Liberal Perspectives on Inclusion

Providing a theoretical underpinning for the idea of inclusion within educa-

tion, this book recognizes the fundamental role political values play in our
understanding of inclusion in the classroom, providing a philosophical lens
on the inherent tensions that exist within sociological perspectives on social
justice, equity and diversity.
Chapters address value tensions from the perspective of classical liber-
alism and the extent to which this can be reconciled with values pluralism
and Berlin’s notions of negative and positive liberty. The book argues for a
re-​framing of inclusion as a process of negotiation between teachers, parents,
children and young people which involves a recognition of the complex trade-​
offs involved in working with difference in the classroom. These tensions are
explored through a series of case studies of real-​world dilemmas in the class-
room, ultimately serving to highlight the ways in which varying political value
positions, including liberalism, are inescapably embedded within the practice
in education.
Considering topics such as decolonization of the curriculum, freedom
of speech and social justice, this seminal volume will be highly relevant for
researchers, scholars and postgraduate students in the fields of inclusive edu-
cation, special educational needs, philosophy of education, social justice and
education and critical theory.

Joseph Mintz is Associate Professor in Education, Faculty of Education and

Society (IOE), University College London, UK.
Routledge Research in Special Educational Needs

This series provides a forum for established and emerging scholars to dis-
cuss the latest debates, research and practice in the evolving field of Special
Educational Needs.

Books in the series include:

Policy, Provision and Practice for Special Educational Needs and

Disability
Perspectives across countries
Edited by Peter Wood

Technology Use by Adults with Learning Disabilities

Past, Present and Future Design and Support Practices
Jane Seale

International Issues in SEND and Inclusion

Perspectives Across Six Continents
Edited by Alan Hodkinson and Zeta Williams-​Brown

Building Community to Create Equitable, Inclusive and Compassionate

Schools through Relational Approaches
Joan G Mowat

Liberal Perspectives on Inclusion

Enlightenment Values and Debates on Equity and Democracy in the
Classroom
Joseph Mintz

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routle​dge.com/​Routle​dge-​Resea​rch-​in-​

Spec​ial-​Educ​atio​nal-​Needs/​book-​ser​ies/​RRSEN
Liberal Perspectives on
Inclusion
Enlightenment Values and Debates on
Equity and Democracy in the Classroom

Joseph Mintz
First published 2025
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2025 Joseph Mintz
The right of Joseph Mintz to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​27996-​1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​27995-​4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​29489-​4 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/​9781003294894
Typeset in Galliard
by Newgen Publishing UK
This book is dedicated to my parents, Professor Barrie Mintz
and my late mother Mrs Jennifer Mintz (may her memory be
a blessing).

The links in the chain that taught me all I know.

newgenprepdf

Contents

Introduction 1

1 What Is Wrong with Inclusion Today 5

2 Value Pluralism and Liberalism 22

3 Knowledge and Liberal Perspectives on Inclusion 59

4 Implications for Education and Inclusion in the Classroom 74

5 Wider Aspects of Education and Inclusion 90

6 Inclusion and Higher Education 109

7 Conclusions 125

Index 137
Introduction

I myself am pursuing the same instinctive course as the veriest human animal you
can think of…staring at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness –​without
knowing the bearing of any one assertion, of any one opinion…
John Keats, Letters, 1819

In 2020 the BBC released the television short film Education as part of the
Small Axe series directed by Steve McQueen, a Londoner of West Indian
heritage.1 The series focused on various aspects of the experience of the
West Indian community in London from the 1960s through to the 1980s
and Education tells the story of a 12-​year-​old boy Kingsley who is sent to
an ESN (“Educationally Subnormal”) special school in the mid-​1970s. The
film portrays the cultural racism inherent in English society and the educa-
tion system, and the ways in which the label of ESN was applied particularly
to black boys. Kingsley is clearly very bright, but perhaps has some specific
learning difficulties with reading, although this is not explicitly made clear
in the film. The head teacher at his mainstream school uses IQ results to
“objectively” justify the need for Kingsley to be transferred to special educa-
tion. The ESN school he is sent to has very low expectations of its students
and sub-​standard teaching. The message conveyed is that of special education
at the time as essentially serving as a means to hide away and not very much
bother about a group of people not much valued by society. However, the film
goes on to show how, through local community action, Kingsley’s family are
empowered to fight back against the system, at the same time as reclaiming
an understanding of the richness of African history and culture.2 It is fiction,
but it is nevertheless based on clear evidence about what happened to immi-
grant black children in that period in England.3,4 Although the picture is more
complex than in the 1970s, fairly recent research has shown that in England,
children identified as Black Caribbean and Mixed White and Black Caribbean
are twice as likely to be identified with Social, Emotional and Mental Health
needs as White British pupils.5 Research in the US has shown similar disparities
continue to the present day.6

DOI: 10.4324/9781003294894-1
2 Introduction

The need for the international movement for inclusion in education is

demonstrated by the historical narrative so powerfully portrayed for us in
Steve McQueen’s film. The ongoing racial and cultural disparities in the label-
ling of children with the categories of special educational needs similarly shows
the need for the moral imperative which is at the heart of this movement.
This movement is closely entwined with academic enquiry into difference
and oppression, in a variety of fields, although its roots are most importantly
in disability studies.7,8 The sociological critique of difference at the centre of
this academic enquiry is predicated on uncovering the cultural and historical
processes that may be at play in how difference is addressed in society, particu-
larly in terms of how structures, processes and knowledge are applied differ-
entially to particular groups. In this book, my intention is to explore what we
can learn from other perspectives, particularly that of classical liberalism, when
considering the important questions raised by this critique.
In its activist form, the critique involves a key premise, shared in fact with
classical liberalism, at least in its stated aims: that everyone, no matter what
their inescapable characteristics, is entitled to equality of opportunity. There
may be differences in terms of how that might be achieved, and the extent to
which equality of outcome is seen as desirable, but the sociological critique
shares with liberalism a notion that everyone has the same essential value as a
human being.
The sociological critique of difference, and the activists who have taken
it up, often coalesce around a range of political perspectives on difference
more widely in left politics.9 My aim in this book is not to sharply differen­
tiate between left and right politics as a primary marker for debates, mainly
because I don’t tend to find such labels as particularly useful in this context.
Communitarian perspectives on liberalism, for example, do not fit neatly into a
left/​right split. Nevertheless, in the UK and US in particular, and I am writing
in England, the disability and inclusion activism which I identify in this book,
primarily drawn from Foucault and others’ deconstruction of the human
sciences, and applied in education spaces to the issues of inclusion, tends to
be allied with a range of other positions commonly adopted on the left of
politics. These include ideas from Marxism, postcolonial theory and critical
theory. I will consider them and their intercalation with education and inclu-
sion, in a more rigorous manner, later in the book. For now, though, I want to
note the impact of the events of October 7th. For many, many Jewish people
and writers such as myself, the Hamas terrorist atrocities, and perhaps more
importantly, the reaction to them particularly in the university and schools
sector in the UK and US and internationally, have been seismic. Wilfred Bion,
the seminal Kleinian psychoanalyst and thinker of the late 20th century, writes,
following Freud, about the caesura of birth10 –​the in a sense unknowable rup­
ture, both awful and creative, that occurs when a child suddenly moves from
the safety of the womb to the cold hard reality of the world. This caesura,
rooted in violence and the new, is in Bion’s view foundational for identity and
contains within it the seeds of thought, of the ability for the child to engage
 Introduction 3

in the very act of thinking. For many people, particularly those whether nom-
inally on the right or the left, who feel a commitment to the ideals of a liberal
democratic state, October 7th and its aftermath was such a caesura. In par-
ticular, the realization, which was perhaps too long in coming, that much of
left politics truly excluded Jews from its preoccupations, inevitably raised the
question of what was in fact the basis for those preoccupations. Just as Western
communists could not escape questioning the basis of Marxism in the wake of
Stalin’s atrocities, so today we similarly have to ask what values and frameworks
underpin the political agenda of the left, and are these ones that we can share
in? Inescapably, this also involves probing what values underlie the activism
of those adopting a sociological critique of education and inclusion, and are
those values that we can all share? As an orthodox Jewish writer on inclusion,
I cannot but contend that this is a crucial, inescapable question for education
and inclusion.
Answering such questions involves grappling with the challenge and diffi-
culty of uncertainty. This is something Bion was not afraid of and in this he
followed in the footsteps of Keats. As Keats illuminates for us in the quote
from his letters at the start of the book, uncertainty can have a terrifying
quality. This is not though, a reason to turn away from the fray.
In this book I refer to education and inclusion, as opposed to inclusive edu-
cation, or inclusive pedagogy. This is because I feel that these terms come with
an unwarranted unity, i.e. that they suggest a settled and uncomplicated pos-
ition on what they mean. My aim with this book is to illuminate and explore
how complicated and importantly unsettled inclusion is as a term. Specifically,
I explore the values and political value systems that underpin the ways in which
difference is conceived broadly, consider how these values are often in tension
with each other, and then consider the implications of that tension for edu-
cation, with a particular focus on the classroom and the class teacher. Thus,
I aim to provide further theoretical underpinnings for the concept of inclusion
through an examination of tensions inherent within current approaches to it.
In particular, I use the lens of value pluralism11 to interrogate such tensions.
I explore the implications of a range of political value systems, including clas-
sical liberalism, much neglected in debates in the field. Drawing on Berlin’s
idea of negative liberty, I explore the extent to which sociological perspectives
on inclusion, which might be considered as having resonance with Berlin’s
notion of positive liberty, have drawn on hegemonizing conceptualizations
of inclusion rooted in social justice perspectives. Through identifying and
exploring the tensions such approaches have tended to ignore, and identi-
fying the different value positions entailed, I consider the extent to which such
tensions can or cannot be resolved in the classroom.
This does not make the book an argument for a liberal approach to educa-
tion or to inclusion, but rather its aim is to highlight the ways in which varying
political value positions, including liberalism, are inescapably embedded
within practice in education. This I believe then serves to open up a space for
a debate on the ensuing complexity, which I argue is more useful than current
4 Introduction

approaches, particularly in terms of helping teachers to deal with difference in

the classroom.

References
1. Education review: how we taught Black boys to fail. BFI. Accessed February
21, 2024. www.bfi.org.uk/​sight-​and-​sound/​revi​ews/​educat​ion-​steve-​mcqu​een-​
small-​axe-​brit​ish-​sch​ool-​instit​utio​nal-​rac​ism
2. Bebbington C. Reflection on Steve McQueen’s ‘Small Axe: Education’ Film. Allfie.
Published December 21, 2020. Accessed February 21, 2024. www.all​fie.org.uk/​
news/​blog/​ref​l ect​ion-​on-​steve-​mcque​ens-​small-​axe-​educat​ion-​film/​
3. Coard B. How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Subnormal in the
British School System: The Scandal of the Black Child in Schools in Britain. New
Beacon Books, Ltd; 1971.
4. Wallace D, Joseph-​Salisbury R. How, still, is the Black Caribbean child made
educationally subnormal in the English school system? Ethn Racial Stud.
2022;45(8):1426–​1452. doi:10.1080/​01419870.2021.1981969
5. Strand S, Lindorff A. Ethnic Disproportionality in the Identification of Special
Educational Needs (SEN) in England: Extent, Causes and Consequences (Report
on DfE/​ESRC Funded Study). University of Oxford Accessed February 4, 2024.
https://​ora.ox.ac.uk/​obje​cts/​uuid:a28b7​858-​994a-​4474-​9c4b-​6962d​1f6d​a41/​
files/​maea51​f1ea​29cd​e0e3​6c13​a9e2​a9dd​838
6. Department for Education. 2020 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act
Annual Report to Congress; 2020. Accessed February 21, 2024. https://​sites.
ed.gov/​idea/​2020-​ann​ual-​rep​ort-​congr​ess-​idea/​
7. Finklestein V. Attitudes and Disabled People: Issues for Discussion. World
Rehabilitation Fund, Inc; 1980.
8. Oliver M. The Politics of Disablement. Palgrave Macmillan; 1990.
9. Barton L. Disability, Politics and the Struggle for Change. Routledge; 2013.
10. Bion WR. Two Papers: ‘The Grid’ and ‘Caesura’. Routledge; 1977.
11. Berlin I. Two Concepts of Liberty. Clarendon Press; 1958.
1 What Is Wrong with
Inclusion Today

