2009-10 Spencer Workshop

Spencer Workshop: Education, Justice, and Democracy

Thanks to support from the Spencer Foundation, the School of Social Science will sponsor the three-stage cross-disciplinary scholarly workshop that is expected to produce an interdisciplinary and agenda-setting book on education, justice, and democracy. The focus of the cross-disciplinary engagement will be on creating ongoing conversations between normative and empirical approaches to the study of education. Consistent with the Spencer Foundation’s interests in normative issues related to education, we have given special attention to bringing into the workshop a set of philosophers who have done exceptional work on education already (e.g., Harry Brighouse) and other philosophers who are just beginning to work on education or can be enticed to do so through participation in our workshop.

Multi-disciplinary conversations are especially important, we believe, at the crossroads between normative, value-oriented scholarship and positive, empirically-oriented social science. Questions about justice and democracy have been at the center of an amazing output of philosophical scholarship over the past forty years. During the same period, social scientists have vastly increased their methodological rigor and amassed vast datasets to study important social phenomena. Both normative and positive scholars have been working hard on questions concerning education, but they too rarely engage one another.

The workshop specifically will address the following questions: Which democratic ideals in education are appropriate to the U.S. context? What are the current conceptual and practical obstacles to achieving a democratic ideal in education? What sorts of ethical choices are involved in concrete decisions about teaching practice, school design, funding structures, admissions practices, legislative and judicial decisions about schooling, and so on?

Scholars participating in this workshop are: