Rawls’s notion of the political conception as educator
| Date | 01 April 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885111430618 |
| Published date | 01 April 2013 |
| Author | Steinar Bøyum |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
European Journal of Political Theory
12(2) 136–152
!The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885111430618
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Article
Rawls’s notion of the
political conception as
educator
Steinar Bøyum
University of Bergen, Norway
Abstract
This paper explores John Rawls’s strangely neglected notion, the political conception as
educator, which captures how the public political culture can educate citizens. The aim is
to elucidate both the idea itself and above all its function in Rawls’s Political Liberalism.
After first surveying its main content and some historical parallels, the main body of the
paper explores why Rawls places so much trust in the educative effect of institutions
and, apparently, so little in schools. Along the way we shall discuss the relation between
political liberalism and republicanism, the border disagreement between political con-
ception and comprehensive doctrine, Mackie’s distinction between wide and narrow
morality and the importance of trust in Rawls’s view of society.
Keywords
Civic, education, educator, liberalism, Rawls, republicanism, schooling, socialization
The connection between politics and education is both ancient and intimate.
Aristotle famously wrote: ‘The citizen should be molded to suit the form of gov-
ernment under which he lives.’
1
Forming the character of citizens to suit the polity,
he thought, will then serve to sustain the polity – ‘the character of democracy
creates democracy’.
2
This idea has been central to the revival of interest in civic,
citizen and democratic education in recent decades. A few philosophers, though,
put more emphasis on the converse: democracy itself creates the character of
democracy. In other words, they emphasize the educative effect of political insti-
tutions. It is, of course, reasonable to assume that the direction of fit goes both
ways here and that there is a dialectical relation between character and institu-
tions.
3
Nevertheless, these two ideas, call them education for democracy and edu-
cation through democracy, can play very different and even opposing roles within a
Corresponding author:
Steinar Bøyum, Department of Education, Box 7807, 5020 Bergen, Norway.
Email: steinar.boyum@iuh.uib.no
given political theory. As I shall now try to demonstrate, this is the case with
John Rawls’s political liberalism.
The topic of this paper is Rawls’s strangely neglected notion, the political con-
ception as educator, which is used in Political Liberalism (PL) to capture the idea of
how the public political culture educates citizens.
4
In order to put this notion in the
proper light and localize the role it has for Rawls, we shall start by considering a
problem that political liberalism creates for liberal-democratic education.
5
This
raises the question of which conception of political education is to be found in
PL, what remains, as it were, in the wake of Rawls’s argument against a more
comprehensive liberal education. We are then led to the idea of the political con-
ception as educator. After first surveying its main content and some historical
parallels, the rest of the paper is devoted to exploring the role it plays in Rawls’s
political liberalism. More specifically, my approach will be to ask why Rawls places
so much trust in the educative effect of political institutions and, apparently, so
little in schools. Thus, the point of the paper is not to debate the pros and cons of
Rawlsian liberalism in the sphere of education, but to show the significance of the
notion of the political conception as educator by way of reconstructing an argu-
ment for why Rawls put such weight on informal and indirect political education
rather than the direct and formal kind. To be sure, the idea and importance of
indirect political education is not original with Rawls, but the reasons he may have
had for emphasizing it can still tell us something important about his political
liberalism.
Comprehensive and political liberal-democratic education
Civic education, Harry Brighouse wrote in 1998, ‘is relatively uncontroversial
among contemporary liberal theorists’.
6
Civic, citizen and democratic education
had by then become huge topics in political philosophy and the philosophy of
education.
7
Most scholars now seem to accept that even a liberal democracy
needs an education designed to enable this kind of society to thrive and endure.
This is not to be an education for a specific political view, e.g. that of a particular
party, but an education for democracy itself, the framework that we suppose all
parties share. Yet apart from that, ‘its content is disputed’.
8
Regarding the content of an education for democracy, one may put emphasis on
either learning about democracy or on learning to be democratic. In the first case,
education for democracy is seen primarily as a matter of acquiring knowledge
about society—its political structure in particular, e.g. its constitution and levels
of government, but also more generally. That this has become comparatively more
important in our time is a view expressed in a famous EU white paper: ‘Democracy
functions by majority decision on major issues which, because of their complexity,
require an increasing amount of background knowledge.’
9
In the second case, education for democracy is seen as learning to be a demo-
cratic citizen, that is, cultivating those skills, virtues and values that define a dem-
ocratic ‘character’, as Aristotle put it. The generic skills most often mentioned are
Bøyum 137
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