Special Educational Needs and Its History

How to conceive of and make sense of differences from what is perceived as
the norm, or the typical, is not a new question. Foucault1 suggests that in
the West prior to industrialization, people who nowadays would be identified
as having mental illness, and perhaps also some of those who would also be
identified today as coming into the categorization of special educational needs
(SEN), were regarded not as something apart from society, but more as an
integrated element that also had some special truth on knowledge or ideas that
were hidden from others. Whether this may be an overly idealized view of the
past, such an analysis at least indicates the possibility and indeed likelihood of
changing perspectives on difference over time. In the 21st century, in liberal
democratic societies, and indeed also more widely across countries with a wide
variety of other political systems, there has been for over 30 years an increasing
consensus of how, at least in an idealized sense, disability, special educational
needs and difference more widely should be conceptualized, and addressed in
both national policy and local practice. Of course, in many non-​democratic
countries, on some aspects of difference such as for example in relation to
ethnic minorities, there is considerable divergence from liberal democracies
on policy, notwithstanding some far from inconsequential diversity of views
within such democracies themselves. Nevertheless, the ratification by many
countries of the Salamanca Statement,2 as well as the UN Convention on the
Rights of People with Disabilities,3 has led to significant policy developments
across the world, broadly conceived as a move towards inclusion, which have
at least aimed to implement the perceived corollaries of these international
agreements in terms of local policy enactment. As such, there is a real sense in
which inclusion has gained almost world-​wide acceptance, as a working con-
cept, for how societies can conceive of and operationalize policy in relation to
difference, particularly in relation to special educational needs.
Others have outlined in helpful detail the development of thinking on
special educational needs through the medical model, the social model and
attempts to resolve the two perspectives in biopsychosocial models,4–​6 and
economic approaches such as capability theory.7,8 I will not go over that
DOI: 10.4324/9781003294894-2
6 What Is Wrong with Inclusion Today

well-​trodden ground in significant depth here. Following Barton, I have pre-

viously positioned this debate in terms of ontological splits between positions
on both knowledge and conceptualization of special educational needs.9 The
psychological position,4 perhaps best considered as a realist perspective on
knowledge, is reflected in clinical and cognitive psychology, and psychiatry,
and gives rise to the conceptualization of special educational needs as categor-
ical diagnosis, and the insertion of these categories into the educational space.
The sociological position,4 rather, sees difference not as deriving from a fixed
quality inherent within individuals, but as something discursive that arises from
the way that particular features of an individual are interpreted, and indeed the
way that knowledge about such features arises, within the human sciences,
and intercalates with power relations that are expressed within societal rules
and norms. The social model /​sociological critique of a psychological view
of difference is a trajectory of theory, activism and policy development, arising
first in the field of disability studies,10 and then being picked up in terms of
difference more widely, leading ultimately to the agenda for inclusion, inter-
nationally, within the field of education.
The term inclusion in the field of education, as others such as Hegarty,11
Reindal12 and Norwich13 have noted, can be critiqued as being lacking in spe­­
cificity or even content. This is illustrated, in my view, by the endless debates
on defining inclusion.14,15 As Norwich notes,16 concepts which take on a total­­­
izing quality, as many think inclusion has, end up losing meaning, or at least a
specific and thus useful meaning. I have in a linked critique9 noted that some
inclusion theorists such as Florian in 201217 have come up with definitions of
inclusion which can be interpreted as identifying inclusive practice with gen-
eral educational practice –​thus inclusive pedagogy becomes undifferentiated
from general notions of pedagogy. We also end up with statements, occasion-
ally seen in the academic and practice-​based literature on inclusion18,19 to the
effect that good teaching for children with special educational needs is good
teaching for all, which is another way of saying that general and inclusive
pedagogy are undifferentiated. However, it’s unclear how an undifferentiated
concept can truly be of use to educators or policy makers in making the actual
decisions which they are faced with. I contend in this book that inclusion
does signify something specific, in that it serves to identify sites of tension
and debate. Such a signification is, though, potentially of considerable use
within the field. However, what is needed is a clearer understanding of the
concepts that underlie the tension and debate, as, I argue, it is through such
an understanding that we make effective use of the term.

Tracing the Sociological Critique and the Gaps It Leaves

The sociological critique in disability studies owes a significant debt to
Foucault’s analysis –​Foucault’s analysis of power and knowledge20 and through
it the identification of modes of power, subjectification and resistance, which
have formed a key part of the underlying impetus of the social model, when
 What Is Wrong with Inclusion Today 7

applied to gaze of the human sciences falling on the disabled body and indi-
vidual, and then by extension the child with special educational needs. As
Olssen21 notes, Foucault and indeed other deconstructive thinkers, particu­
larly Derrida, use such models to play with how we might interpret the actions
of social actors, shying away from actual prescriptions about the real-​world
policy implications of their work. This, as Ball22 identified, derives at least from
some extent from their recognition of the relativism of their position in that if
social practices and rules are inescapably historically and culturally constructed,
then it’s not immediately clear what the basis is for privileging one model or
approach over another. Indeed, one of the key critiques that Foucault makes of
Marxism is that it fails to recognize its positioning as an Enlightenment mode
of thinking tied to the conditions of the late 20th century.21 Foucault is also
critical of Marxism for its underlying rationalist focus on human agency. We
can perhaps extend this criticism to Soviet psychology and cultural-​historical
theory. For Foucault, a key element of his thought is the deconstruction of the
pre-​social autonomous human agent –​regarding the subject as both arising
from the social field, and not having an existence that can meaningfully be
considered as separate from the social field. It is of course this insight that,
perhaps sometimes too simplistically, underlies the critique made in the social
model –​that to regard the individual as having internal (and thus autonomous)
qualities that exist separately from the social field, is untenable. Linked to this,
Foucault’s positioning of power and knowledge as mutually constitutive, and
at play in all social fields, similarly suggests that it is through discovering their
particular applications now and in the past (i.e. “archaeology”), for disability
theorists at least, that patterns of oppression instantiated through the operation
of the human sciences could be uncovered and remedied. As noted though, the
extent to which Foucault himself argued for an activist position, i.e. to make
recommendations for social change based on his philosophy and analysis, is
somewhat unclear.22 Olssen21 suggests that Foucault may have considered his
approach suited to bringing about change in a local rather than global way,
whereby local patterns of power, subjectification and resistance can be explored
and revealed thus allowing the actors in the social field to at least understand
experiences more clearly, or change them to bring about, in local contexts the
equalization of power relations. Thus, Foucault, answering the question, “what
replaces the system?”, responds:

I think that to imagine another system is to extend our participation in the

present system … I would rather oppose actual experiences, than the possi-
bility of a utopia. 23(p.230)

Thus, it seems that Foucault, in terms of the possibility for change, could
be seen as setting out a non-​ idealist perspective, i.e. one that recognizes
the impossibility of idealism. However, it’s fair to say that the translation of
Foucault’s ideas into the sociological critique of the medical model in dis-
ability studies and the field of special educational needs, has been much more
8 What Is Wrong with Inclusion Today

sanguine in calling for both local and global change.24–​26 It’s hard not to see
the supranational movement around inclusion in educational settings as indeed
pointing towards some sort of utopia. However, as Berlin notes,27 utopian
movements carry a risk of a form of oppression themselves, particularly if their
underlying rationales remain unclear. The more salient point for the argument
I am making here is that in this move to activism, and the specific content of
what precisely we might draw from sociological critiques, as translated into a
“movement” for inclusion, is unclear.
At the same time, in material reality, of course, no one can doubt the
importance and force of this movement. There is, for example, near universal
acceptance that, in terms of special educational needs, nobody wants to go
back to the situation in many countries in the 1940s, 1950s and later, where
some children were regarded as “educationally subnormal”, and consigned in
some cases to bleak specialist provision where they were both conveniently out
of sight and out of mind, and where no real thought was given to their poten-
tial, their agency or their needs. There is, as Nussbaum28 might put it, a broad
agreement on the “conception of the good”, in terms of thinking about diffe-
rence in educational contexts. However, this wide acceptance has masked con-
siderable complexity and tension.11 The term inclusion, widely accepted as such
a conception of the good, lacks conceptual clarity and specificity. It is true that
approaches such as the biopsychosocial model have attempted to overcome
the unresolved tensions between sociological and psychological perspectives
on difference, particularly by recognizing the bodily reality of impairment.29–​
31
I would posit that the actuality is that despite these efforts, the tensions
remain unresolved. The evidence for such lack of resolution is all around us.
Anyone who has attended an academic conference in the field of education
or examined the papers published in many leading education journals will
have seen the presentation of papers and research, which whilst no doubt not
decrying the broad conception of the good of inclusion, come from radically
different epistemological positions on how to conceive of difference. In parallel,
despite the warm sounding preambles of international agreements and local
legislation, following the trajectory of policy development post Salamanca, the
phrase “reasonable adjustments” or “reasonable accommodations” invariably
appears in the text.3,32 One does not need to consider in depth the political
debates, primarily led by communal and activist groups, about the problematic
nature of this language,33,34 to understand that the word reasonable reflects
a significant site of unresolved tension. Some of this tension, in fact a cru-
cial element of it, arises, I propose, from the idealist underpinnings of the
inclusion movement. Sociological perspectives on difference, whether deriving
from discursive sociological approaches such as Foucault or Derrida (at least
in their activist forms), or from Marxist perspectives, tend, as Berlin35 pointed
out, to have an idealist underpinning, in that they at least create the impres-
sion that a final undisputed resolution to the question of how to deal with
social issues, including the issue difference, is possible to achieve. It is this
that has led us, in contemporary debates on inclusion in education, to naively
 What Is Wrong with Inclusion Today 9

consider that there are simplistic solutions to the complexity of dealing with
difference in the classroom. If only we can make sure that teachers have the
correct attitudes and beliefs,9 if only we can get schools to adopt the right
leadership models, if only we can get the correct mix of placement decisions
and parental choice, if only we can have some more funding, then we can
achieve truly inclusive schools, and a truly inclusive educational system.36 It is
not, of course, that we should not debate these matters, nor that they are not
of crucial importance in the lives of children with special educational needs,
their families and their communities. Indeed, they are of crucial importance
to school leaders and teachers, particularly those teachers at the “chalk face”,
who are at the locus where tensions in policy get played out. However, the
point I am making is that the conceptual emptiness of the term inclusion, the
lack of definition of what it might actually mean, prevents us from properly
engaging in this debate. Conceptual terms which lack proper definition and
derive from critically undertheorized idealism have a tendency to undergo a
sort of mission creep. In respect of the term inclusion in the education space,
this means that inclusion has at times been considered as equivalent to, or to
encompass, concepts such as equity, democracy, diversity and so on.37 Yet too
often this happens by a sort of sleight of hand, whereby this conceptual elision
is just accepted as unproblematic. However, it is not at all unproblematic, as
it deprives us of the very critical conceptual tools that we need to make sense
of the sites of tension, and the resulting debates about what actually we can
do, and the limits of what we can do, in terms of working with difference in
educational settings. I will return to some of the ways in which this happens in
more depth in the next chapter.
One consequence of this conceptual elision in current debates on inclusion
is that, in a sense, only one side of the argument is being properly considered.
There are plenty of accounts of education and inclusion from the perspective
of the sociological critique6,38,39 and from a sociocultural perspective.40–​42 Yet
there has been, in my view largely due to the underlying idealizing tendency
in how the term inclusion has been conceived of and deployed, a lack of con-
sideration of other perspectives, which implicitly adheres to critique of psy-
chological perspectives. Specifically, classical liberal, neoliberal, communitarian
and indeed neo-​conservative perspectives on underlying concepts including
the purposes of education, the positioning of agency and autonomy in society,
and political perspectives on the responsibilities or not of the state to individ-
uals and families, and the resultant implications of such concepts for notions of
inclusion in the educational field, are to a significant extent underplayed in the
literature. This means that the relevance and implications of the value priorities
of these perspectives, which cannot be ignored given their penetration into the
real world, are largely absent from the debate. Now I should note that arguing
for a full consideration of perspectives is not the same as arguing that the
missing perspectives are, in some sense, correct or the right ones. It is rather
to argue that the conceptual elision of the term inclusion, in masking over the
different perspectives that can be taken, renders the debates that do take place
10 What Is Wrong with Inclusion Today

in a sense ineffective. Thus, my aim in introducing them is to achieve a fuller

account, which will better inform the ways in which we can effectively discuss
and come to necessary decisions in educational policy formation and educa-
tional practice.

Tensions and Dilemmas

It is not of course that tensions between sociological and psychological
perspectives on difference have not been considered. However, I contend that
this has usually been at the level of process, rather than from the perspec-
tive of differing value systems. Commonly, use has been made of the concept
of “Dilemma of Difference”, which arises from the field of legal studies, as
formulated by Minow.43 Minow notes that categorization and labelling (typic­
ally inherently psychological) can form useful purposes but at the same time,
mirroring a discursive sociological perspective, the very act of labelling brings
with it the risk or the inevitability of stigmatization. Florian et al.44 trace out in
detail how this applies in respect of special educational needs (SEN) in schools,
and Norwich13 illuminates where particular forms of the dilemma arise and
translate into tensions for practice. I summarize below this approach and then
go on to consider its limitations.

