Public schools, public goods: Reintegrating the liberal and republican traditions for a civic philosophy of education (John Rawls, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor)

The purpose of this dissertation is to recover a normative conception of public schooling that recognizes (a) that schooling is a public as well as private good, and that former is not reducible to the latter; (b) that schools in a liberal-democratic republic have a mandate to develop shared citizen competence, duty, and commitment to the polity; and (c) competent citizenship involves much more in the way of discipline, mastery, and identification with the polity than is usually allowed in contemporary conceptions of civic-democratic education. It draws primarily on the work of three contemporary philosophers: John Rawls, Michael Sandel, and Charles Taylor. These figures represent competing positions within American political thought over the relative importance in American history of liberalism's focus on individual rights, justice, and freedom from government; and republicanism's emphasis on virtue, the nature of the good polity, and the freedom to participate in self-government. The thesis argues that these positions are more complementary than conflicting, and of equal importance in achieving and sustaining a just democratic polity. Rawls, Sandel, and Taylor provide a theory of society, self, and citizen that could substantially reshape educational philosophy and policy in the US. Chapter 1 critiques dominant modes of educational philosophy dominant at the turn of the 21st century from a civic perspective. Chapter 2 introduces Rawls, Sandel, and Taylor, and draws on them to identify the public philosophy undergirding the positions sketched in chapter 1 before presenting an alternative grounded in what Taylor calls the social thesis. Chapter 3 develops a normative theory of the citizen. Chapter 4 attempts to derive from chapters 2 and 3 some normative principles for civic education. These chapters defend the role of schools in forming citizen character and competence, sketch the substance and contours of citizen education grounded in the social thesis, and defend it in terms of both justice and the good polity. Chapter 5 closes with two examples of how this model, as a “new” public philosophy, might reframe educational policy discussions by focusing on obligations—what the polity owes schools and schools owe the polity.