institutions are. Institutions and practices have their own logic, but they can only be justified in terms of how they promote individual agency; we can see the point of practices, and thus the basis for critiquing them, as enabling individuals to actually act on their aims. Institutions should enable individuals to decide what they want and effectively reach the aims they decide upon. They should also make it possible for those aims to be negotiated among individuals. Without rational negotiation in some form, the distinction between deciding for oneself and merely endorsing public or other private aims cannot be sustained.
This very brief reconstruction of social freedom is intended to elicit one main point. Hegel and Honneth each aim to provide a comprehensive social theory in this sense: they intend to offer a full characterization of the rationality of social institutions that are necessary and jointly sufficient for human freedom to be possible. Such institutions must be constituted by relations of mutual recognition such that individuals can realize their aims in concert with one another. As Honneth writes, ‘To elucidate what it means for individuals to be free necessarily implies determining the existing institutions in which they can experience recognition in normatively regulated interaction with others’ (Honneth Reference Honneth2014: 65). Their accounts would be inadequate if they omitted some institutional context needed for autonomous human agency, or if they neglected some feature of the social world that could undermine the justificatory status of modern society as a whole. Their differences, for our purposes, are less important than the fact that they see the modern society as vindicated, or at least as capable of vindication, in terms of the roles that the family, market economy and public sphere play in furthering human freedom. Other institutions play at best a derivative or secondary role in their accounts.
III. The neglect of formal education
In this section we show that for both Hegel and Honneth, educational institutions fall outside their accounts of social freedom.Footnote 9 They both fail to devote much attention to schools, yet they do so in different ways. For Hegel, education as Bildung is deeply important, but thoroughly non-institutional: Bildung takes place either on a philosophical level or on a cultural level, but in either case does not require the involvement of schools. Education as Erziehung does sometimes take place in an institutional context but it is not important that it does so; the same function can be performed informally. Its function, furthermore, is primarily instrumental: it provides training for participation in other spheres by conveying necessary skills but has little independent interest. Honneth seldom discusses education at all and when he does he assigns it a secondary, derivative role: instead of having independent standing, it takes its norms from other institutions and serves the instrumental function of preparing individuals for participation in those other institutions. For both Hegel and Honneth, then, educational institutions do not distinctively contribute to securing social freedom.
Education in the form of Bildung arguably has a central place in Hegel’s thought. Hegel characterizes both philosophy itself and the rational historical process as education: Bildung names the process by which Spirit is achieved in human communities and at the same time by which philosophical knowledge is gained.Footnote 10 So, for example, Hegel famously named the subject-matter of the Phenomenology of Spirit as ‘the education of consciousness itself to the standpoint of Science’ (PhG §78). Of course, these processes have little to do with formal education, or indeed with any familiar form of pedagogy. There are no identifiable individual students in these processes, except perhaps for consciousness itself, and no identifiable teachers, except perhaps for consciousness itself. ‘Experience’, rather than schools, is important for the kind of education that philosophical Bildung represents.
Bildung also has an important place in Hegel’s social philosophy. It is most often rendered in English as ‘culture’ or ‘cultural formation’, but Hegel also refers to education in its ‘absolute determination’ (PR §187), where it has a special sense. Education, here, is the process by which ethical life is achieved, and again this does not depend on educational institutions. Bildung, rather, signifies the process of individual self-development that co-ordinates with the progression of culture as a manifestation of shared standpoint. If individuals are to arrive at a reflective identification with the norms and institutions of the social world of which they are a part, they must first understand themselves in their subjective particularity. This process of becoming self-conscious must occur within the social world, but its end result, if successful, is to provide persons with an understanding of their subjective self that accepts the social aims and customs that shape co-ordinated human activity. Such an individualized and at the same time shared standpoint is achieved through Bildung.
