Equality of Educational Opportunity

This chapter provides an overview on the contemporary philosophical debate about equality of educational opportunity. It first develops a reconstruction of the major conceptions of equality of educational opportunity that contemporary educational philosophers and theorists have developed to flesh out the idea of educational equality of opportunity. These include, most importantly, liberal egalitarian or fairness based as well as socialist or luck-egalitarian conceptions of equality of educational opportunity. Second, the chapter lays out three influential critiques of equality of educational opportunity: the violation of parental liberty, the leveling down, and the misapplication of responsibility objections. On this basis, third, this chapter discusses alternative conceptions such as democratic educational adequacy or education as the development of social freedom that are meant to either complement or substitute equality of educational opportunity.