Abstracts
Abstract
This paper criticizes mainstream philosophical justifications for paternalism in children’s education, highlighting their exclusion of students labelled with intellectual disability. Most philosophical justifications of paternalism presume “able-mindedness” – that is, they presume that learners possess the potential to develop capacities of rationality and autonomy considered normal – and normatively superior – for adults. Prioritizing these able-minded norms obscures educationally worthwhile communicative, reasoning, and behavioural capacities that diverge from able-minded norms, but which nevertheless express forms of rational and epistemic agency that are educationally beneficial. The paper argues that able-mindedness therefore constitutes a conceptually impoverished basis for educational paternalism. A number of harmful educational implications of able-minded educational paternalism are explored and a more promising and inclusive avenue for justifying educational paternalism is briefly outlined.
Appendices
Bibliography
- ACLU. (2009). Impairing education: Corporal punishment of students with disabilities in US public schools. https://www.aclu.org/impairing-education-corporal-punishment-students-disabilities-us-public-schools-html.
- American Psychiatric Association. (2017). What is intellectual disability? https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/intellectual-disability/what-is-intellectual-disability.
- Annamma, S. A. (2017). The pedagogy of pathologization: Dis/abled girls of color in the school-prison nexus. Routledge.
- Artiles, A. J. (2011). Toward an interdisciplinary understanding of educational equity and difference: The case of the racialization of ability. Educational Researcher, 40(9), 431–445.
- Ashby, C. (2010). The trouble with normal: The struggle for meaningful access for middle school students with developmental disability labels. Disability and Society, 25(3), 345–358.
- Baglieri, S., Bejoian, L., Broderick, A., Connor, D., & Valle, J. (2011). [Re] claiming “inclusive education” toward cohesion in educational reform: Disability studies unravels the myth of the normal child. Teachers College Record, 113(10), 2,122–2,154.
- Baker, B. (2002). The hunt for disability: The new eugenics and the normalization of school children. Teachers College Record, 104(4), 663–703.
- Ben-Porath, S. R. (2010). Tough choices: Structured paternalism and the landscape of choice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
- Ben-Porath, S. R. (2012). Defending rights in (special) education. Educational Theory, 62(1), 25–39.
- Brighouse, H. (2003). How should children be heard? Arizona Law Review, 45, 691–712.
- Brighouse, H. (2006). On education. Routledge.
- Broderick, A. A., & Leonardo, Z. (2016). What a good boy. DisCrit: Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory in Education, 55–67.
- Carey, A. C. (2009). On the margins of citizenship: Intellectual disability and civil rights in twentieth-century America. Temple University Press.
- Carlson, L. (2009). The faces of intellectual disability: Philosophical reflections. Indiana University Press.
- Cavendish, W., Artiles, A. J., & Harry, B. (2014). Tracking inequality 60 years after Brown: Does policy legitimize the racialization of disability? Multiple Voices for Ethnically Diverse Exceptional Learners, 14(2), 30–40.
- Collins, K. M. (2013). Ability profiling and school failure: One child’s struggle to be seen as competent. Routledge.
- Connor, D. J., Ferri, B. A., & Annamma, S. A. (2016). DisCrit: Disability studies and critical race theory in education. New York: Teachers College Press.
- Connor, D., Cavendish, W., Gonzalez, T., & Jean-Pierre, P. (2019). Is a bridge even possible over troubled waters? The field of special education negates the overrepresentation of minority students: A DisCrit analysis. Race Ethnicity and Education, 22(6), 723–745.
- de Marneffe, P. (2006). Avoiding paternalism. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 34(1), 68–94.
- Donaldson, S., & Kymlicka, W. (2011). Zoopolis: A political theory of animal rights. OUP Oxford.
- Donaldson, S., & Kymlicka, W. (2016). Rethinking membership and participation in an inclusive democracy: Cognitive disability, children, animals. In B. Arneil & N. Hirschmann (Eds.), Disability and political theory (pp. 168–197). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Drerup, J. (2017). What if anything is wrong with paternalism towards children? Philosophical Inquiry in Education, 24(4), 348–367.
- Ferguson, A. (2000). Bad boys. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
- Ferrante, C. A., & Oak, E. (2020). “No sex please!” We have been labelled intellectually disabled. Sex Education, 20(4), 383–397.
- Franklin-Hall, A. (2013). On becoming an adult: Autonomy and the moral relevance of life’s stages. Philosophical Quarterly, 63, 223–247.
- Gill, M. (2015). Already doing it: Intellectual disability and sexual agency. University of Minnesota Press.
- Giesinger, J. (2019). Paternalism and the justification of education. Philosophical Inquiry in Education, 26(1), 49–63.
- Gougeon, N. A. (2009). Sexuality education for students with intellectual disabilities, a critical pedagogical approach: Outing the ignored curriculum. Sex Education, 9(3), 277–291.
- Gutmann, A. (1980). Children, paternalism, and education: A liberal argument. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 9(4), 338–358.
- Hehir, T. (2002). Eliminating ableism in education. Harvard Educational Review, 72(1), 1–33.
- Kafer, A. (2013). Feminist, queer, crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
- Kliewer, C., Biklen, D., & Petersen, A. (2015). At the end of intellectual disability. Harvard Educational Review, 85(1), 1–28.
- Lamboy, L., Taylor, A., & Thompson, W. (2020). Paternalistic aims and (mis)attributions of agency: What the over-punishment of Black girls in US classrooms teaches us about just school discipline. Theory and Research in Education, 18(1), 59–77.
- Mill, J. S. (2002). The basic writings of John Stuart Mill. New York: Modern Library.
- Morris, A. (2021). Court overturns F.D.A. ban on school’s electric shock devices. New York Times.
- Morris, M. (2016). Pushout: The criminalization of Black girls in schools. New Press.
- Petersen, A. J. (2009). Shana’s story: The struggles, quandaries and pitfalls surrounding self-determination. Disability Studies Quarterly, 29(2).
- Rood, C. E., Kanter, A., & Causton, J. (2014). Presumption of incompetence: The systematic assignment of guardianship within the transition process. Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities, 39(4), 319–328.
- Schalk, S. (2018). Bodyminds reimagined: (Dis)ability, race, and gender in Black women’s speculative fiction. Duke University Press.
- Schapiro, T. (1999). What is a child? Ethics, 109(4), 715–738.
- Schouten, G. (2018). Paternalism and education. In K. Grill (Ed.), The routledge handbook of the philosophy of paternalism (336–347). London: Routledge.
- Schrag, F. (1977). The child in the moral order. Philosophy, 52(200), 167–177.
- Shiffrin, S. V. (2000). Paternalism, unconscionability doctrine, and accommodation. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 29(3), 205–250.
- Silvers, A., & Francis, L. P. (2005). Justice through trust: Disability and the “outlier problem” in social contract theory. Ethics, 116(1), 40–76.
- Silvers, A., & Francis, L. P. (2009). Thinking about the good: Reconfiguring liberal metaphysics (or not) for people with cognitive disabilities. Metaphilosophy, 40(3–4), 475–498.
- Simplican, S. C. (2015). The capacity contract: Intellectual disability and the question of citizenship. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Steiner, G. 2013. Animals and the limits of postmodernism. New York: Columbia University Press.
- Taylor, A. (2020). The metaphor of civic threat: Intellectual disability and education for citizenship. In L. Ware (Ed.), Critical readings in interdisciplinary disability studies (pp. 53–67). New York: Springer.
10.7202/1070691ar