Hegel uses Bildung in less ‘absolute’ senses, too, but in any case, Bildung is a philosophical or cultural process and not a matter of schooling. The philosophical process is primarily retrospective—it depends on the prior achievement of self-consciousness at a broader cultural level—and operates at the level of abstract thought. The cultural process takes place primarily, according to Hegel, in economic life. As Allen Wood notes, ‘It is in civil society … that Hegel locates the function of Bildung in the modern state …’ (Wood Reference Wood1998: 307; cf. also Franco Reference Franco1999: 320). Civil society is competitive and yet regulated, encourages private pursuits for the provision of general needs, fosters the creation of new needs and allows for individuals to find satisfaction in their labour; in these ways it, rather than schools, serves as the model for Bildung (see also PM §396A; PR §197A). Hegel of course could have treated Bildung as a process that required specifically educational institutions; indeed, in Hegel’s time, the prominent public discourse stemming from Humboldt concerned the kind of Bildung appropriate for modern Germany and the institutions appropriate for furnishing it (see Gjesdal 2015: 702–5). Yet Hegel seemed to retrieve a sense of Bildung out of step with his time, one for which schools were not distinctively important.
Even when discussing education in the sense of Erziehung, Hegel does not assign schools an essential role. Erziehung typically takes the form of ‘upbringing’ in the family or ‘training’ in the workplace: it is something carried out informally with the purpose of preparation for more or less immediate tasks. ‘Upbringing’ of course imparts abilities and dispositions that transcend immediate usefulness, but it still functions as part of a process in which childhood is preparation for civic life, and civic life is itself the school of freedom (see Hardimon Reference Hardimon1994: 169). Schools, in this picture, occupy the gap between upbringing in the family and training in the sphere of work; they are the ‘middle-sphere which leads the human being from the family circle over into the world’ (Hegel Reference Hegel1970: 348–49, cited in Wood Reference Wood1998: 312).Footnote 11 So even where formal schooling is called for as part of the theory of society, this schooling fills the gaps and serves the ends provided by other spheres. Hegel makes clear that schools should not compete at all with the authority claims of other institutions; in one of the few places where he refers to educational institutions, he warns against turning ‘the state’s own educational establishments [Lehrveranstaltungen] against it by inciting them to make pretensions akin to those of a Church’ (PR §270). So Erziehung is not independently significant and does not merit an analysis of the role of schools in securing individual freedom.
Honneth’s social theory does not have any sustained discussion of schools at all. Although Honneth does discuss education in places, his discussion indicates that he does not take these institutions to have independent significance in his theory of social freedom; they are about as prominent in his social theory as radio transmitters and shopping centres.Footnote 12 In many ways his discussion parallels Hegel’s: he situates education in a broader context of social progress (Honneth Reference Honneth1995: 116–17; Honneth Reference Honneth2007: 88, 93), and locates it in relation to work and the family. But as Teemu Hanhela argues, while Hegel gives a clear separation of the roles of family and civil society in providing education,
Honneth’s notion of a ‘drawn-out process’ of education receives an autonomous, self-reconstructive nature in terms of the spheres of ethical life, leaving readers relatively uncertain as to how upbringing, education and schools should be understood in context. (Hanhela 2014: 371)
Education appears either to take the form of the ‘cultural education’ (Honneth Reference Honneth2014: 242, 257) that is primarily provided in the family (156, 174–76), or to concern ‘workers’ prospects for earning a qualification’ (239). Both of these could indeed be offered in schools, but there is no particular reason why they should or need to be so offered, except possibly for efficiency’s sake, or, as with Hegel, to fill the gaps left by other spheres. In other words, the very concept of education, and how it might be formally guaranteed, are not mentioned more than in passing.
There are some small exceptions to this neglect. Honneth does, for example, remark on the legal and economic dimensions of educational justice, and he discusses the ways that families provide forms of education. He writes, ‘… in the schools, the needs of children are increasingly presented in the form of legal claims’ (Honneth Reference Honneth2014: 92). Since the proper norm in the legal sphere for Honneth is equal respect towards all legal subjects within the sphere, there should be equal inclusion of students’ educational claims under the law and in the public policies that are shaped by the law. He also discusses how education supports equality of opportunity within the market and how workers have demanded education as a means to realize economic goals and participate fully in the market (Honneth Reference Honneth2014: 239–42). Finally, Honneth allows that the household is a place in which children are informally educated through the interactions with parents and the values reinforced there. He writes, ‘… the family has become a kind of school …’ (175). So all of this recapitulates a point from Hegel’s view of schooling: schools contribute to the aims of other spheres within society and so we can understand the importance of education by examining these other spheres.
