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9 AFTER JUST SCHOOLS: THE EQUALITYDIFFERENCE PARADOX AND CONFLICTING VARIETIES OF LIBERAL HOPE Richard A. Shweder Difference: “No child should be expected to cast off the language and culture of the home as he crosses the school threshold, nor to live and act as though school and home represent two totally separate and different cultures which have to be kept firmly apart.” (Bullock 1975) Equality: “A French Minister once boasted that in any hour of any day, he knew exactly what every schoolchild in France was studying. It is hard to imagine anything more alien to the tradition of education in the United States.” (Galston 2005, 78) S everal conflicting varieties of liberal value are present in debates about how children should be justly educated in a multicultural society such as our own. Specifically, there are four liberal values—autonomy, merit-based justice, equal opportunity, and benevolent safekeeping of the vulnerable—that are aspects of the liberal political ideal of equal regard for all citizens. These four values have changed in different ways throughout public policy debates about the equality-difference paradox and the appropriate place for multiculturalism in American schools. The idea of an equalitydifference paradox refers to the tension or tradeoff between public policies supporting genuine cultural diversity in beliefs, values, and family life practices , versus public policies promoting equal educational outcomes for all children regardless of cultural or family background. Essential in understanding this tension is the distinction between pluralism and inclusion as educational objectives. I want to note that the history of this book is inseparable from the history of the Russell Sage Foundation and Social Science Research Council Working Group on “Law and Culture” (previous named the Working Group on 254 “Ethnic Customs, Assimilation and American Law”). This has been an interdisciplinary forum for legal scholars, lawyers, political theorists, and social scientists to examine the challenge of multiculturalism in liberal democracies . In 2002 the Working Group published a book titled Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies (Shweder, Minow, and Markus 2002). After several years of rich conversations and debates among the many social scientists, legal scholars, and lawyers in the Working Group, all of whom had an interest in contemporary patterns of social and cultural diversity, one of the main lessons learned was that models of equality in public policy debates are diverse and not necessarily mutually compatible; yet those models of equality stand in need of explication for the sake of both promoting equality and giving permission to diversity in those societies. Just Schools builds on the experience of the members of the Working Group and focuses the discussion of multiculturalism on the challenges facing schools. The coeditors of this book were encouraged by the members of the Working Group to design and organize a narrowly focused project in order to make deeper sense of the persistent and recurring evidence of competing models and polarizing views of equality in public policy debates about the aims of education. Thus this chapter is inspired not only by James Madison ’s specific concern about factions, but also by the general concern, shared by all the contributors to this edited volume, to identify and distinguish between two types of multicultural agendas—the pluralism agenda and the inclusion agenda—and to raise questions about their degree of compatibility. In a genuinely liberal democratic society, the most popular political ideals tend to be variations on the notion of equal regard for all citizens (or, alternatively and more expansively, equal regard for all “persons”). Taken together they express collective hopes for the development of that type of goodness (equal regard) in that kind of society (a liberal democratic one). The four particular values of autonomy, merit-based justice, equal opportunity, and benevolent safekeeping of the vulnerable—all of which add substance to the abstract ethical ideal of equal regard—are so commonplace and fundamental in a society such as the United States that they are readily recognized and intuitively embraced with a sense of approbation, hope, and expectancy. They serve to motivate action, justify public policy objectives, and define the moral foundations of social and political life.1 Yet these values are not necessarily mutually compatible or in harmony with each other. Irresolvable conflicts—for example, between merit-based justice (a value whose implementation typically results in an unequal distribution of rewards) and equal opportunity (a value whose implementation typically requires a redistribution of resources), or between autonomy (a value whose implementation typically calls for a liberty-based...

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