Is Education for Justice Justifiable?

Rawls does not talk much about education in A Theory of Justice. His study is not educational at all in the conventional sense, were it not taken as a lengthy source, out of which one can still derive an account of education for justice. This is so, not only because he did not write explicitly on education in any of the chapters, but also because, I shall argue, his theory does not help us any more than Kant’s ethics to get rid of the metaphysics embedded in value judgments. In other words, Rawls too, together with Kantian theorists, brings the educator to see that she/he is alone in the dubious world of values and value judgments. In this study, I argue for two points. Firstly, that education for justice based on Rawls’s theory cannot be justified rationally, as long as one stands safely outside a Kantian metaphysics. Secondly, that Rawls’s theory of justice, can yet provide an abstract ground for the educator, upon which she can invite her pupils to reflect upon the basic dilemmas of social justice, distribution of rights and goods.