In a recent essay Honneth reinforces this point with respect to the political sphere. In ‘Education and the Democratic Public Sphere’ (2015), he discusses the role of educational institutions within democratic life. There he acknowledges the importance of democratic education for philosophical work on democratic political theory. This is a practical and a philosophical matter: clarifying the normative importance of education in a democratic society can give us guidance about real issues in education such as standardized testing and the content of curricula. His central claim is that democratic political theory should not neglect educational theory as part of its subject matter because education has an active role in democratic culture and is a legitimate domain of state influence. This discussion, however, locates the normative significance of educational institutions solely in sustaining a democratic culture and bringing individuals into a standpoint of democratic activity. For example, when Honneth indicates that political normative ideals and practical schooling converge in some cases of state-run schooling, this convergence is understood according to the ideals of the political theorists (Honneth Reference Honneth2015: 29). Education only enters the theory of social freedom after a theory of democracy is formulated. Honneth writes, for example,
the more public schools thus come to be thought of as subject to the constraint of ethical neutrality … the greater becomes the threat to one of the very few instruments that a democratic society has at its disposal to regenerate its own ethical foundations. In this way conflicts over a state-run school system—regardless of whether they concern its structure, curriculum, or methods—are always at the same time conflicts over the sustainability of democracy. (Honneth Reference Honneth2015: 24, emphases added)
Education is important insofar as it serves the sustainability of democracy by regenerating its ethical foundations; there are no norms of education that fall outside those ends.
Hegel and Honneth thus share similar treatments of education. Education is important as a part of social movements that bring individuals into a shared standpoint. Education in this broad sense is normatively important as a practical realization of philosophical ideals, but such realization does not take place in the context of formal schooling. Even education in the narrower sense of training is important only insofar as it serves other social spheres. The importance of these other social spheres, such as the legal sphere, market and family, comes from their role in the collective realization of rational aims. The norms and aims of education as a significant institution itself are not even mentioned by either Hegel or Honneth. Educational institutions are secondary to other institutions and derive their significance as a part of social life from their relation to those other institutions: they provide preparation for participation in other, independently-defined aspects of social life. According to Hegel and Honneth, schools are derivative institutions. Hegel and Honneth’s normative conclusions about educational institutions are based on schools’ secondary role in society—the norms of schools are derived from other primary institutions.
These treatments of education have important implications for their theories of social freedom. A theory of social freedom has to establish how objective institutions provide the social conditions under which individuals can realize their aims. If educational institutions are derivative institutions, they contribute nothing to this by themselves and have no independent significance as a condition of rational life. According to both Hegel and Honneth, then, educational institutions have only an incidental role in modern society. The norms that contribute to the self-realization of individuals in educational relationships are furnished by other social spheres. The educational relationships that take place within educational institutions are not independently significant as a part of individuals’ identity formation. Educational relationships are not the site of specific developmental goals that are confirmed through mutual recognition. It may be necessary for education to reinforce the self-respect or self-esteem that is necessary for participation in other social spheres. But there is nothing inherently educational about these relations-to-self, nor is there any relation-to-self that is specifically educational. Education as a derivative institution, finally, contributes nothing itself to the ability of individuals to make their aims effective by negotiating their needs with others within the school. Individuals are able to effectively realize their rational aims in their relationships outside of education, but educational institutions are not an independently important condition of this.
IV. Education and the neglect of social actuality
According to the social theory provided by Hegel and Honneth, then, the three main institutions—the family, state and market economy—are adequate and necessary to establish the conditions for free individual agency and education only plays a secondary role by working to support those institutions. This is not how educational institutions actually function, however. Education does not merely play a derivative role, but rather independently fosters the development of individuals and the progression of cultural norms. In this section, then, we argue, based on the actual character of social institutions, that Hegel and Honneth are mistaken to neglect education in their accounts of social freedom. We argue, first, that educational relationships have their own content, and this content is not merely derived from the secondary role that education has in supporting other social spheres. This content comes from the normative expectations associated with the distinctive skills, abilities and relationships that education develops. Other institutions respond to and incorporate such skills and abilities rather than demanding them antecedently to education’s fostering of them. So it is false that educational institutions are derivative; on the contrary, other social spheres take their norms from education. We argue, second, that education plays an important role in individual development that no other institution is in a position to take on. Education is at once a process of emotional development through mentorship, the acquisition of valuable skills and a legally guaranteed protection for access to opportunities necessary for a good life. Education as a formal social institution has the role of providing a stable guarantee of opportunities for individual development. Without this, basic conditions for individual development would depend on contingent circumstances such as family, social position or life experience.
