2024 Volume 91 Issue 2 Pages 235-247
The purpose of this article is to draw a distinction between the political conception of justice and comprehensive doctrine in the discussion of public education, focusing on John Rawls's concept of public reason in his political liberalism. Through this process, the article addresses two educational interests, and considers public education as enabled by Rawlsian deliberative theory and his theory of the public.
Public reason refers to the reasoning that people employ to justify their claims during deliberation. Individuals aim for public justification based on political values and the like, contained in political conception, by which they provide reasons for their claims. In this procedure, justification simply based on comprehensive doctrines is not permissible. Rawls's distinction between political conception and comprehensive doctrine is widely utilized as a conceptual tool to represent the aspects that can be shared (political conception) and those that cannot (comprehensive doctrine) in contemporary pluralistic societies.
This article addresses two educational interests that arise when incorporating this distinction into discussions about public education. The first interest concerns the “justification of education,” and the second the “potentiality of education.” The former interest considers what kinds of public education are justified in deliberation by public reason, while the latter interest considers the effects of the justified education. This article approaches these interests by interpreting Rawls's public reason from two points of view.
In summary, the article's conclusion can be stated as follows: during deliberation, individuals publicly justify their claims in ways that are acceptable to others in accordance with political values (proviso). At this time, individuals can introduce not only political conception but also comprehensive doctrines, such as religion, into deliberation. This has a positive significance. In deliberation based on public reason, fundamental political questions should be examined within political conception, but there are also other questions where more active deliberation can take place through the introduction of comprehensive doctrines.
Based on the above, this article argues that for the first interest, we can justify certain conceptions of education based on not only political conception but also some comprehensive doctrines as public education, provided that public reasons can be presented. For the second interest, we can encourage the formation of the public sphere and of individual identity and society in the non-public sphere through education on public reasons. Depending on the course of deliberations, we can publicly justify specific conceptions of education based on specific comprehensive doctrines if public reasons can be presented, potentially further encouraging interaction between political conception and comprehensive doctrines and transforming the spheres. Nevertheless, this article recognizes only that the realization of the formation of individual and society is an outcome of the process of public justification; caution is required when aiming for this realization in education.
