Socializing Justice: The Role of Formal, Non-Formal, and Family Education Spheres

This book offers a comprehensive view of the numerous and robust roles of justice in three education spheres: public and globalized schools, non-formal education, and the family. It develops a heuristic framework for taking account of issues related to distributive justice in the everyday lives of children and young people and to the pillars of justice in various socialization spheres. It makes a compelling case that not only schools, but also non-formal education and the family are primary socialization agents that help align new citizens’ conduct with competing yet coexisting justice ideals in democratic societies. The book shows how children’s and young people’s educational justice experiences affect their beliefs and behavior. Moreover, it examines the justice perspectives of other educational agents—the actual purveyors of distributive justice—such as policymakers, teachers, and parents. Children and young people are conceptualized not merely as subjects experiencing justice or injustice (i.e., as recipients or observers), but also as objects of social justice, targeted by different education agents in an effort to establish and sustain justice in democratic societies. This inquiry into justice research interfaces other, more established disciplines, such as education, sociology of education, social psychology, and political philosophy, and relies on the quantitative and ethnographic methodological traditions in these fields. Such an interdisciplinary framework has made it possible to identify controversies within justice theory regarding the distributive roles of education and to illustrate how the forms of justice underlying educational spheres are universal yet sensitive to sociocultural variation.