Education serves a number of instrumental ends, some of which are critical for the achievement of a just social order. Individuals rely on schooling to attain the skills and credentials needed for labour force participation and for engaging in other social activities, for example. Education can, moreover, be conducive to social integration and mutual concern (see Honneth Reference Honneth2014: 240–42). But even if education were serving the ends of a democratic and egalitarian society, it could still be hindering the development of students and in particular the educational development of students. This is apparent when one tries to infer the norms of education from other spheres. Although it would be wrong to treat students differently according to their class background, social skills or likely contribution to the labour market, it would also be wrong to treat each student exactly the same according to the demands of legal respect. Even making sense of what this means would require reducing education to a matter of distributing resources and allocating them to individuals. Otherwise, one would have to understand the many, complex intersubjective relationships in school as if they were a matter of respecting the equal rights of each student. Furthermore, schools are not places where fully formed subjects, confident in their own standpoint, come together, as if all the other work required for gaining self-confidence were settled in the household. There is a formative middle ground within educative relationships that regards the ability of individuals to straddle different demands on them as potential workers and citizens who also have individual projects.
Educational institutions, then, have their own inherent aims and norms and produce abilities and dispositions that are proper to their own sphere. Some of these aims and norms are familiar simply from ordinary or philosophical understandings of education. Education involves learning, but in discussions of social freedom, the place of cognitive norms—for example those concerning knowledge, understanding and rational inference—sometimes seems to be forgotten. Cognitive skills are of course useful in the practical contexts of the market or politics but they do not derive from those spheres. The normative criteria of cognitive skills are cognitive in nature; one cannot make sense of thought in terms of what is effective in the marketplace. These skills furthermore serve the developmental ends of education, rather than preparation for something else. They allow for ‘the growth of ever clearer and finer distinctions in our experience’ (Hirst Reference Hirst1973: 111), the ‘understanding, capabilities, and virtues foundational to living well’ (Curren Reference Curren2014: 37), and ‘the internal resources and skills necessary to evaluate and revise [one’s] own commitments and practices’ (Brighouse and Swift Reference Brighouse and Swift2006: 82–83), for example. Apart from serving as philosophical ideals of education, these skills are inevitably part of thinking about how schools are run. It is hard to imagine how formal education could be conducted without attention to norms of thought.
Schools, however, do not only impart intellectual virtues. Educational institutions operate according to intersubjective norms that do not derive from other spheres. For example, as Meira Levinson argues, a norm of civic engagement is important within schools (Levinson Reference Levinson2014). This is a complex norm with many facets but it comes down to attitudes, behaviours and expectations that schools teach students. As ‘civic communities’, schools model inclusivity or exclusivity towards diversity, ‘trust and respect’, ‘fairness of lack thereof, equity or its opposite, transparency or Kafkaesque obscurity, humaneness and flexibility or rigid, bureaucratic indifference’ (Levinson Reference Levinson2014: 175).Footnote 13 Such norms are embodied in schools’ curricular content, structure and policies because all of these things affect the relationships that students form with themselves, one another and their communities outside of the school. This is inevitable within a school because in schools ‘students are inevitably practicing something with respect to civic skills, norms and habits’ (Levinson Reference Levinson2014: 190).
