Thank you very much for the introduction of justice as a necessary part of praxis. Rawls's island is the best 'leveler', in terms of identifying the starting point of what justice should be, that I have come across. It's good to be reminded of it.
love
Sara
________________________________________
From: Practitioner-Researcher [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bob Dick [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, January 10, 2011 5:21 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Educational influence and Social Formation
Dianne asks what is informing me in nominating the ideal of a system
of education that I proposed.
Briefly, I imagined a classroom where differences in talents are
accepted; where people talk openly and without judgment about them.
It might be described as a system where accidents of birth are not
socially or materially rewarded -- just accepted as natural.
Dianne, the short answer is that I arrived there through logic,
informed by 75 years of experience. It would take me more than a
short email to retrace those steps.
One of my important assumptions is that, more than we imagine, most
people are what they are. It's unfair to penalise them or reward
them for it.
When I worked in university classrooms as a lecturer I sought to
create a system that approached that situation.
There's actually much more to it than that. Fortunately, John Rawls
has provided me with a more succinct answer with his theory of
justice.
To summarise a lot, Rawls invites us to think about the system of
justice we would design if we didn't know what role we would be born
into.
In other words, suppose you didn't know what nation, what social
class or what material conditions and so on would be your lot. What
form of justice would you design as "just"?
And, in the context of the present conversation, what would a fair
classroom look like?
Warm regards -- Bob
[ The reference is: Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice.
Harvard: Harvard University Press.
There are also reprints and later editions. ]
--
+- Bob Dick --------------------------------------------------+
| bd at uqconnect.net http://uqconnect.net/action_research/ |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
|