Identification/​Resource-​Stigma

Norwich considers that these include primarily identification, i.e. the act of
applying the categorization and label to the child. In the dilemma of diffe-
rence framework, identification (or as Norwich puts it the resource-​stigma
dilemma) is considered as providing a gateway for the allocation of resources
and required provision, but at the same time carries with it the stigma of the
label. In relation to provision, Daniels45 has questioned whether in educational
settings this is meaningful, pointing out the frequent lack of connection, in his
view, between traditional diagnostic categories and educational strategies. In
respect of stigma, there is also the linked issue of teacher expectations and of
fixed notions of ability.46,47 In other words, the teacher, and indeed the wider
community of school adults, can translate a diagnostic label, or even a fuzzy
label such as special educational needs itself, or terms just used to denote that
children need a bit more help, such as the use of “SEN Support” as a category
in England mainstream schools, into a perception of individual children as
inherently lacking potential, and not just lacking potential now, but in a fixed
way throughout their school careers and beyond.48

Placement

A related site of tension in relation to the dilemma of difference identified by

Norwich is that of placement. Placing students in specialized provision such
as special schools can potentially allow them to access provision which is more
 What Is Wrong with Inclusion Today 11

tailored to their needs, in terms of curriculum, pedagogy and resources such

as augmented communication.13 Teachers in specialist provision may also have
more specific training and/​or experience which can mean that they are better
able to meet the individual needs of children with special educational needs.
On the other hand, specialist provision means separation or exclusion from
the mainstream “community” of their peers, both physically and socially. This
separation can be considered in itself as a form of stigmatization, with poten-
tially a significant impact on children’s self-​concept. Almost inevitably, the cur-
riculum in specialist settings will be a restricted adaptation of that which is
available in mainstream settings. This, linked to the danger of reduced teacher
expectations and notions of fixed ability, can mean that children with special
educational needs in specialist settings may not fully meet their academic and
social potential. This debate about mainstreaming has of course been one of
the most perennial points of contention in international and national policy on
special educational needs in recent decades.49,50 It also touches on other extant
debates in wider educational policy, particularly that of parental school choice.
There are also “downstream” linked debates about placement in mainstream
settings. These debates include (a) the extent to which children should be
placed into ability groupings either in primary or secondary schools,51 (b) how
teaching assistants should be deployed in classrooms, particularly when assigned
to or working with children with special educational needs52 and (c) the use of
withdrawal whereby children with special educational needs are taken out of
class for periods of time for specialized support or instruction (often by teaching
assistants)53 or via placement in specialist units attached to mainstream schools
which may involve periods of time in both the unit and mainstream classes.54

Curriculum

Curriculum is also identified as a site of tension in relation to the dilemma

of difference.13 There is considerable overlap with the tensions identified
with respect to identification and placement. Particularly in terms of whether
tailoring the curriculum to meet individual needs runs the risk of stigmatiza-
tion, separation and reduced expectations. This is clearly bound up with the
issue of placement, in terms of special versus mainstream, as well as in relation
to ability grouping and withdrawal. There are also wider issues of the national
and local scoping of curriculum aims and content, linked to considerations of
the aims of education. Theorists (and activists) have argued that a curriculum
which is conceived of in relation to tightly specified measures of academic
achievement, and aligned with the requirements of similarly tightly specified
public examinations, reflects a limited or impoverished aim for education.55,56
This impoverishment includes the valuing of particular forms of knowledge,
or overly favouring knowledge in terms of skills, leading to a restricted idea of
ability,9 which inevitably reduces the potential for achievement of some chil­
dren, usually those children who are, in a circular fashion, those identified as
having special educational needs.
12 What Is Wrong with Inclusion Today

There have been some attempts particularly to overcome some of the

tension in respect of curriculum via the adoption of “universal” teaching
approaches, which focus on the individual needs of all children. For example,
Universal Design for Learning (UDL)57,58 has now quite a long history in the
US, in particular, and proposes that by flexibly assessing and responding to
the individual needs of all children, issues of stigma and reduced expectations
can be overcome. Norwich,37 whilst somewhat doubtful that UDL has quite
achieved this in practice, also broadly suggests that it is possible to overcome
the dilemma of difference, in respect of at least some of its sites of tension,
by ensuring that teachers are both aware of and actively manage the risks of
identification, at the same time as taking account of the individual needs of
learners.

Dilemmas and Values

The dilemma of difference is in my view a useful heuristic tool in terms of
setting out a framework for both categorizing different aspects of sites of
tension in attempts at inclusion. Some attempts have been made to make
connections to value tensions, and particularly Norwich has laid the ground-
work for considering dilemmas in relation to Berlin’s ideas on value commen-
surability.16 This is a theme which I develop considerably further in this book,
and I argue that issues of tension in inclusion need to be examined at the level
of political values, rather than the legal level of process which is the focus of
the dilemma of difference. To clarify, by political values what I mean is the
consideration of values within wider positions on the political organization
of society and public services, not of course in the sense of everyday party
politics.
If we take a short, fictional but illustrative example of what happens in
classrooms, this will help illuminate this point. Imagine a six-​year-​old girl
who her parents see as bright and articulate, and very interested in things
like dolls, and Disney franchises like Frozen, and who can recite off by heart
the latest pop songs. However, she struggles with decoding and reading and
is not making age-​appropriate progress. There are 30 other children in the
class, some also who are struggling with different aspects of the curriculum.
There is also a teaching assistant who is with the class some of the time. The
school is also dealing with the aftermath of the COVID pandemic and the
impact of missed schooling on a number of children. The school staff perceive
the school as inclusive and the school uses a graduated approach to identi-
fying and responding to needs. So taking this fictional scenario, the following
questions might arise: How should the teaching assistant be deployed? What
curriculum should be adopted in the class? How should we define its aims?
Should it be modified for our putative subject alone, or for her and some of
her classmates, or for the class or indeed the school as a whole? How much
responsibility should devolve on the class teacher for the progress of this indi-
vidual child? Are claims that the teacher or other teachers in the school, or
 What Is Wrong with Inclusion Today 13

the school leadership corporately, might make about the issue of resourcing
valid? What if the teacher feels overwhelmed by the complexity of the task of
meeting all these needs –​how should that be regarded?
These are questions primarily of resource allocation, including importantly
the allocation of a key limiting resource –​that of the teachers. Political values
are the level at which such issues, i.e. dilemmas of and choices about resource
allocation, occur. We can attempt some mapping between the legal and pol-
itical value level to exemplify this. Thus, the identification dilemma could be
mapped to a site of tension between the value of participation or belonging
versus a value of equality of opportunity. Such a tension could operate in mul-
tiple ways. For example, the stigma attached to identification could reduce
participation or belonging, yet labelling could allow for targeting of needs
leading to more equal participation in learning. Alternatively, the identifica-
tion dilemma could be considered a site of tension for the value of liberty (i.e.
the free opportunity to maximize one’s individual potential) versus the value
of equality of outcome in that identification implies preferential resource allo-
cation or changes to the classroom to meet the needs of individual children
which may not always be optimal for other children. Liberty versus equality of
outcome as a site of tension can also be considered to apply in the placement
and curriculum dilemmas. Placement in mainstream might imply differential
resource allocation to meet individual needs and specific curriculum adap-
tation which implies tension between meeting the needs of the individual
(equality of outcome) and the needs of the wider group of children in the
school (liberty). The dilemma of difference, as a legal and thus process level
analysis, tends, I argue, to mask these value-​based tensions, which operate
at a wider political value level. Its application in the field may also mask the
resource restraints which underpin sites of tension. Mapping the dilemma to
value tensions shows how the dilemma is usually about how to allocate scarce
resources, i.e. how much scarce resource could be allocated to meet the needs
of an individual child as opposed to meeting the needs of the whole class.
A focus on value tensions I contend has more potential to illuminate the actual
sites of tension, particularly in regard to limited resources. Thus, the dilemma
of difference does indeed help in identifying these questions and tensions, but
perhaps does not give enough purchase in terms of working through in more
useful depth how these questions might be properly answered. For example,
how much time and effort should the class teacher allocate to the needs of our
putative actor? What are the limits? Is there a minimum and maximum expect-
ation? Where does the responsibility for effort lie? How much responsibility
in terms of effort (also a resource issue) devolve on the child themselves (or
their family), or are considerations of individual effort extraneous (whether
in whole or in part) to what we should be thinking about with regard to
inclusion? The point is that the current debates in the field about inclusion
too often refuse, often due to ideological overdetermination on the part of
theorists, to dig under assumptions about the political values and frameworks
we might use in answering such questions.
14 What Is Wrong with Inclusion Today

The issue of resources and how they are allocated, and how we might think
about whether this allocation is fair, and what impact that might have on
others either in society more widely or in the microcosm of the society of
the classroom or school, is a fundamental underlying issue in philosophical
debates about the political structures of society and formulation and applica-
tion of public policy in modern day societies, and in terms of debates on the
aims, purposes and formulation of education policy in particular.59,60 Yet there
is currently limited discussion of the underpinnings of such debates on pol-
itical values in relation to the issue of inclusion in education. I propose that
by delving in these underlying debates on political values, we can further illu-
minate the answers to some of the questions I have identified. The importance
of such an endeavour can be seen by reflecting for a moment on the point that
these are questions which, whether explicitly or implicitly, are “live”, every day,
in the minds of all teachers and school leaders.

Hegemony
There is, as noted, a sense in which inclusion as a term has undergone a form
of “conceptual creep”. Some have referred to this as a form of conceptual
hegemony.61,62 Hegemony in modern times is a term heavily influenced by
Gramsci’s63(3.2) use of it in Marxist theory to indicate the development of
consensus in society by which modern states, often through the activities of
intellectuals, won over “potentially hostile social groups and classes”64 and
thus deflected threats to the power of the state. Thus, hegemony involves
a mix of both consensus and compromise in relation to ideology (which
penetrates through structures of civil society, such as the church, schools etc.)
and which is operationalized in a pragmatic political sense, thus requiring a
level of consensus across potentially disparate positions. It is in this sense of
trying to achieve consensus across positions that are actually disparate that
we might apply the term hegemonic to inclusion. The epistemological point,
independent of the term used, though, is that inclusion has tended to expand
the reach of areas that it covers and often is presented in the literature as being
either equivalent to or overlapping with terms such as democracy, equality,
equity and social justice.65–​67 As Norwich13 has noted, if it means all these
things or equates to any or all of them, then it is hard to specify what it
does mean as a differentiated concept. Putting this in Gramsci’s terms, con-
sensus might be achieved, but importantly what is meant in terms of material
relations might be unclear. Consensus for Gramsci is linked to the “foun-
dational Marxist principle that social consciousness ‘corresponds’ to material
relations of production”.64(3.5) I would propose that a Marxist view of material
relations is not fundamental to recognizing, as Gramsci does, that political
economic questions underpin ideological consensus and cannot be ignored.
In other words, we need to understand what a concept means in terms of its
implications for resource allocation to make sense of it in a political sense.
Thus, although I make use of the term hegemony in this book in relation to
 What Is Wrong with Inclusion Today 15

inclusion, it is with a caveat in terms of not necessarily accepting a specific view

of materialist economics in relation to it, but rather to illustrate how concepts
can “grow” and, through such growth, lose cohesion and practical meaning,
particularly in an economic (i.e. resource related) sense.
One example of such hegemonic concept growth is the elision of inclu-
sion as a concept with that of democracy. Thus, for example, Booth and
Ainscow68(p.20), in their influential Index of Inclusion, write:

Inclusion in the Index, then, is a principled approach to the development

of education and society. It is linked to democratic participation within and
beyond education. It is not about an aspect of education to do with a par-
ticular group of children. It is concerned with bringing coherence to the
development activities that take place under a variety of headings so that
they encourage the learning and participation of everyone: children and
their families, staff and governors and other community members.

Such a move often involves a particular positioning which even though it may
conceptualize democracy as deliberative, i.e. as a process for the negotiation of
different perspectives within society, ultimately uses the force and authority of
the majority to come to decisions on such different perspectives. This is often
linked to a universalizing function, in which once such decisions are made, the
state takes on a role to promote such perspectives as a good within society,
the authority for such positioning as a good comes through the decision of
the majority. Olssen’s discussion of thin communitarian perspectives on edu-
cation,21 and Carr and Kemmis’69 (broad) critical perspective on education,
are two good examples of this approach. Of course, there have been consid-
erations of the relationship between inclusion and democracy, with Marion
Young70 in particular focusing, through a critical theory lens, on how inclu­
sion in respect of democracy needs more focus on facilitating participation in
the political process, specifically for marginalized groups in society, in add-
ition to notions of deliberative democracy. As Biesta71 discusses, considering
Young’s approach in relation to education, schooling plays a central role in the
question of how and under what circumstances the capacity for participation is
developed. However, for both Young and Biesta, a detailed discussion of what
inclusion might mean in this context is lacking, except for their assertion that
it has some connection, as above, with a critical, revolutionary concept of the
“good”, which is unproblematically to be imposed via democratic processes.
Yet there is of course a quite different liberal perspective on democracy, the
tradition of Mill, Locke, de Tocqueville, and Berlin, which sees the primary
function of democracy as a structure and associated processes to defend the
rights of the individual against the power of the state, a key element of which is
to protect private property rights. One could consider these two quite different
approaches as, in Berlin’s terms, a positive liberty versus a negative liberty
approach to democracy. These different approaches potentially imply quite
contrasting emphasis on political values and on resource allocation –​most
16 What Is Wrong with Inclusion Today

obviously a positive liberty approach might emphasize the value of redistri-

bution of resources to achieve equality, and a negative liberty approach might
give more emphasize to the protection of individual economic rights (liberty).
Based on my contention that value tensions in inclusion and education are
usually economic, it is clear that (a) a simple equation between inclusion and
democracy is not possible, and (b) attempting to simply “add in” democracy as
a concept to inclusion does not help to illuminate for us what inclusion might
mean in any useful sense.