None of this can be explained in terms of another social sphere supplying education with norms of interaction. Many of Levinson’s own students had no extrinsic motivation to partake in a mock trial event and other civic engagement projects (Levinson Reference Levinson2014: 243). They nevertheless became informed about important issues, practised valuable skills and gained a sense of empowerment by participating in experiential, student-led, cooperative activities. The political sphere might in fact impart the wrong kinds of norms to the schools that the schools need to work against. Some communities are civically disempowered but the norms that reinforce this in the political sphere should not be recreated in schools. This disempowerment is reinforced, for example, if civic lessons are treated like voluntary, charitable projects that economically privileged students take on in service to their disadvantaged peers (Levinson Reference Levinson2014: 220–24). Extrinsic constraints on schools in the form of externally imposed, outcomes-based evaluative measures also can impart the wrong norms to schools. Education as a system has its own norms that shape the interactions of individuals in the system, the kinds of knowledge that system imparts, and the kinds of habits it instils (Ben-Porath Reference Ben-Porath2016; Mehta Reference Mehta2016). These norms and the development they support can be undermined by accountability systems that dehumanize educational interactions, place importance on measurable outcomes instead of the educational process and reduce the flexibility needed to support the developmental needs of students (Levinson Reference Levinson2014: 248–49, 273–75).
Educational institutions also provide a forum for the hermeneutic construction of selfhood. The interpretive abilities that education imparts and the cultural significance of education allow for the reinterpretation of identity, such that ‘a person’s educational status has come to form a considerable portion of his public and private self’ (Baker Reference Baker2014: 219). Education, furthermore, has its own reflexive norms, so that educational institutions have the power to continually redefine the social meaning of education, stake authority claims and transform their own institutional purpose on that basis. The result of that process has been exactly what Hegel warned against:
Education, as has often been noted, is a secular religion in modern societies: as religions do, it provides a legitimating account of the competence of citizens, the authority of elites, and the source of the adequacy of the social system to maintain itself in the face of uncertainty. (Meyer Reference Meyer1977: 72)
Education furnishes its own legitimacy rather than borrowing it from elsewhere.
Not only do educational institutions have their own norms, independent of education’s relation to other spheres, but education has an active role in shaping those other spheres.Footnote 14 Transformations in how individuals think, imagine and interact in schools reshape human personality in ways that elicit transformation in how other institutions operate; if anything, the predominant direction of transfer is that norms emerge in educational contexts and reproduce themselves elsewhere. As David Baker has written,
The extensive body of evidence … shows that instead of subserviently following other institutions, formal education has developed into a primary institution with its own independent influence on society, constructing more than it reproduces. (Baker Reference Baker2014: 275)
Baker, for example, has identified
four core ideas that mass education as an institution has instilled into the culture of postindustrial society: educational opportunity as a central form of social justice; educational development as social progress; dominance of academic intelligence; and, legitimating of educational degrees as recognized expertise. (Baker Reference Baker2011: 6)
But, more pervasively, changes in the self-understanding of educated people allow for different kinds of social arrangements. So now other institutions structure themselves according to educational norms: workers, family members and citizens are expected to be self-motivated and responsible, follow rules reliably and deal with complex organizational forms, manage interpersonal conflicts and co-operate on group projects, teach themselves new skills and approach problems creatively, adapt to flexibility in social roles, respect difference and diversity, re-invent and reconstruct organizational forms, and so on.
We can consider some of these changes with respect to the three main institutional spheres that Hegel and Honneth identify. First, consider the economic sphere. According to David Bills, ‘What we have witnessed is not simply a reshuffling of jobs, but a transformation of what work is’ (Bills Reference Bills2004: 107). An educated populace allows for workers who are ‘thinking and choosing actors, embodying professional expertise and capable of rational and creative behavior’ (Luo Reference Luo2006: 230, cited in Baker Reference Baker2012: 104). This in turn creates a demand for ‘skill-complementary technologies’ (Acemoglu Reference Acemoglu1998: 1055) that educated workers use to increase productivity, and at the same time allows for ‘the increasing complexity of … business operations [and] more sophisticated management techniques’ (Wyatt and Hecker Reference Wyatt and Hecker2006: 42). The nature of the family has also undergone significant transformations (see Levitan, Belous and Gallo Reference Levitan, Belous and Gallo1988), in part due to educational norms. One notable change is simply in life-course: the age at which one completes schooling has increased and transitions out of schooling into other spheres have become tentative and revisable. This alone is sufficient to change patterns of courtship, marriage, divorce, child-raising and the provision of care. Other changes in intimate behaviour, the social construction of childhood and the responsibilities of parenting can be attributed to cognitive and interpersonal skills that educational institutions have emphasized.Footnote 15
Third, the political sphere has been subject to the influence of educational institutions. According to David Baker, ‘Recent research on education as a primary institution shows that as a polity becomes more educated, it tears down the old political theatre and erects an entirely different one in its place’ (Baker Reference Baker2014: 249). The main set of changes has been in the nature and scope of civic involvement and mobilization. First, Baker and others argue, ‘education is the single most determining factor in an individual’s political motivation, capability, and proclivity to undertake civic involvement’ (247). Second is what Baker calls the ‘hyper-civic’ involvement that results from higher education:
a large volume of research conveys that university students … are more willing to be ‘publicly active’, more able to challenge traditional political positions, and more committed to influencing social values and the makeup of the political structure. (250)
Another significant change is that the scope of the political has increased dramatically. Politics is no longer confined to the deliberations of formal office holders. Rather, as David Kamens has argued, ‘Modern democratic polities have expanded so that they are now turbocharged with social movements, nongovernmental organizations, and other kinds of citizen organizations’ (Kamens Reference Kamens2009: 99).
