Reframing Access to, Instruction in, and Alternatives Beyond the University: Formative Justice and Postsecondary Education

• In Event: Fulfillment of Self Through Adherence to Law: Formative Justice and Educational Politics

Abstract

The paper begins by acknowledging a deeply felt and enduring public dissatisfaction with the American system of higher education. While this discontentment is rooted in historical circumstances of perceived perpetually unfulfilled promises; questions of access, retention, instruction, relevance and ultimate value have grown more acute as the topic of higher education serves as a battleground for political debates of group and individual enfranchisement and enrichment.
I argue that these criticisms of the institution of higher education are based in an assumed and, in this area, largely unexplored notion of justice that, as it is overtly narrowly political in nature, fails to respond well to the educational needs central to projects in pursuit of the shaping of human potentials. Robbie McClintock’s bold recommendation to shift the academic study of education towards the development of a rich and multifaceted conceptualization of formative justice offers a language with which to articulate a new set of answers to these persistent doubts . Questions of the distribution of post-secondary educational resources, the methods and circumstances of academic engagement, and the educational aims of the university take on a new character in light of McClintock’s proposal.
Lest one think that the concept of formative justice offers conclusion without provocation, I highlight the ways in which these new and insightful responses still require our collective attention and discussion, and point to a set of novel questions that emerge from taking the concept seriously. To this end, three areas are identified.
Firstly, formative justice subsumes questions of the just distribution of educational resources. In asking how, to whom, and which educational opportunities are distributed, contemporary scholarship on educational equity largely seeks a fair method by which to bring a “mix of aptitudes to their full employment in pursuit of sustainable fulfillment” .
Secondly, higher educational pedagogy must struggle with the concept of “formative justice” as its students design for themselves and undertake a course of study. The paternalism that often marks the educational experiences of younger students may deserve reconsideration and reformation in the adult realm of postsecondary education. Said differently, what limits or boundaries on the practices of university instruction might formative justice elucidate?
Finally, formative justice supersedes the institution. The university or college setting might, in important ways, infirm the formation of the student. How then might we recast post-secondary education in an individual’s life such that the campus becomes one site among many for that process?
Formative justice provides responses to many of the enduring questions of higher education, but it also serves to provide a context for emerging questions alongside. This paper’s encounter with the concept allows the educational research community access to a greater variety of conceptual frames through which to pose and ponder the essential questions of our shared educational institutions, endeavors and opportunities.

Author

• Winston Charles Thompson, University of New Hampshire