Exploring Values Further

If then we need to go further in exploring the values underlying sites of tension
related to inclusion, I want to consider what framework might be useful in
thinking about values and what specific values might be in play. Of course, the
place of values in educational decision making has long been noted. Willower72
noted that values are key to the practice of education as it so often involves
multiple decisions, with the constant choosing one action over another.
Values influence the decisions that we make. There is though little agreement
across disciplines about precisely how to define values. Taking Kroeber and
Kluckhohn’s73 seminal paper, they consider that values are conceptions of the
desirable, either of individuals or more widely across groups, that influence
actions. Desirable in his sense is normative, meaning what should be desired,
rather than what necessarily is desired. Hodgkinson,74 writing in relation to
education, differentiates between simple preferences, values which can by
rational discovery be linked to consequences or that enjoy a consensus within
a particular society, and values that in an idealist sense are “transrational”.
Hodgkinson cites justice, equality and dignity as examples of the latter. How
and why such transrational values might arise and be sustained or defended
against is the subject of much debate. This is closely linked to the issue of
how to judge between different values when they come into conflict when
making decisions. Some, notably Dewey, have argued that the demarcation
between rational and transrational values, based as it is on some form of teleo-
logical or Kantian view of a universal moral law, is unclear.75 Rather, Dewey
argues that values are pragmatic, always linked to the consequences of par-
ticular actions, and that it is a kind of post-​hoc evaluation of their contextual
impact that allows for the assignment of moral worth to values, rather than any
transrational or idealist framework.
Notwithstanding the varying perspectives on what values are, and how
they are derived, lists of values in relation to inclusion and education are not
uncommon. For example, Booth’s framework of inclusive values is quite com-
monly referred to in the literature. His list is as follows:76(p.309)

equality; rights; participation; respect for diversity, [concern for] commu-

nity, sustainability, non-​violence, trust, honesty, courage, joy, compassion,
love/​care, optimism/​hope, and beauty [in] gratuitous acts of kindness.
 What Is Wrong with Inclusion Today 17

However, quite how these are selected, established and derived, who they
apply to or indeed how they might intercalate with each other is somewhat
underexplored by Booth and by most writers making use of the list. Nor is
it very clear how conflicts between these values might be considered in the
practice of inclusion. Some of the terms are also used in a particular way –​
so for example courage is used perhaps in the sense of being courageous in
overcoming oppression. This is of course a perfectly laudable value in itself,
but it is also quite different from how courage, or other omitted values such
as loyalty and responsibility, might be employed if coming from a classically
liberal or conservative, as opposed to, as Booth does, a postmodern largely
Foucauldian-​inspired perspective.
Going back to our fictional classroom story, might there be a conflict
between compassion and honesty, for example? Could honesty involve an
evaluation of the limits of ability for example, and would this be in conflict
with the values of hope or compassion? Putting this another way, should the
teacher have realistic limits on the expectations for what individual children
can achieve, i.e. expectations and thus curriculum aims which are tailored
to their needs? If so, is that in conflict with maintaining their self-​esteem?
It’s not clear to me that this list, and others like it, in their raw form, do
particularly help teachers in understanding what inclusion might mean for
classroom practice. It’s also notable that in Booth’s list and others,77,78 no in-​
depth account is taken of resource constraints. Thus, in these lists of values
for education and inclusion, the omission of consideration of the tensions
between equality of opportunity, equality of outcome, and liberty, contingent
on resource limitations, central to such debates in all spheres of the work of
the welfare state, including very much in education,59 seems a notable absence.
I argue that at least part of the reason for this lack of clarity and indeed preci-
sion in terms of what value conflicts there might be is due to the hegemonic
quality that inclusion as a concept has taken on in its trajectory from discursive
sociological critique through to activist agenda in education, which has served
to empty it of truly useful content. In order to arrive at a more productive
account of inclusion, one which takes proper account of underlying conflicts
about values, I will turn in the next chapter to a more in-​depth discussion of
political values in relation to public policy.

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56. Lumby J. Performativity and identity: mechanisms of exclusion. J Educ Policy.
2009;24(3):353–​369. doi:10.1080/​02680930802669284
57. Capp MJ. The effectiveness of universal design for learning: A meta-​ analysis
of literature between 2013 and 2016. Int J Incl Educ. 2017;21(8):791–​807.
doi:10.1080/​13603116.2017.1325074
58. McGuire JM, Scott SS, Shaw SF. Universal Design and Its Applications
in Educational Environments. Remedial Spec Educ. 2006;27(3):166–​175.
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59. Njoya W. Free Markets and Economic Progress. In: Njoya W, ed. Economic
Freedom and Social Justice: The Classical Ideal of Equality in Contexts of Racial
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60. Tooley J. E.G. West: Economic Liberalism and the Role of Government in Education.
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61. Mulderrig J. The hegemony of inclusion: A corpus-​based critical discourse analysis
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0957926512455377
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023/​entr​ies/​gram​sci
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and Democracy: What Is the Purpose?. Springer; 2003:49–​65.
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67. Sanahuja A, Moliner O, Moliner L. Inclusive and democratic practices in primary
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2 Value Pluralism and Liberalism

Berlin, Liberalism and Other Perspectives

A key aspect of political debates about public policy is that of disagree-
ment. There is no one position that theorists or governments have adopted.
Foucault’s discursive analysis, although certainly not lacking in impact on
political thinking, particularly in relation to public policy and the welfare
state, is in the end just one perspective. As such, even if it had a kind of uni-
versal acceptance within inclusion and education, given that in the real-​world
classrooms are very much not at all split off from the rest of the world or
from wider public policy, it’s something of a non-​starter to suggest that in
any practical sense, we can just stay with that one perspective and still find it a
useful concept for the practical challenges that education and educators face.
Value conflicts and different political perspectives on value prioritization are in
all aspects of our lives, all the time. In this chapter, and the book as a whole,
I consider debates on political values, including John Rawls’ seminal thinking,
very much underplayed in the writing on education and inclusion. I also have
a particular focus on Isaiah Berlin. This is because much of Berlin’s writing,
and that of his commentators (such as John Gray and George Crowder), focus
on value conflicts and their persistence in the public policy sphere. I also focus
on Berlin because of his specific commitment to (a) the importance of nega-
tive liberty (or freedom), a value that many theorists writing about inclusion
and education underplay,1–​3 and (b) as John Gray4 argues, his straddling of
Enlightenment values at the same time as his opposition to its one of its fun-
damental positions –​that idealist universality will overcome the particularity
of culture.
Berlin’s focus on liberty was, in my view, linked to his early experiences.
He was born into a Jewish family in Russia in 1909 and witnessed the 1917
revolutions before his family fled to England in 1921. Just after the start
of the February revolution, Berlin went for a walk and saw a group of men
dragging another terrified man away. It later came to light that the terrified
man was a policeman who likely was being dragged away to be lynched.5
This and other experiences of the revolutions, as a young boy, had a lasting
impact on Berlin, and it’s fair to say they influenced his focus on freedom
DOI: 10.4324/9781003294894-3
 Value Pluralism and Liberalism 23

in his scholarly writing. As such, Berlin’s conception of liberalism is rooted

in a concern to protect the liberty of the individual against the power of
the state. Thus, he sees liberalism’s most important feature as lying in the
lessons learned in Britain during the Reformation,3 namely that it is better
to allow for different conceptions of the good life, and to restrict the role of
the state in deciding on such matters for people or families. In other words,
it is better to allow plurality of religious thought rather than to burn people
at the stake for holding to a different theology from that adopted by the
state at any one time. It is this lesson, which for Berlin could be observed as
a lesson arising from history as much as from his own personal experience,
which explains his focus on, and to an extent privileging of, the concept of
negative liberty in liberalism, although as Gray4 notes he was also well aware
of the possible abuses of negative liberty. Berlin also agreed with Popper6
that Enlightenment rationality, in differentiating between superstition and
reason, also underpins the idea of liberty, as from this perspective it is only
through rational open debate that we can come to a conception of what the
good might be. However, as with other liberal thinkers, this commitment
to pluralism, and specifically in Berlin’s case to values pluralism, raises the
perennial question of how, in a pluralist system, we (a) underpin the general
agreements about what we might expect as minimum conceptions of the
good in liberal democracy –​that is how we avoid a collapse into relativism,
and (b) how in terms of public policy we balance between different values. It
is this focus on balancing values, or indeed value choice, that is particularly
relevant to inclusion and education.
Berlin was of course writing at a particular point in time, and other theoret-
ical positions in political philosophy are also germane to the questions I raise.
Which values are given priority and how conflicts between them are assessed
varies between (classical) liberalism/​libertarian, neoliberal, communitarian,
and conservative or neoconservative modes of thought.1 The balance between
the emphasis on economic (i.e. approaches for the allocation of resources) and
other concerns also varies between these modes. However, the impact of these
different modes on how we think about education cannot be denied. This is
particularly important if we consider, as noted by Olssen, that education is the
most significant way in which public policy in modern states is enacted.7 The
differential connections between these modes to questions such as the aims of
education, the content of curriculum, the balance between knowledge, skills
and attitudes, how to position activism within the sphere of education, the
extent to which we are or are not free rationale agents, and the place of lib-
erty within education and its relative importance compared say to tradition, is
multifaceted. As such, they bring to bear, inescapably on how we might think
about the idea of inclusion in education, and when it comes to value choices,
they underpin, in my view, how we can come to make sense of, if not come
to any easy resolution of, the choices faced by educators when dealing with
difference in the classroom.
24 Value Pluralism and Liberalism

Forms of Liberalism
Classical liberalism takes many forms although most would agree that in its
initial forms it developed as a reaction against the unrestrained power of the
monarch over the individual in the 17th century.8,9 Laissez-​faire liberalism,
associated with Adam Smith, Hayek, Locke and Nozick, has a more economic
focus, positioning private property rights and the working of the market, along
with restrictions on the role of government in interfering with either of these.
Of course, concerns about a particular sense of justice also interpenetrate in
this mode of thinking with concerns about the right of the individual and the
family to be free from interference from the state, particularly in terms of cul-
ture and family and religion, in a much wider sense than the purely economic.
In contrast, social liberalism8,9 has a modified conception of justice, privileging
a concern for fair allocation of resources to ensure that all members of society
have a minimum set of those required to achieve their goals. Rawls, Dworkin,
Kymlicka and even perhaps Nussbaum are commonly associated with this type
of liberalism,10 which tends to give a greater role to the state, particularly in
terms of ensuring that resources are shared out in a more equal fashion.
The focus on what Berlin would call negative liberty in liberal thought
raises the issue, as noted, of the warrants, in liberal thought, for privileging
the ideas of non-​interference by the state given the commitment to pluralism.
A universalist perspective on liberalism, based on the liberal conception of
the free agentic individual coming in a Kantian sense via rational enquiry to
an understanding of the untethered ideal, proposes that liberal principles and
structures (most commonly the structures of liberal democracy) are the best
possible form of government, and have a universal application independent
of culture, geography or time. In contrast, a particularist perspective on liber-
alism makes more restricted claims, namely that liberal principles and structures
might best apply to those who have a tradition aligned to liberal values or
value ordering. Therefore, the idea that liberal democracy is something that
should be promulgated across the world has less resonance. Crowder8,9 notes
that the most common approach in the literature to justify liberalism is neutral
universality, which Crowder argues Rawls11 adopts in his influential Theory of
Justice. Such a conception draws on Locke and Mill in setting out that the role
of the state should be restricted, as in Berlin’s negative liberty, to preventing
harm to others in a narrow sense, tolerating (neutrally) a range of conceptions
of the good life and associated modes of community living and operation.