One can dispute the precise nature of education’s influence over other institutions. There is, however, overwhelming evidence that educational institutions are not derivative: they do not merely furnish preparation for other spheres and take their norms from other institutions. Of course we could reconceive of educational institutions as derivative institutions and prescribe to them norms from other spheres. But then we would be offering social theory for a world that does not exist. Accounts of social freedom need to start with institutional possibilities and forms of legitimation that actually obtain. They are examples of a kind of social theory that, as Frederick Neuhouser puts it:
… straddle[s] the boundary between empirical social science and normative philosophy. What these theories have in common is that they offer, or presuppose, a vision of the good social order that is grounded in both a detailed, empirical understanding of how existing institutions function and an acknowledged commitment to normative criteria that are (in the broadest sense) ethical. (Neuhouser Reference Neuhouser2000: 11)
Assessing the role of education in social freedom begins with analysing what education does, which brings with it a normative framework open to revision according to the practical aims of rational social critique.
Educational institutions, apart from legitimating their own norms and transferring them to other institutions, also manage important meta-institutional roles. Schools operate according to educational norms, of course, but they are also sites where competing types of claims arise and need to be mediated. As Honneth notes, meeting children’s needs within schools has been increasingly expressed as a legal demand. At the same time, students do not only need to assert legal rights but also to cultivate self-confidence through caring relationships in which their interests are taken seriously. Educational institutions, then, perform a function that no other institution is in a position to perform: they reconcile demands from other spheres, incorporating relationships that are competitive, caring and legal. Education, furthermore, promotes attitudes that enable persons individually to negotiate the other spheres. As Alex Inkeles has found, mass education engenders ‘openness to new experience … assertion of increasing independence from the authority of individual figures … ambition for oneself … [and] strong interest and taking an active part in civic and community affairs’ (Inkeles Reference Inkeles1973: 165–66).
One other important point about the function of educational institutions is made by Hegel, although he attributes its performance to civil society. He writes,
In this character as a universal family, civil society has the duty and right, in the face of arbitrariness and contingency on the part of the parents, to supervise and influence the education [Erziehung] of children in so far as this has a bearing on their capacity to become members of society … (PR §239)
Education is better positioned than other institutions to correct for ‘arbitrariness and contingency’, and indeed needs to do so as part of its proper functioning. As Brighouse and Swift point out, ‘autonomy can only be learned and practiced by children who have … emotional security’ (Brighouse and Swift Reference Brighouse and Swift2006: 84). More generally, for educational goals to be achieved, children’s development cannot depend on morally arbitrary factors such as whether one’s home life is sound or whether market forces encourage it. Schools, unlike other institutions, are designed to account for this.
None of this is to deny that educational institutions are often complicit in perpetuating structural features of an unjust society (see Young Reference Young2006). Pedagogical methods, the organization of school systems and the kinds of policies that are implemented to boost measurable academic achievement often result in undermining the aims of education and often in ways that concentrate the harm in communities already suffering from oppression (Ben-Porath Reference Ben-Porath2013; Golann Reference Golann2015; Warnick, Kim and Robinson Reference Warnick, Kim and Robinson2015). Yet the drawbacks to current educational systems emphasize the necessity of articulating the goals that indicate a starting-point for the possibility of transcending the current problems. Although actual economic and political institutions are not reaching their normative aims, we can still identify what contributions to social freedom they are capable of making and use that as a basis for assessing and reforming them. Furthermore, as we suggest in our conclusion, many of the contemporary problems with schools come from not recognizing them as a separate sphere with their own normative demands. This is apparent, for example, when schools, attempting to regularize behaviour to reach measurable outcomes, thereby undermine student autonomy (Au Reference Au2008). Subjecting schools to norms that are proper to the market, the family or politics can undermine the aims of schools in upholding social freedom.
The role of educational institutions in social freedom is minimized by suggesting that their contribution is derivative of the ends of other institutions. That suggestion is false, however. Even if it were so, those who frame education as a derivative institution would have to explain, in a comprehensive social theory, how all the normative functions of education get satisfied. If education were just a mechanism for bringing about an ideal market economy or an ideal public sphere, then there would need to be an explanation of how other institutions enable individuals to achieve cognitive, interpersonal and interpretive developmental goals. For the purposes of a critical theory, there would need to be an explanation of how other social spheres could provide the basis for a normative critique of a society that fails to live up to these educative aims. Finally, such a theory would also have to say something informative about what it is that drives changes in the norms of other institutions which would otherwise be explained in terms of the role that educational institutions have in shaping the character of institutions through their influence over the individuals who participate in them. Otherwise one would be constructing an account of social freedom for a social world that is not ours.
V. Deeper needs, potential solutions
The previous section offered reasons why a social theory without a treatment of education is empirically inadequate. In this section we offer some general reasons for thinking that educational institutions need to play a constructive role in social freedom. We argue that formal education is necessary for initiating individuals into a standpoint that is at once autonomous and shared so that they can reconcile their private pursuits with their relatedness to others. Educational institutions offer an experience of uncoerced development so that students can make sense of their interests and aims as their own and still fit them in with the requirements of other social spheres. Students learn how to interact in the public sphere so that they can influence the course of their own lives and gain accommodation for their needs by negotiating social norms and expectations with others. Schools also create space for public reflection on the good life, reflection that would otherwise only take place at a philosophical level. Only educational institutions are well-suited to accomplishing all this because only schools can manifest the right kind of substantive egalitarian commitment. Other spheres rely too much on the arbitrariness of feelings, do not leave enough room for independence, instrumentalize individuals’ activity or can only address formal claims. Education provides a basis for social progress that no other institution can.
One central feature of social freedom is that individuals can rationally endorse public norms as their own; basic terms of social co-operation need to be seen as enabling conditions for autonomous action rather than as infringements on private liberty. Educational institutions provide the setting most conducive to the cultivation of such a shared and at the same time individual standpoint. Schools are places where individuals learn how to relate to one another in the context of achieving other goals. The acquisition of academic skills takes place collaboratively and cooperatively. Schools, moreover, integrate academic learning with other opportunities for engaging with others in shared pursuits and building a common identity (Bricker Reference Bricker1989). The shared spaces that schools provide can function at the same time as places for individual development. Values and ends are formed in one’s pursuits and engaging in shared pursuits requires learning how to express oneself to others effectively. In the process of negotiating their knowledge and experience of the world with others, individuals develop their own perspectives on the world.
Schools, furthermore, allow for the adoption of more provisional standpoints and identities than other spheres allow for. Outside of schools, there are various exigencies to occupy a fixed role or make one’s position determinate for the sake of pressing interests (Honneth Reference Honneth2014: 127). Schools, by contrast, stave off those demands and allow students to explore their interests more freely. Schools, that is, function as a place of uncoerced development where considerations about affiliation and the efficient pursuit of ends can be deferred until students can formulate and follow through with their own aims.
Educational institutions are also the home for a range of intersubjective norms that have become central to modern personality. Some of these, such as inclusivity, openness, respect and trust, were mentioned above. Of course they can appear in other spheres but in schools they can take on a public form that is suitable for diffusion. There the authority of these norms does not depend on deep, shared commitments or instrumental ends; these norms can be taken as important for their own sake. So in schools children from different backgrounds come together, engage in peer relationships and learn how to be themselves along with others (Anderson Reference Anderson2007). This form of relatedness can also serve as a basis for practically interacting with others outside of schools. In the public sphere there will be demands to articulate one’s needs to others and reconcile them with others’ needs, understand the basis of others’ and one’s own public positions, and weigh such positions against other salient information.
