As a social pedagogue, my inadequate efforts to help poor undocumented migrants in Norway only touches a few individuals. I can offer a bed here, a meal there, and pay for some dental treatment. I am well paid, so this is no sacrifice. On the contrary, it is a privilege to help those who have least, even when I offer so little and Iive so comfortably. How can we make John Rawls´s Original Position, in which social justice is embedded in social structure, a reality? Yes, I am an unapologetic idealist, but I know that moral politics is a realistic goal.
If there is a social structure, this is the cause of unchange structural injustice.
This is from wikipedia:
Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Portuguese: Pedagogia do Oprimido), written by educator Paulo Freire, proposes a pedagogy with a new relationship between teacher, student, and society. It was first published in Portuguese in 1968, and was translated by Myra Ramos into English and published in 1970.[1] The book is considered one of the foundational texts of critical pedagogy.
Dedicated to what is called "the oppressed" and based on his own experience helping Brazilian adults to read and write, Freire includes a detailed Marxist class analysis in his exploration of the relationship between what he calls "the colonizer" and "the colonized".
In the book Freire calls traditional pedagogy the "banking model" because it treats the student as an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge, like a piggy bank. However, he argues for pedagogy to treat the learner as a co-creator of knowledge.
The book has sold over 750,000 copies worldwide.[2]
This book might help you in your great task!
Many thanks Oscar. I attended a seminar that Paolo gave in Stockholm back in the 1970s.
Best wishes Paul
Brilliant!
I have always found John Rawls´s A thoery of justice in which the Original Position appears in, to be unsatisfactory. This because he states that unequaility can be warrented if those in the lower positions are not worse of, or might even benefit from an unfair system. (sorry for not providing the exact quote). To me, this is the social liberal defense for a capitalist system (and other systems) that actually create inequality.
Thank you Oscar. We must continue our conversation. . I accept that Rawls might, in some respects, show social liberal inclinations. But if we look at the bigger metaphor, in this case, The Original Position, I can see a strong egalitarian potential. I say potential because the term can be misused by the neo-liberal right. When I teach my Master students, some on a Norwegian Master course, others on a Mundus EU Master course, I give them a little thought exercise, and it is this.
Imagine you wake up on a beautiful South Pacific beach. You look around and you see four other people whom you have never met. Like you, they are young and healthy in all regards. All of you have collective amnesia, so you cannot recall anything about your past. This is an unexpected fresh start.
There are five beautiful beach villas on the beach, all 100 meters apart. Each villa has an abundance of fresh running water and fresh fruit and vegetables. How would the five of you decide on how to divide these assets?
Finally, my reading of Rawl´s seminal book on justice is that he strongly, even if implicitly, is talking about social justice, not the legal kind.
Best wishes Paul
Your example is a great example that may appeal to many young students but it has no horrors or grievences?!
You are of course aware of the critique against all forms of Original Positions. Just like Rawls, it often results in a discussion of ego-centric, risk-aversion and rationalistic individuals, freed from all types of context and history, discourse and social institutions. In that sense, it may be a useful thought experiment of how one ought to think and construct a better/fair/just world.
Do you have any good examples/articles of applications/policies that utlize any version of the Orgininal Position? I would really like to read any of those!
best regards
Oscar, the only source where I recall referring to Rawls is in my book, Social Pedagogy: Heart and Head. It was published in 2013 by a German publisher, with a name that I have forgotten. They have offices in Bremen and Oxford. I will send you a contact person´s email details and you can ask her for a free inspection copy. Tell here that I recommended that you do this. Will send the details later. Best Paul
PS In the meantime, you can get free access on my RG publication pages to some of my articles on social pedagogy. Sometimes I refer to Rawls, but being an absent minded professor, I do not recall which specific articles. Have a look at my chapter on street social pedagogy. In some ways it connects with aspects of your very interesting doctoral thesis. I have in mind, the survival - I repeat survival - of the Romanian poor in Norway. The Norwegian government has failed them totally, so networking is the only choice.
Hello Oscar. Please contact Sylvia Noll [[email protected]], and say Paul would much appreciate it if she sent you a complimentary copy of the book: Paul Stephens (2013) Social Pedagogy: Heart and Head.
I know that the Original Position sounds "pie in the sky". Notwithstanding and indeed acknowledging its artificiality, I think it can help us to understand a primordial notion of social justice, uncluttered by the familiar "reality check", namely:
Get real buddy and face up to fact that an imagined ethical Original Position is intellectually lazy because it fails to take account of deeply embedded inequalities.
My rejoinder is that sometimes we have to, like John Lennon, imagine a better world, and strive to add to the sum of light on the long journey. Martin Luther King Jnr and Nelson Mandela, and Paolo Freire had their respective dreams and were able to mobilise huge and effective efforts that culminated in some big victories. If I were to treat the Original Position as an empirically real state, that would be naive. But I do not. In my experience in many settings, including the lecture hall, this ideal type (not just the Weberian notion of a conceptual model, but also the ideal of something different and better) generates a great deal of debate and, in almost every case, the arousing of that optimistic protest, "Well why not?"
The Original Position does not ignore the fact hat the real world is entrenched in longstanding injustices and hard-to-shift inequities. But it invites moral objection and reflection on ethical alternatives.
All best wishes and many thanks for your very stimulating objections, never cynical, but always genuinely challenging.
Paul
Paul, I think you are doing wonderful work within migration studies. The recent unfortunate and sad events in the US point to a call, if not a cry, for not only structural changes to what people of a certain type perceive as decades-old injustice, but also hopefully a more systemic change. This is commendable work.
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