Education and Equality
About this book
This book features Danielle Allen’s 2014 Tanner Lectures, delivered at Stanford University, along with comments from four distinguished contributors—Harvard philosopher Tommie Shelby; education and globalization scholar Marcelo Suárez-Orozco (UCLA); Michael Rebell, executive director of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College, Columbia; and Pulitzer-winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes—along with Allen’s response to the commentaries. Why it is so hard to think about education and equality in relation to each other? Allen asks. For all of our talk about the two, we don’t actually talk much about how education itself relates to equality, regardless of whether the equality we have in mind is human, political, or social, or connected to economic fairness. The basic problem that motivates these lectures, then, is the following: Allen thinks that education itself—a practice of human development—has important contributions to make to the defense of human equality, the cultivation of political and social equality, and the emergence of fair economic orders. But she thinks we have lost sight of just how education relates to those egalitarian concerns. If we are to do right by the students we purport to educate, in whatever context and at whatever level, we need to recover that vision. Allen’s goal, therefore, is to recover our understanding of just how education and equality are intrinsically connected to each other.