Education as a primary and positional good: an approach to educational inequalities and their effects from John Rawls' theory of justice

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the implications of Rawls' theory of justice in educational matters from an approach to the right to education as a fundamental human right, particularly in contexts with high educational inequalities. In this sense, Rawls' framework, probably one of the most prominent theories in the XX century in matter of social justice, places a series of obligations on social institutions and in particular on state institutions towards rights holders, since configured as such, the State must not only perform a negative action of non-intervention on individual freedoms, but must also perform positive actions to guarantee the exercise of the right to education. The starting hypothesis is that the liberal egalitarianism of Rawls' approach, although it represents a great advance that seeks to combine liberal positions with criteria of distributive justice, is insufficient to account for the existing inequalities in the educational sphere, but provides a strong basis for assuming that any educational policy should consider an egalitarian approach.