Schools also bring into social life the general ability to reflect critically on aspects of life that would otherwise be left only for philosophers to think about amongst themselves. We can see this clearly by contrast with Hegel’s failure to ascribe an important role to education:
We must, however, distinguish and exclude from the progression to be studied here what is in fact cultivation [Bildung] and education [Erziehung]. The sphere of education is concerned only with individual subjects as such: its aim is to bring the universal mind to existence in them. In the philosophical view of the mind as such, the mind itself is regarded as educating and instructing itself in accordance with its concept … (PM §387R)
For Hegel, education is the process of transferring the content that is determined at a philosophical level to individual subjects. Reflection on what makes for a good life and how the competing demands of social life might fit together is carried out by the ‘universal mind’; individuals do not participate in that process except to be inculcated in the results. Universal education, however, is what makes possible a public discourse on the ends of human life.
There are many particular reasons why educational institutions are well-suited to fostering individual development and making a public discourse about the ends of life possible. In general, however, schools play these integral roles in society because no other institution can adopt the same kind of substantively egalitarian commitments. Schools are equipped to meet egalitarian demands that are not encompassed by the formal expression of rights or political participation and that are not based merely on affection, obligation or economic usefulness. Schools, that is, can treat students’ education and educational needs as equally important. Indeed, they need to do so in order to support learning. Treating a student’s education as less important will diminish the importance of her own educational aims. This is problematic because if the educative relationship is to be freeing for the student on Hegel’s and Honneth’s terms (see note 6), she must identify with and value her own educational aims. Otherwise, the ends she strives towards will be arbitrary and coercive. For this reason, schools are already equipped, at least in principle, to provide equal access to educational experiences for students who come from different family backgrounds.
The success of other institutions in performing their social functions depends on their particular characters. They contribute to social freedom but only in limited ways. The household sphere may furnish a supportive environment for children and provide for the basic emotional and material needs of life. But it also makes such support depend on contingent emotional bonds. And these emotional bonds can themselves threaten to impede a child’s development if pursuing her ends is in tension with her obligations to her family.Footnote 16 By connecting developmental ends to emotional bonds, the household leaves little room for independence. The economic sphere, even though it fosters the competitive virtues and subjective self-assertion and provides resources for the public good, only values what is instrumentally useful, which makes it unsuited to foster individuals’ development for their own sake. Political institutions can be an egalitarian sphere, but still function according to formal legal claims and the need to produce political outcomes; they, too, render individual development into something only contingently important. Schools are thus the site of distinctive social aims that are not fulfilled by any other institution and cannot be fulfilled by any other institution.
VI. Conclusion
It is simply not plausible to expect other institutions to carry out the developmental, reconciliatory and rational tasks that educational institutions now perform, and if they were to do so, it would require a complete restructuring of our social world. Many of the familiar contours of moral personality come from the normative commitments that education fosters: participation and flexibility, tolerance and diversity, rational self-governance, creativity and imaginativeness, questioning of authority, substantive reciprocity, and so on. This is why formal education is a demand of justice: healthy, autonomous individuality depends on it, and its tasks cannot be left to chance. If we neglect theorizing the role of education in social freedom, then the very real risk is that schools are understood as being legitimately subject to external norms. Then the normative demands on schools are conceived of in terms of economic imperatives, such as considerations of efficiency or vocational preparation, or become politicized, as when curricular contents are used to advance partisan agendas, or become subordinated to the particularized forms of commitment that are more suitable in family life. And then schools cannot perform the functions that they need to do.
A world in which formal education does not deserve consideration under demands of justice would be one in which children progress inevitably and without obstacles towards healthy individuality; there are no tensions internal to culture that need to be negotiated (either because culture is completely undifferentiated or because all conflicts have been resolved); parents and adults address children only with their autonomous development in mind; the market and the political sphere impose no burdens on individuals and never overstep their proper bounds; each generation tends to the interest of the next; there are no controversies about knowledge, cognitive capacities and how they are to be shaped; and the ends of human life are uncontroversial. Since we do not live in that world, education belongs in our social theory.Footnote 17