Rawls and Justice

Rawls proposed that we can reach a “reflective equilibrium” on questions of
justice not just on questions we might be sure of (such as opposition to religious
intolerance or racial discrimination) but also where there might be less immediate
clarity. In order to achieve clarity, he proposes an imaginary “first conditions”
situation which leads via rational enquiry to a set of principles for justice. Rawls
 Value Pluralism and Liberalism 25

calls this the original position and in this there is a “veil of ignorance” which
prevents the individuals in the situation knowing anything about people in the
situation, including themselves, such as their age, gender, wealth, religion, or
their conception of the good. This means that, as Mandle and Roberts-​Cady12
note, they must consider the principles from the perspective of everyone. What
they do know, Rawls explains, is that rationally they would prefer a particular
share of what he calls primary social goods, such as basic political freedoms, and
fair equality of opportunity to access positions within society. Rawls argues then
that the principles which would be derived from the first position are:11(p.266)

First principle: Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive
total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of lib-
erties for all. [the liberty principle]
Second principle: Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so
that they are both:
(a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged [the difference principle]
and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair
equality of opportunity [fair equality of opportunity principle]

The difference principle is a key element of the social liberalism of Rawls,

which avers a strict definition of justice and rather argues that if there are
to be unequal social and economic social positions, then these must serve
to overall benefit the least advantaged in society than if they were not there
(i.e. if everything was distributed equally). As Mulholland and Swift13 note,
Rawls’ implication is that the innate capacities with which we are borne are
random and that inherently there is no intrinsic rationale for reward based
on such capacities, although there may be a consequentialist one if they serve
to benefit others. That does not mean that there should not be reward for
effort. It should as this will benefit everyone, and this individual reward and
distributive justice can coexist –​thus, for example, if someone is incentivized
to find a cure for cancer, everyone benefits. Cureton14 applies this in relation
to disability, noting that the rationale for Rawls’ theory of justice is that a
system of mutual cooperation, within limits of liberty (the first principle), will
bring greater benefits to everyone in the society, than if there were no system
of mutual cooperation at all. How though to differentiate innate capacity and
effort remains an issue in Rawls’ theory and more widely. Rawls’ perspective
on justice also implies a particular view of the individual as both asocial in the
Kantian sense and psychologically driven primarily by self-​interest.
Further Rawls advocates that the liberty principle has to take precedence,
and in other writing 15(p.209) notes in a similar way that the “right takes prece­
dence over the good”, i.e. that there is in general no preferencing of one theory
of the good over the other, but that when the liberal framework encompassing
the social field comes into conflict with one conception of the good, it is the
liberal framework that takes precedence.8,9 Rawls’ insistence on this reflects his
26 Value Pluralism and Liberalism

underlying liberalism in that it reflects his belief, shared with Berlin, that it is
the ability for the individual to make choices that is an overarching value.

Justice and Other Values

The values that are in contention in public policy are wide ranging and often
subject to debate as to definition (see for example Sen16). It is not within the
scope of this book to interrogate all of those debates; however, it will be useful
to set out a stance on some of the key values considered here. Rawls considers
justice ‘as fairness’, i.e. that society can only be properly just if there is a social
redistributive aspect, albeit within limits, to its structures. Berlin, and classical
liberals such as Hayek or Nozick, adopt a strict, and indeed common usage,
view of justice as a value in which justice is primarily about desert (i.e. reward)
for effort and choice, although as noted, in less strict, form social liberals such
as Rawls do not discount in whole the importance of desert. Effort is of course
itself a choice and this view of justice reflects the belief, following Kant, that it
is the ability to choose, and potentially to choose well, that is the defining fea-
ture of our humanity. This is a view of (strict) justice as the justice of the court-
house, and by extension to life in general, for example as in the justice of equal
application of rules in the classroom. Such a view of justice also encompasses a
notion of equal treatment under the law.
Redistribution is also important in the debate on the values of equality and
equity. Minow,17 writing in 2021, notes that these terms have both taken on
a political polarization in recent decades and lacked conceptual clarity in their
application in the literature and policy application. For this book, I prefer,
following Minow, to consider the debate in terms of equality of opportunity,
in contrast to equality of outcome. It is often equality of outcome that is
positioned in liberalism, such as by Berlin, as being in tension with the value
of liberty (or freedom, terms used mostly interchangeably by Berlin8). Minow
notes how equality of outcome can conflict with liberty, justice as desert, and
indeed diversity as values. In illustrating this, Minow,17(p.186) echoing liberals
such as Hayek, forcefully cites Vonnegut’s dystopian account of a word in
which the law “dictate[s]‌that all Americans are fully equal and disallows anyone
from being smarter, better looking, or more physically able than anyone else.
Enforcement of the ‘equality laws’ forces citizens to equip themselves with dis-
abling devices, including an earpiece radio that blares loud sounds to disrupt
the thoughts of intelligent people and heavy weights that burden the strong
or athletic”.18

Objections to the Liberal Position

Objections have of course been considerable to the general liberal position set
out above. This critique focuses on the assumption of individual autonomy
and/​or agency, counter arguing, particularly from sociological discursive19 and
communitarian20 perspectives, that the idea of the agentic individual which can
 Value Pluralism and Liberalism 27

be separated from societal connections, a foundational point in liberalism, is

untenable. In its Marxist form, this critique focuses on liberalism’s inadequate
consideration of material cultural and historical factors that influence society
as a whole.13
A related aspect of these critiques is the objection to the idea that even
in their neutral form, liberal political structures are not really neutral and in
fact have hidden differential impacts on different segments within society.21
For example, historically marginalized groups, even in Rawls’ social liberalism
adopting a sufficitarian position,22 can be regarded as lacking proper equal
opportunities.23,24 Crowder notes the assumption against tradition in liber­­
alism: that in the very act of creating the space for individuals to pursue their
own ideas about the good life, supposedly neutral liberalism promotes “certain
values in preference to others: toleration rather than orthodoxy, freedom rather
than solidarity, diversity rather than community, debate rather than agreement,
experiment rather than tradition”.8(p.30) Communitarian critiques25,26 note the
assumption of the socially unanchored autonomous agent and the values
associated with this that underlie classical liberalism.
The liberal defence to these objections can be an appeal to a limited plur-
alism. It may well be the case that liberalism is not wholly neutral, but as
Rawls27 and Dworkin28 argue, it is the best attempt possible, a best approxi­­
mation, of allowing the maximum space within public structures, for different
conceptions of the good life to be freely expressed. Rawls seems then, in
response to such critiques, to move in his later writing27 to a more particularist
position on liberalism. Thus, Rawls argues that liberalism draws its foundation
from a shared political culture, which all can agree on, such agreement being
found in particular nations, which are not then part of a comprehensive lib-
eral programme, and that there is a limit to the political discourse of ideas in
liberal democracies. Thus, for example, liberalism if taken to imply support
for diversity may set limits on the extent, at least in public discourse, to which
individuals and groups can criticize or otherwise object to forms of diversity
such as sexuality. The consequence for Rawls’ reliance on this defence is that
it becomes much more difficult to make a universalist claim for liberalism, spe-
cifically to claim its international application across the many societies that do
not have a history of liberal democratic culture.

Rawls and Disability

Rawls has been criticized for ignoring the fact that there are many people in
society who may not be able to either (a) engage in the reflection involved
in the original position scenario, or (b) contribute to society in terms of the
mutual cooperation implied by Rawls, and as such, it would seem that Rawls
ignores or even excludes from citizenship individuals with disabilities, particu-
larly those whose disabilities might be considered profound. Thus, Kittay29
and Nussbaum30 suggest that Rawls ignores the care that any “just society”
needs to give to those with disabilities (as well as children and the elderly).
28 Value Pluralism and Liberalism

Rawls can, I think, be defended from these critiques. As Cureton14 notes,

firstly Rawls did not set out to solve all issues that could be presented in a
society in his analysis, noting that societies would undergo a process leading
to reflective equilibrium in which competing demands and needs would be
resolved. More importantly, the critique of Rawls misses the point that his
notion of mutual cooperation in no way precludes the idea that society cannot
include people with disabilities nor that caring for them and ensuring that they
have equal access to primary social goods undermines mutual cooperation or
a notion of justice. In fact, just the opposite, the difference principle implicitly
proposes that justice involves taking note of those who are least advantaged,
which would include those with disabilities.14,31 The crucial argument of Rawls
is that if society is made up of people with a typical amount of self-​interest,
the model of mutual cooperation he proposes is better than no system of
cooperation at all and serves to balance the competing needs and demands of
individuals. Thus, individual liberty is balanced with a wider (redistributive)
notion of equality of outcome. Rawls’ theory does, though, as a liberal pos-
ition, imply limits to such balancing. If a society was required to provide an
enormous amount of resources to meeting the needs of individuals who could
not mutually contribute, then the overall system of mutual cooperation would
likely collapse. Putting this another way, within Rawls, there is a clear recog-
nition that accommodation has to be reasonable when balancing individual
liberty with equality of outcome.

Public versus Private Spheres

There has been considerable attention by liberal theorists to the difference
between public and private spheres. Rawls27 argues, to a significant extent,
as part of his defence of critiques of liberal positions, that individuals or fam-
ilies that do not accept liberal values such as diversity, tolerance etc. or who
give stronger preference to opposing values can still adopt these in the private
sphere, i.e. within the family or localized community. Thus, the assumption is
that in the public sphere and in terms of political and public policy structures,
liberal values will be dominant, and individuals or groups who disagree with
these will have their freedom, for example, to stridently advocate views based
on these values curtailed. This is of course a key issue for education, and the
extent to which the state, particularly via curriculum requirements, should
impose liberal values on all children and families illuminates the tensions that
Crowder9 and others such as Galston32,33 have noted in this defence by Rawls.
If one of the aims of education in liberal societies is to give children the neces-
sary tools to engage in liberal civic activity and discourse, it becomes difficult
to see how Rawls’ tight demarcation between public and private operates.
Other liberal thinkers such as Raz34 have taken a much more explicit uni­
versalist stance, arguing that we can know that some ways of life and values
 Value Pluralism and Liberalism 29

which underpin liberal democracy constitute the path to the good life, and
the state is fully justified in intervening, all the way down through public
and private structures, to promote this. Thus, from the perspective of Raz, in
respect of education, the state is justified in promoting a required curriculum
that actively promotes liberal values, even where they conflict with the private
values of families.
Such debates are represented in the influential writings of Terry Mclaughlin35
on political values in education, particularly in relation to civics. He discusses
how, whether in terms of a specific civics curriculum, or more widely in terms
of the broader hidden curriculum of the school, civics can be positioned as
either thick, actively promoting liberal values, or thin, minimizing the extent
to which such values, beyond a minimum required for social functioning
within the school, are promoted. Mclaughlin’s importance is his reminder to
us that the extent to which common schools (i.e. mainstream schools funded
by the state and potentially open to all children) should or should not be
involved in promoting a particular conception of the good life has been an
area of considerable debate.
A thick position such as that adopted by Raz is, in Berlin’s terms, much
closer to a view of positive rather than negative liberty. For Berlin, the danger
of such a position, in my reading, is the risk of the active denial of freedom by
the state. Berlin, in Two Concepts of Liberty, argues that the dangers of positive
liberty, as proposed by theorists such as Raz, are that once this view is taken,
once it is assumed that the real self, perhaps unknown to the individual, can
be uncovered through his education into the true morality, then the natural
tendency is for those who know best to “bully, oppress, torture them…”2(p.180)
in the name of freedom. As Gray4 notes, Berlin argues that counter to the
Enlightenment, there is such real “higher” self that can be so differentiated.
Of course, there is potentially quite a distance between bully and torture, and
as Olssen7 rightly points out, considerable difference between oppression in
authoritarian states and oppression in liberal democracies. However, I tend
to disagree with Olssen, as indeed did Berlin,4 that somehow the mere fact of
democratic structures or consensus obviates the risk of state oppression. It’s
also the case that Berlin did not make this critique specifically in relation to
universalist liberal thinkers (although neither did he exclude them). His target
was more widely all hegemonic modes of thinking, all approaches which he
saw, as outlined in his essay on Historical Inevitability,3 as predicated on a view
of the one true approach to the good life –​idealist perspectives (including
those stemming from the Enlightenment) which privileged the march of his-
torical forces, such as in Marxism, and which we could extend, I think, to the
hegemonic tendency implicit in activist forms of the sociological critique. It
is also relevant to note again here that Berlin did not have a simplistic view of
positive versus negative liberty –​he saw a place for both, but wanted neverthe-
less to emphasize the risks of positive liberty.9
30 Value Pluralism and Liberalism

Communitarian Perspectives
The communitarian critique of Rawls in particular challenges the liberal
account of justice, arguing that it fails to adequately consider the relationship
between individuals and their communities, leading to a limited view of the
state’s role. This critique is particularly focused on Rawls’ concept of the self,
which is seen as overly individualistic and detached from communal values.36,37
Sandel’s20,25 well-​known communitarian critique of Rawls argues that Rawls’
(and other social liberals) argument that the asocial Kantian individual is a pre-​
attached consciousness that is split off from ends when making decisions about
them, i.e. that they somehow choose in some disinterested way, is untenable.
Sandel argues that in fact ends are constitutive of identity (as the self is at
least partially socially situated), and thus decisions about ends involve an intra-​
subjective awareness of how the individual is linked to wider community-​based
ends as well as ends purely related to the individual’s own self-​interest. This
ontological reality, Sandel argues, is masked, for example, by the way Rawls’
constructs the first position scenario. Rawls’ response to these critiques in his
later writing13 is that he does not set out a metaphysical account of the person
overall but rather an account located in relation to the political sphere only,
i.e. people can have ends and attachments and community and identity in the
private sphere and this is to be expected as long as this is voluntary (although
communitarians might ask how voluntary).27 Thus, Rawls argues that it is in
the political sphere that it is important to preserve a democratic space for the
“right” before the ‘good’. However, as discussed, it is questionable whether
the private and public can be so neatly split off either ontologically or prac-
tically, and if they can, whether this then reduces the scope of the claims of
liberalism.
Communitarians such as Sandel also make the useful distinction between
identity formation and agentic action, arguing that rather than being asocial,
identity is created through positioning in community, and that a distinction
can be drawn between the creation of the self and the self as an active agent.
Thus, it can be argued that for Sandel and other weaker communitarian
critiques, their position is not to suggest a full-​blown deconstruction of the
subject as an active agent,8 and the debate may be considered more practically
as being about how we balance these values with others in the political and
policy structures within liberal democracies.13 However, this still leaves the
question as to practically how such balancing should happen or what values
should be involved.

