地方教育行政における「正義」について考える

抄録

The purpose of this paper is to discuss what“justice”is for education, especially for local education administration. In the first half of the paper, the basic ideas of justice of education are discussed, and in the second half, the current state of the theory of“justice of education”in Germany is considered, and in particular, the policies of the Hanseatic city Hamburg, Germany, are examined as concrete examples.

Justice is subject to various discussions. In political science, some argue that it is impossible to prove the correctness of a concept of justice, so they focus on only the“decision process”of what seems to be“justice”. On the other hand, there are people who continue to argue for tentatively agreed justice, even if the final correctness is uncertain. From the standpoint of the latter, this paper discusses justice for local educational administration from some limited perspectives.

The theory of educational justice is generally discussed as distributive justice of education. The popular positions in discussions are egalitarianism, priority theory, sufficiency theory, and meritocratic conception. Aside from these individual-based approaches, it is also important for educational administration to take into consideration individual school or school districts as a subject, on which the compensative measurements are offered. When ensuring equal educational conditions for each school district or school, it is necessary to carefully consider how to handle the differences that actually exist. Guarantees of formally equal conditions often lead to unequal results. Therefore, in order to guarantee substantial equality of education, it is necessary to“make the difference stand out”in advance.

In Japan, the substantial guarantee of educational conditions has been achieved fairly well since the Second World War. However, in recent years, there has been an increasing tendency to directly compare the educational achievements of individual schools. Each school is, however, located in a diverse social environment. The backgrounds of students' parents are diverse and disparate, too. Including these points, there is an increasing need for educational administration to provide support on an individual school basis. In other words, there is a growing necessity to discuss the justice of education for individual schools or school districts.

In Germany, many people have been discussing“educational justice” since the PISA survey. In Germany, the word“Chancengleichheit” (equal opportunity) is rejected as a formal concept. Instead, the word “Bildungsgerechtigkeit” (educational justice) is preferred to express these concepts. Educational justice is defined as“the condition in which a decision to go to secondary school is determined independently of the student's social background.”Regarding this definition, there are criticisms that the principle of sufficiency should be considered more strongly, and that the recognition of individual moral autonomy should be emphasized.

Hamburg, as a federal state, is advancing school reform with the aim of realizing“educational justice.”There, school system reforms (two-pillar model) were introduced to reduce restrictions on educational career paths at the time of progressing to secondary education, and administrative support has been provided based on the“social index”of individual schools. In addition, the moral autonomy of individuals is approved by guaranteeing the parent's right of school choice. These measures are intended to improve the level of“educational justice”.

It is concluded by this half theoretical and half case-based discussion that when discussing justice from the perspective of educational administration, it is better to analyze a concrete educational policy based on the particular notion of justice appropriate to it, rather than to theoretically and comprehensively discuss the concept of justice.