Justice and Private Education

Dr Dan Halliday (University of Melbourne)

Abstract: Private education is a touchy subject. Many people feel that there’s something unjust about the fact that some children gain a competitive advantage through having parents able and willing to spend large sums of money on their education, while other children fall behind.

This paper departs from an existing trend by extracting the problem of private education from the more general philosophical debate that has, so far, sought to subsume private education among other issues concerning justice and education. My claim is that there is an interesting argument against private education in particular, which draws on the way in which justice opposes the buying and selling of positional goods. Where private education is concerned, the strength of this opposition depends on the precise extent and character of education’s positional status. I then go on to identify some relevant features of education that have been wrongly overlooked by philosophers. These include (chiefly) the burdens imposed on children by the purchase of opportunities for them to gain positional advantage, and the way in which the private supply of positional goods counts as an exercise in concentration rather than genuine production (here, there are some ramifications for charity law).

The conclusion is that there remains a rather strong presumption against private education, albeit for reasons that differ in some way from those more frequently offered.