Neoliberalism, Liberalism and Economics

Biebricher38 sets out a view of neoliberalism as a coherent development from
classical liberal thought which is characterized by a concern to consider how
the freedoms offered by the operation of the market can be properly conceived
of and supported to function in modern technological societies. Neoliberalism
 Value Pluralism and Liberalism 31

supports political structures that are committed to negative liberty in viewing

“big government” with suspicion, particularly the regulatory state, and is dis-
approving of large government spending. Neoliberalism is also committed
to democratic institutions and the welfare state within limits. In particular,
compared to laissez-​faire trends of thought in classical liberalism, it has a far
clearer commitment to the requirements to correct failures in the market,
and thus in a Rawlsian sense, ensure from a sufficitarian and/​or consequen-
tialist perspective that everyone has the resources/​goods to participate in the
economy, and thus supports in principle the welfare state including services
such as universal access to education and healthcare.
Although neoliberalism is often considered as primarily economic in orien-
tation, the main neoliberal theorists, such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton
Friedman, did not see a sharp distinction between wider political structures
and purely economic ones. As argued by Whyte,39 this is because, as in clas­
sical liberal thinking, the operation of a free market is linked both to a) the
structures necessary to allow the proper functioning of such a market and,
b) further in terms of ends, the implicit conception of the good life within
neoliberalism that is based on the idea of freedom, and the idea that it is
through free market choices, as opposed to any other possible system, that
individual preferences can best be expressed and resolved.
Similarly, Hayek and Friedman take a somewhat neutralist view of public
policy, being largely neutral on what constitutes the good life.40 They do not
argue, as some have,41 that a key element in neoliberal thought is that com­
petition between people or profit seeking is some sort of privileged value.
Neoliberalism is also not, as some have suggested,41 opposed to the state or
typically in favour of the state as a night watchman, such as in Nozickian lib-
ertarianism.39 Although neoliberal theorists are concerned about the limits
of state power, this concern arises from how to deal with the requirements
of modern technological states, as well as being a response to the negative
consequences arising from centralized state planning in the post war era in
the Soviet Union, China, and the fascist experience during the war. Neoliberal
concerns are also a response to big state social democratic, particularly
Keynesian, macroeconomic policies and their implementations, and perceived
negative consequences in, for example, Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Labour
party’s welfare state in the UK.39
From the perspective of the argument I am developing in this book, it is
interesting to note the way neoliberalism is used as a kind of catch-​all term for
the evils of much government policy,38 particularly in relation to inclusion. It is
striking how often the general literature on inclusion fails in a serious attempt
to account for the normative theoretical underpinnings of neoliberalism
(or classical liberalism) and to properly critique these.42 Linked to this, the
discussions of issues of resourcing (i.e. economics) in the literature on edu-
cation and inclusion, in most of the literature, are also limited. Resources,
whether capital or revenue, or in terms of the workload and expectations on
individual teachers, are often absent from the debate. Yet at both national and
32 Value Pluralism and Liberalism

local level, resources are a key issue, as the neoliberal policy trajectory suggests,
for any aspects of the operation of public policy.43

Hayek’s Social Knowledge

Neoliberalism is often non-​idealist, rejecting the possibility of coming to an

understanding, through a central function, of what works best.39 Hayek,44 in
his theory of social knowledge, argued that the information in modern-​day
societies is too complex and fragmented for any central authority to be able to
in any sense properly capture it, and that attempts to do so will inevitably lead
to inefficiency, as they cannot adequately reflect the complexity of aggregate
personal preferences. He believed that the free market, with its decentralized
decision-​making process and price mechanism, represents the only practical
way to capture preference information, and thus is a more effective way to
allocate resources, encourage innovation, and respond to the diverse needs
and preferences of individuals. Linked to this, Hayek45,46 and other neoliberal
thinkers also consider, resonant with Berlin’s critique of positive liberty, that
the idealist position in socialism and some forms of social liberalism –​that
government policy can change people to a significant extent so that altruism
rather than justice becomes their defining internal value –​is misguided. Taken
together, these two positions highlight for neoliberal thinkers, on a conse-
quential basis, the risks to liberty and happiness of an over emphasis in public
policy on central planning. As Hayek noted: 46(p.133)

[coercion is] … made to serve another man’s will, not for his own but for
the other’s purpose.

These are both economic and political concerns. Decisions on taxation, the
public administration of the welfare state, public pronouncements on what
the good life should be by government, the “nudging” of people’s behaviour
proposed by some thin communitarians,7,47 all involve, in social democratic
policy, the coercion that neoliberal thinkers like Hayek fear. However, des-
pite these concerns, in terms of public policy, the imperative to consider and
respond to difference or disadvantage, and to provide for these via the welfare
state, is one of the defining aspects of neoliberalism, in contrast to classical
liberalism.38 However, neoliberal thought has also set limits on the welfare
state and its size, and prioritized personal responsibility and choice in ways
which often contrast, significantly, with “progressive” perspectives.48 Yet in
bringing a critique of neoliberalism in public policy, many coming from an
activist sociological, Marxist, or social democratic positions have failed to give
a proper consideration to the actual positions made by theorists such as Hayek.
As Kristol noted,49 the tendency is to just assume the argument, and thus to
avoid debating whether there might be sites of tension to be considered. From
the perspective of education and inclusion, such an approach fails to consider
that there are different values and perspectives which are inevitably in play
 Value Pluralism and Liberalism 33

materially in schools in modern technological societies. Thus, Seldon38 noted

that social democrats in favour of the unrestricted expansion of the welfare
state tend to note the benefits of welfare but ignore the negative aspects in
terms of taxation, family cohesion, liberty and conflict arising from the impos-
ition of particular modes of thinking on minorities. The welfare state’s imple-
mentation leads to value tensions, and in particular choices in relation to these
often have economic implications. As I will explore in later chapters, such
tensions extend down into the classroom and the school. I contend in this
book that teachers and schools cannot effectively engage with these tensions if
they are swept under the carpet.

Liberal Thought and Education

I turn now to the application of liberal thinking to education policy. Tooley,
in discussing the contribution of the seminal liberal educational theorist
E.G. West,40 highlights key issues for liberalism and education as (a) the role
of education in providing the tools or resources for citizens to be autono-
mous, (b) the linked question of the extent to which compulsion in terms of
liberal beliefs can be imposed on citizens and whether this can or cannot be
separated into public and private domains, (c) the rights or duties of parents
in relation to children and how the family is conceived of as a unit and in
relation to the state, (d) the linked question of the duties of even a rela-
tively minimalist state in the protection of the child, and (e) what Friedman
classifies as externalities or neighbourhood effects, i.e. the extent to which a
lack of effective education of the individual child has wider impacts on other
people in society.40
Friedman50 noted that for a democratic liberal state to operate, children
need to have a minimum level of literacy, knowledge and common values,
and that if they don’t have these, then this per force impacts on other
people. Because of these externalities, Friedman advocated a minimum level
of schooling should be mandated for children, although, following general
neoliberal principles, he felt argued that the state should not be involved in
the direct provision of education, and proposed the use of voucher systems.
Hayek46 adopts a similar perspective and both Hayek and Friedman argue as
well for a protectionist view of the state in relation to children and specifically
as well with regard to education.40 Thus, they reject libertarian views of the
child (e.g. Nozick51) which position children in practice as the property of
their parents, and they require, on protectionist grounds, parents to be indi-
vidually and solely responsible for providing a minimum level of schooling to
their children. There is of course very considerable ongoing debate on these
matters, and thinkers such as Kymlicka,52 Mclaughlin,53 Gutman,54 Taylor,55
Scheffler,56 Reich,57 and Galston32,58 have debated the extent to which a liberal
conception of schooling, whether in thin or thick35 formulation, should lead
to detailed curriculum specification as to what should be taught in schools
in terms of civics for the development of public democratic autonomy, and
34 Value Pluralism and Liberalism

how this intercalates with the private domain and the rights of, for example,
minority groups who opt for an unexamined life for their children.
Hayek felt, as with Friedman, that the state’s involvement in directly pro-
viding education, in order to obviate risks to freedom, should be minimized
and in particular argued, in common with Adam Smith,59 that the state should
not be involved with the training and provision of teachers and thus for an
independent market for teachers to offer their services, as state control would
‘corrupt’ the teachers as well as erect unnecessary barriers to entry to the pro-
fession.40 Thus, they argued for a position which was common in England prior
to the 1870 Education Act and the advent of universal state education. Of
course, such an argument may well appear, to many of us, as jarring in the 21st
century, although it is relevant to note that historically, in general, the advent of
mass schooling preceded government regulation of education.59 Further, quite
a few modern theorists (not least Foucault) have argued for greater consider-
ation of the negative impacts of state regulation in the caring professions.60-​62
I spend time reflecting on these historical trajectories not to bring an argu-
ment for some kind of laissez-​faire utopia (or dystopia), but rather to note
that the common international consensus about both education and educa-
tion for inclusion obscures, as perhaps Foucault might have argued, particular
patterns of thinking, which have a history and derivation, and that uncovering
these may allow us to better understand, in my terms, the tensions (if not the
power relations) that we need to deal with in approaching difference in the
classroom.

Protection and Neighbourhood Effects

As discussed by Tooley,40 West’s position on education63 recognizes and largely

agrees with the concerns of Hayek, Friedman and Seldon. However, whilst
agreeing with the need for protection (including protection against ignor-
ance), West draws a comparison to the protection that parents are expected
to give their children against being hungry. Very few political systems pro-
pose that parents should not be responsible at least prima facie for feeding
their children, and most position the role of the state in a protective role
only in the minority of circumstances where this might not be possible. Of
course, concerns about child poverty are very real, and I don’t think West
was discounting these concerns in pointing out that in contrast to education,
states don’t tend to set up national provision of food to their citizens as a
matter of course. As West noted,63 it’s hard to see people agreeing to such a
system, particularly, I would argue, given the example of real child starvation
that has accompanied any society attempting such an approach, such as North
Korea.64 As such, why then West asks is education qualitatively different so that
national provision by the state is required to meet the needs of the principle
of protection.
West makes similar points in relation to education and neighbourhood
effects, i.e. although there may be a role for education in relation to such
 Value Pluralism and Liberalism 35

effects, whether education needs to be provided universally by the state is for

West much less clear. In relation to the key issue of the role of education in
developing the civil skills required for engagement in democratic processes,
West proposes, similarly to his arguments on protection, that in fact in most
cases, if children develop basic literacy skills, and there is a free press, then the
ongoing discussion of issues in the public square will ensure the development
of democratic skills. West was writing before the internet, and there is a sense,
I would suggest, that this point has even more force of argument now. There
is also a link here to debates on the delineation between public and private in
liberal perspectives on education. This is why I foreground West’s arguments.
Compulsory schooling is here to stay in technological societies, and for good
reason, but by questioning the very notion of the need for compulsory state
schooling if not for education, West reminds us (a) of the potential negative
consequences of the role of the state in education, and (b) to reconsider, as
for example others have done in say initiatives such as Summerhill,65 a unified
idealist perspective on how education should work. Such a reminder could
also be applied more widely to the central concerns of this book about educa-
tion and inclusion.

Civics and Publics versus Private

In respect of the public versus private debate in liberalism, West’s arguments

impinge on the relationship between civics education and the private beliefs
of minority groups. A range of theorists57,66–​68 have argued about the extent to
which teaching of the critical thinking skills, which might be viewed as needed
for engagement in democratic processes, can be taught in schools without
inevitably interpenetrating with private family beliefs, particularly in terms
of common schools and religious minorities. Taylor in particular argued that
liberalism needs to accommodate the unexamined life,55 thus proposing that
critical thinking skills should not necessarily be a core aspect of a civics curric-
ulum. This raises the question as to whether critical thinking as a skill can be
taught whilst keeping it separate from the content of what is taught.8

The Role of Education in Developing Autonomy

In terms of how difference is accommodated in common schools, the issue
of to what extent the liberal state should promote autonomy, the associated
issues of the relationship between public and private spaces in the state, and
the overall aims of education from a liberal perspective are important aspects
of the debate. If citizens of the liberal state are to engage in civic duty, which,
at the very least on the principle of neighbourhood effects, is needed for the
state to minimally operate, then it would follow that education should play a
role in developing the autonomy of the individual. No one, not even, I would
argue, the most laissez-​faire classical liberal or the most ardent advocate of stu-
dent voice, really believes that children somehow magically develop autonomy
36 Value Pluralism and Liberalism

and critical reasoning, i.e. the ability to discern between different propositions
and make choices, independently of their parents or community. The fact
that universally in criminal systems, account is taken of a child’s age and that
they are treated differently from adults in terms of their choices and actions,
provides an acknowledgement that children are not viewed as inherently
autonomous and that although they may well be borne with the capacity for
autonomy, in its application this is a skill that they need to develop.69 Children
are inescapably borne into particular societies and particular families, with par-
ticular parents. In fact, it can be argued, as in communitarian approaches, that
the development of autonomy is dependent on networks of social relations
and on a process of learning.70–​72 Children are thus, in such a framework,
inherently non-​autonomous as they start out and gradually develop the skill
of autonomy. We are not therefore self-​creating as autonomous individuals, in
some rationalist asocial Kantian sense, but can, as we achieve maturity, develop
(or have developed) our capacity for autonomy, i.e. we can develop the cap-
acity for self-​direction.57 Some theorists, though, such as Galston,58 privilege
concerns about negative liberty, arguing that, as with critical thinking, as some
groups do not value autonomy, a commitment to diversity of the concep-
tion of the good life means that autonomy is not necessarily something that
the liberal state should actively promote even in the public sphere. Galston58
overall argues that what is most important for the liberal state to value is tol-
erance of diversity of opinion, and that all but a very minimal promotion of
civics should not be undertaken by the state in the public sphere, particularly
in terms of what the state mandates in relation to education provision. Thus,
a Rawlsian delineation between public and private spheres is unworkable, as it
runs the risks of the state actively promoting autonomy as a value which may
be antithetical to the private values held by particular groups in society, with
the caveat common to many liberal thinkers that there remains a right of exit
from the sub-​group protected by the state.8

Autonomy, Duty and Tradition

What I think is clear from this discussion is that any conception of autonomy
as a value to be promoted is not a neutral value with regard to particular
groups who hold different views. Reich69 for example in his discussion
of autonomy does admit of the possibility of individuals autonomously
choosing to do things because of a sense of duty, as to a significant extent it
is the individual as an autonomous agent who chooses what they think will
give them the most benefit or pleasure or value. Yet autonomy in the liberal
tradition seems, as in its presentation by Reich, to have its own primacy.
In contrast, Raz73 argued for the primacy of duties over rights, in the con­
text of “orthodoxy”, and Etzioni74 also placed significant emphasis on the
obligations deriving from communal bonds. Traditional faith communities,
and the Judaeo-​Christian tradition, also tend to place more weight on duty.
For example, the Talmudic dictum “Greater is he who performs an action
 Value Pluralism and Liberalism 37

because he is commanded than he who performs the same action without

being commanded”75(Baba Kama 87a) is a well-​known concept in Jewish educa­
tion. It is regarded as more praiseworthy to undertake a commandment from
G-​d simply because this is a duty from G-​d, than to come to think it is
a good thing via one’s own process of (autonomous) rational inquiry. Of
course, Jewish thought on rational inquiry is complex, and this dictum does
not mean that inquiry has no place in its thought systems. However, without
entering into that complex debate, what it does show is that the idea of
duty, along with linked ideas of tradition and belief, is at least as important
in this value system, if not more important, than autonomous choice and
associated notions of liberal freedom. This reflects a differing perspective
on freedom within religious and (potentially) neoconservative thought,76
in that unrestricted choice is not viewed as synonymous with freedom and
is seen more as itself a sort of servility –​the servility of the confusion and
uncertainty of the constant choice and of the “idolatry” that comes from
placing man and his rational choice at the centre for existence. As in other
religious traditions (e.g. Aquinas’s views on duty –​see Hause and Pasnau77),
true freedom is regarded as coming through the acceptance of obligation.
As the critics of liberalism point out, even if it’s the best system we have for
political structures, it still involves implicit choices about values.

Liberalism, the Family and the Child

As Witte78 notes, natural law arguments for the family were often adopted
by classical liberal thinkers, and it has to be said continue to have purchase
today. Thus Christian and natural law traditions on the family have consid-
erable resonance with the rights of parents and families as set out in various
supra national policy statements such as the UN Convention on the Rights of
the Child. Of course, both earlier and modern liberal thinkers have diverted
considerably, in some aspects from this natural law perspective on the family,
although it’s also the case that a number of thinkers agree at least, in the ideal
scenario, with the idea that children are best served by being raised by their bio-
logical parents who stay together amicably when raising them.79,80 However,
a key critique of traditional systems which is raised by liberal thinkers is that
more emphasis needs to be placed on the rights of the child as individuals.40,81
Children, no differently to anyone else, have in liberal thinking the right to
freedom and agency, and as such there are clear limits in liberal thought as
to the power of parents over their children, and as a corollary children have
rights that are separable, at least in principle, from the rights of their parents.
In terms of education, this might, according to some broadly liberal thinkers,
mean that in contrast to Galston they in fact have the right to learn about
different modes of thinking to those of their parents, and to develop the crit-
ical thinking skills that might allow them to critique different conceptions of
the good life, and then using their rational will, to choose between them.81–​
84
This raises the question though of how to conceive of the relationship
38 Value Pluralism and Liberalism

between parents and children. There is a common recognition, across liberal,

social democratic and communitarian perspectives, of the “stickiness” and
unique intimacy of the relationship between parent and child across soci-
eties.85 Some such as Noddings,86 or Arneil87 have employed a care ethic as a
means to explain the particularity of parent-​child relationships. I would like
though to focus on Ramaekers and Suissa’s88 account. Ramaekers and Suissa
consider the care ethic account as being too one dimensional and failing to
account for the depth of the relationships. Rather, they note that the intimacy
between parents and children is unique in that it is not equivalent to the
intimacy between adults, as it is inherently built on unequal positioning with
the adult caring and nurturing and developing and the child being cared for
and being nurtured and developed. These positions are also inherently recip-
rocal, and again in terms of intimate relationships this reciprocity is unique.
The parent cannot care and nurture without the child and the child cannot
be cared for and be nurtured without the parent. As such Ramaekers and
Suissa position this relationship not as something that is to do with externally
imposed political values and structures, with rights and duties, but as some-
thing that can only be understood experientially from within the intimacy of
the relationship itself. This also means that the parent child relationship is
something that is a site of constant iterative negotiation between parents and
children, which is suffused by the intimacy, and changing dependencies of the
relationship. I think there is some considerable resonance here between this
account and Winnicott’s89 (modernist) model of the mother-​child relation­
ship with its reciprocal, interpersonal, symbolic features. This unique experi-
ential quality between parents and children is also something, for Ramaekers
and Suissa, that goes all the way up and down, i.e. its moral consequences
ripple out to impact on how we should politically think about the family and
its relationship to the state. Ramaekers and Suissa do not discount that there
are indeed limits to parental rights but that these lie at the extremes, and that
we should not allow the rare cases of systematic parental abuse to change our
moral view of the parent-​child relationship. They contrast their perspective to
the Arneil’s discussion of an ethic of care and its implications, who suggests
that a truly caring state would instigate a Ministry of Children that meets all
the “developmental needs” of children.87(p.90) There is, at least for me, a kind
of visceral horror in reading such proposals (although they are of course very
well intentioned) which Ramaekers and Suissa’s analysis foregrounds. It is the
horror, for families, for anyone who has been a father or a mother or a son or
a daughter, that is tempered perhaps by Winnicott’s reminder that the mother
“holds” the baby, contains their fears and their terrors in a unique intimate
relationship, and that such holding is always contextual, always contingent,
and doesn’t hold within it any empirical sense of external measurement or
approbation. The mother is always (except in the tiny minority of extremes)
“good enough”. When liberal and other approaches question the relationship
between parents and children, for example by suggesting that the autonomy
of children needs to be given greater primacy, which may well be true, they
 Value Pluralism and Liberalism 39

do not, I contend, manage to account effectively for the unique properties of

the child-​parent relationship.
Although it’s perhaps not the connection that Ramaekers and Suissa them-
selves would make, I propose that their arguments, as with others who focus
on the unique intimacy of the parental bond, are making a traditional (or con-
servative) connection, which echoes the natural law argument, between kin,
tribe and psyche (as in the psychical dynamic constitution of the individual). It
is perhaps this bond, and all that flows from it in terms of the particularity of
identity, that Berlin, who characterized himself as always a “Russian Jew”,90(p.11)
reflected in his challenge to the Enlightenment’s idealizing tendencies and his
primacy of the importance of values pluralism. A conservative religious per-
spective also adds another layer to this argument. In particular, the intimate
inequality which Suissa identifies at the heart of the parent-​child relationship
can also be considered as constitutive of duty as a value in family life. Not duty
in a purely legalistic sense, but duty in terms of the, as I discussed before, the
voluntary giving up of freedom. New parents are often told that having chil-
dren will “change their lives”. This can be taken to mean the sleepless nights,
and the school pick-​ups and so on, but in a religious sense it’s in the very act of
selflessness, of duty in terms of the sacrifice of the self for others, that brings a
unique and valuable type of freedom –​it is this that changes your life. Adding
to Ramaekers and Suissa, this selfless duty is also a unique aspect of the child-​
parent relationship that interpenetrates with the child’s knowledge, sublimin-
ally as they grow, of the unique sacrifice made by the parent, that someone
has uniquely placed them and their needs above themselves. In Christianity
this resonates strongly with the idea of the suffering shepherd and the sacrifice
that G-​d made for the world. In Judaism, when a parent dies, the tradition
is to say Kaddish, the memorial prayer, for a period of one year. For all other
close relatives, including the tragic loss of a child, the period is one month.
This recognizes the unique duty, the unique investment that the parent makes
for their child. This is not an investment, not a duty, that can be replicated by
the state. Straddling particularist and universalist positions, Berlin, in setting
out his emphasis on negative liberty and value pluralism, whilst privileging the
specificity of identity and the fundamental right of choice, also argues against
relativism and proposes an empirical (minimum) common human horizon of
values shared across societies. I would contend that such a common human
horizon includes and even is predicated on the bonds based on the unique
reciprocity between parents and children. Other liberal thinkers, such as
Kekes, have made similar essentially natural law argument based on the unique
features of the family.91 Thus, there remain tensions, which as Gray suggests,
Berlin in a sense highlights in his arguments for value pluralism, between lib-
eral notions of autonomy and the traditional view of the uniqueness of the
bond between children and parents. Such a perspective is also in significant
tension with Marxist, feminist and postmodernist perspectives which critique
family structures.92 Such tensions inevitably play out in educational spaces and
present conflicts that teachers and schools need to address.
40 Value Pluralism and Liberalism

Liberal Education and Special Educational Needs

Liberal perspectives on education have not given, it is true to say, significant
enough attention to disability and disadvantage.48 Rawls has been critiqued
for not placing enough focus on what have been called epistemic as well as
economic social goods.30 The sociological critique of the medical model, in
its Foucauldian form, can be considered as a critique of (a) the normative
assumptions and values, and the normative accumulation of advantage that
are hidden behind the supposedly neutral liberal facade, and (b) the similarly
hidden linkages between power and the knowledge of the human sciences,
when applied to difference, within the liberal order. Thus, the sociological
critique questions the assumptions, and thus the privileging of certain values
in liberalism. In its various forms, liberalism’s focus on justice and private
property, particularly on individual economic rights and liberties, as opposed
to wider conceptions of social responsibility, is also the target, in its activist
form, of the sociological critique. The critique thus appears subsumed into a
critique of neoliberal economics, and is re-​presented as an argument for sig-
nificant social revolution, including in relation to the structure of the family.
Whether of course it’s the role of teachers or the education system at all to
engage in such “public” activism for such social re-​engineering is one of the
key questions that liberal perspectives on education poses which tends to
remain unexamined in such accounts. Further, given that the revolution may
be some time coming, the real implications for practice in the real world of
teaching and schools of such a positioning often tend to be unexamined, as
in for example accounts of neoliberalism and early years education by Robert-​
Holmes and Moss.93

The Capability Approach

One way in which the issue of resources and disadvantage has been addressed
is in the work of Amartya Sen94 and Martha Nussbaum95 on capability theory.
Sen’s key point, as expressed by Anderson,96(p.320) is that:

Because of differences in their internal capacities and social situations, people

are not equally able to convert resources into capabilities for functioning.
They are therefore entitled to different amounts of resources so they can
enjoy freedom as equals.96

Thus, Sen notes that in order to ensure equality in the social goods required
to participate in society, account needs to be taken of the fact that people have
different abilities to convert economic resources (i.e. money or services) into
such goods (capabilities for functioning) and that social constraints may simi-
larly cause differential ability to make use of resources. Both Sen and Nussbaum
see education as a central capability. Terzi97 has considered in some depth how
the capability approach can be applied to inclusion and education, arguing
 Value Pluralism and Liberalism 41

that it offers a way to overcome the social/​medical model divide by providing

a framework for addressing the diverse needs of students with special educa-
tional needs. Thus, individual characteristics and environmental factors are
reframed not as deficit or failure in social adaptation but rather as the con-
text in which individuals can differentially convert resources into functionings.
Whether such an approach, or its close cousin, the biopsychosocial model,98
truly do anything to resolve the tensions inherent in education and inclu-
sion, is in my view highly questionable.99 Although it is true that compared
to Rawls, difference is certainly foregrounded as an issue, resource constraints
and the tensions that arise from them in respect of how to deal with difference
seem, at least to me, to continue to persist.
The Rawlsian (or resourcist) response to the capability approach is to argue
that such a model requires some sort of quite expansive listing of these desir-
able functionings, which involves a prescription of the good life which lies
outside of the requirements of fairness implied by a (social) liberal theory
of justice.10 Pogge and Pogge10 also note that understanding for any indi­­
vidual exactly how they can, on any meaningful comparative basis, convert
resources into capabilities is also problematic. In particular, how one can dif-
ferentiate between inherent ability and effort, and thus how a criterion of
desert in respect of justice as value can be properly considered, is quite unclear
in accounts of the capability theory, even though both Sen and Nussbaum
emphasize the role of agency in the theory. This is an important point in terms
of education and inclusion –​in that very often a key question for teachers is
how to differentiate between ability and effort, in that when a teacher sets a
child a task, there is no easy informational basis to decide between the two.
This issue becomes even more acute with children who are considered to have
difficulties with learning in a particular area of study.

Critiques of Participation

Critiques of liberalism from communitarian and social/​relational perspectives

also focus, particularly in terms of disability, on whether enough account has
been taken of the need to develop the autonomy and thus the ability to par-
ticipate of the disabled child.25 Thus, Felder23 argues for a social relational
view of inclusion and education, emphasizing the important role of education
in ensuring that both disabled children and their families have sufficient pol-
itical power to engage in meaningful representation. Although it’s true that
liberal perspectives can be rightly criticized for not giving such issues enough
attention, I think that there are in fact strong liberal arguments that can be
brought to bear on such concerns. As discussed, there is a classical liberal
concern to promote the autonomy of children. Further, equal representation
and protection under the law are in fact classical liberal concepts,6 and equal
protection, in law, requires that individuals have the capacity to represent their
perspectives, and that such assistance as is required to allow for such represen-
tation is to be made available.
42 Value Pluralism and Liberalism

Autonomy

Liberal perspectives on autonomy and agency also have wider relevance for
inclusion and education. Autonomy provides the foundation for agency, and
in the liberal tradition, part of the rationale for autonomy is very much its
role in facilitating agency. Agency in Kantian terms is the rational individual
mind exercising the right to choose, whether this is through, as McGee100
puts it, the classic case of deciding whether or not to raise your finger in the
air, or by extension in any number of other arenas areas such as, for example,
deciding as a teenager to go to the shops after school rather than come home.
Liberal thinking positions autonomy and by corollary agency as central values,
although as we have seen in communitarian and conservative critiques of
liberalism, this is balanced by social concerns or competing values such as
duty. Thus, Rawls and his communitarian critics don’t deny the importance
of autonomy but rather debate what emphasis should be given to it. Thus,
it may well be that other values and related needs suggest there are good
reasons to constrain autonomy, particularly when this is about protecting
others from harm.

Implications in School

In terms of education and inclusion, the teacher in the classroom is continu-

ously confronted with the issue of autonomy and agency. What space should
be given for children to express their own views, to choose what they study
or not? Should children be allowed to go to the toilet during lessons without
asking permission (something of course that we would never expect of adults)?
Thinking of Summerhill, should children be allowed to choose whether to go
to lessons or not at all? At break times, should children be allowed to choose
who they want to play with even if this means some children might not feel fully
included? Should children (and families) be allowed to invite who they want
to birthday parties, or can the school or teacher impose rules (say for example,
if more than half the class, everyone needs to be invited)? The list goes on. In
coming to decisions on these matters, schools and teachers are, whether impli-
citly or explicitly, balancing other values and concerns, such as the needs of
other children for effective teaching, the expectations of family and state with
regard to curriculum, the need to develop aspects of civics such as skills for
autonomy and critical thinking, and the efficient use of resources. The latter is
also important in respect of teachers –​their energy, their capacity for mental
attention and the number of hours in the day is limited. So, for example, let’s
say a particular elementary-​age child has a very strong interest in space and a
discussion in morning form time happened to touch on this and the child says
to the teacher “Can we learn about space today?”. How should the teacher
respond? How far if at all should she balance the agency of this child against
the limits of resources? In some idealized world where time and resources were
not limited, the teacher could well say yes that’s fine let us spend today on
 Value Pluralism and Liberalism 43

space, we can come back to everything else tomorrow. Yet in the real word of
limited time and resources, there are losses involved for the children, perhaps
for the state even, in making such a decision. So I think it’s quite safe to say
that in the vast majority of classes in the vast majority of countries, the teacher
would say no, or might perhaps spend a limited time on learning about space,
because of the need to balance the autonomy and agency of this one child
with both the autonomy of other children (let’s assume that not all of them
want to spend the day learning about space) and wider concerns about limited
resources for teaching the rest of the curriculum. Concerns about resources
then intercalate with concerns about autonomy and agency in the classroom.
If we now consider a child identified as having special educational needs, say
age 6, in a mainstream primary classroom. Let us say that this child has some
specific learning difficulty and finds it more difficult than her classmates to
recognize phonemes and blend words. The teacher prepares some scaffolding
for her in the afternoon before the lesson, to help her access the written work.
This helps but still during the lesson the child keeps calling the teacher over
to help her with the blending. What should the teacher do? Perhaps she could
sit her next to a more able child by her to help with the reading? Perhaps
she should come and sit with the child for an extended period, leaving other
children in the class who might also need her attention? Perhaps she should
encourage the child to try and work by herself, looking out to praise her when
she makes this effort? Perhaps she should give her in the moment an alterna-
tive text that is easier for her to access even if it does not help her develop her
reading skills? Now, of course, there is considerable literature on these kind
of issues on education and inclusion and literacy teaching, which proposes
many helpful things to consider in terms of classroom organization and peda-
gogy,101 particularly around differentiated instruction and universal design for
learning102,103 and the teacher and the school may well be able to make sig­­
nificant use of these suggestions in making decisions both in the moment and
reflectively later on how best to approach supporting this individual child in the
context of the whole class. Nevertheless, these approaches are not, I contend,
a complete solution to the issues of limited resources and of conflicts in rela-
tion to autonomy and agency that this case and the million others like it that
take place in classrooms across the world every day throw up. In an obvious
sense, the time that the teacher spent on for example developing scaffolding
resources for one child is a limited resource that cannot then be used on doing
something else, whether that something else is something in the teacher’s life
(from the perspective of work/​life balance) or preparing other things for the
class as a whole. The case also raises issues of autonomy, agency and liberty –​
thus what if the child asked to help with the reading does not want to, and
even if they are willing, harbour somewhere a resentment that they could not
get further with reading the book they wanted to at the pace they wanted
to. There is also an intercalation between ability and effort, linked to agency.
When deciding whether to ask the child to essentially be more independent
and try harder, the teacher needs to make a judgement and thus a decision on
44 Value Pluralism and Liberalism

the balance between ability and effort on the part of the child. How much is it
about an impairment in their ability to do the task (or a variation in capability)
and how much is it about the amount of effort that they are making. Putting
this another way, to what extent are they exercising the agency that they do
have to decide to or to not make that effort, and if they are not making it,
then there is a wider value that the teacher is likely wanting to promote about
“working hard” or “doing our best”, which is an emphasis on excellence as
a value. As Pogge and Pogge10 note, although they might want to make a
judgement about this, differentiating between ability and effort (for anyone
making such a judgement in any context) is not always very straightforward,
and as such, this makes it more difficult for the teacher to make a decision.
However, whatever decision is made is a balancing between issues of equality
in terms of how resources are allocated to ensure equality of opportunity, and
agency. Lukianoff and Haidt,104 writing about higher education, suggest that
from a liberal perspective there should be more emphasis in education on the
old aphorism of “Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child”,
i.e. in dealing with difference in education we should give more primacy to
matters of simple equality in resource allocation, partly because a principle of
equal treatment (an aspect of strict justice) places limits on the extent to which
we should vary resource allocations. In my view, this is inescapable in any real
world where resources are limited. Of course, in terms of both national and
supranational policies, which are inevitably located in the real world, there is
clear recognition of resource limitations, which is why phrases like “reason-
able accommodations” are a feature of their language. The word reasonable
implies that because resources are not unlimited, there are limits, based on a
principle of justice, to how far the state or organizations (or individuals) can
go in terms of meeting individual needs. Shakespeare105 has shown, in respect
of disability studies and sociological activism, the importance of considering
real-​world constraints and the limits of how the social model can be applied.
Thus, Shakespeare notes how the idea of universal wheelchair accessibility is
subject to real-​world constraints, such as the fact that it would be virtually
impossible to make the “mountains, bogs, beaches” 105(p.213) of the world fit
for wheelchair use.2

Inclusion and Value Conflict

It is the case that many who disagree with the liberal and neoliberal concep-
tion of education have objected to the inclusion in policy documents of this
phrasing. Sometimes this is aligned to a sociological critique of disability.106,107
Sometimes the critique goes further and is aligned to a wider critique of capit-
alism in general, and/​or that sees the political structures of liberal democracy
as reflecting historical patterns of unequal resource allocation which needs
to be corrected.108 These are legitimate positions to take, although they are
only positions that are themselves subject to critique and debate, and it’s also
unclear, in my view, how useful they are to teachers and schools in most of
 Value Pluralism and Liberalism 45

the real world in terms of thinking about policy and practice. The concept of
inclusion, particularly as it is applied in respect to education in the academic
literature, tends however to ignore such issues of resource limits, resource allo-
cation decisions and value conflicts. Inclusion is seen in an idealized way, and
the process of idealization that it undergoes in its application in the real world,
means that it becomes somewhat denuded of content. Cigman109 has argued
that inclusion used in this way can become blind to suffering, suggesting for
example that sometimes when inclusion activists argue for mainstreaming
for all, this involves a lack of consideration of how this might work in prac-
tice, and a lack of concern for potential harms, in that some children may
well be much happier in special rather than mainstream settings. I think this
overstates the case in that inclusion theorists and activists are, I think, usually
very concerned with individual suffering –​they are certainly not, as perhaps
implied, Robespierres of 21st century education. However, I think the sub-
stantive point is that the idealizing tendency in inclusion does often mean
that there is a lack of sufficient consideration of how things might actually
work in practice. The argument I am making is not that the concerns of inclu-
sion in education are not important, they are, but that in order to properly
understand those concerns and how they can be addressed, we need to con-
sider more precisely the different values involved, and the tensions and clashes
between them. I shall turn now to Berlin’s account of value incommensur-
ability and Crowder’s account of Berlin’s value pluralism, which will provide
some tools for considering this matter.

Berlin and the Pursuit of the Ideal

Olssen7 notes that Berlin, in his essay the Pursuit of the Ideal,110 contrasts the
difference between the values of Machiavelli’s political realism, which might
be characterized as pagan and associated with classical imperialism, and those
of Christianity. Berlin contrasts the former’s privileged values as “bravery,
courage, pride” with the latter’s as “humility, meekness, suffering, acceptance,
unworldliness”,110(p.8) at least as publicly professed. Berlin’s key point, as Olssen
notes, is that, as Machiavelli admits, these two systems of values are incom-
patible.7 What Berlin importantly does is note that as well as being incom­
patible they are also incommensurable. This means that there is no external
point of reference for measuring different values, so that one could say that
value X is worth more than value Y, or that there is any fungibility between
them, i.e. that a measure of value X could be taken to replace some measure of
value Y. As Kekes91 notes, incommensurability is contingent on local incom­
patibility between values (e.g. wanting to do two things reflecting differing
vales that cannot practically be achieved at the same time). We don’t need to
go as far as considering, for the issue of education and inclusion in the 21st
century, as to whether we have clashes with the value system of the Roman
Republic to understand, as I have set out, that value conflicts are inherent
in public policy, particularly in terms of the welfare state and education. We
46 Value Pluralism and Liberalism

could equally consider, as I have noted before, value system conflicts between
liberal and communitarian perspectives –​freedom versus solidarity; diversity
versus community, or between liberal and conservative views –​debate versus
agreement, experiment versus tradition, and the liberal downplaying of other
values such as duty, courage and perhaps love. Berlin’s point is as much that
when we have such value conflicts, choosing one over the other leads to an
absolute loss, and as Crowder notes, “the losses that result from trade-​offs
cannot be wholly compensated but will inevitably possess an absolute and
perhaps tragic quality”.8(p.62) In my classroom example above, the child who is
asked to help with the reading absolutely loses the time that they could have
spent pursuing reading at their own level and interest. One of the notable
things about education is that the time that children are children is short and
limited, and I think, as Berlin suggests, that whatever the social recompense,
the impact on “neighbourhood effects”, you cannot ever get the time back.
This argument is also at the core of those liberal thinkers (such as Hayek111 or
more recently Stokes112) who argue that social justice is a meaningless or at
least misleading term, in that social effects and strict justice, in liberal terms,
are not commensurable. Berlin also uses this point of value incommensur-
ability to (heavily) critique idealist philosophies and theorists who think that
such value conflicts are easily resolvable or that if they are not resolved, this
is not due to actual conflicts between values but rather to human wickedness,
ignorance or self-​interest, particularly class self-​interest.3 For Berlin, this con­
cern plays a central role in his preoccupation with negative liberty, as a bul-
wark against the idealizing tendency and its inherent dangers in thinking that
(a) simple solutions are possible, and that (b) the state can impose their view of
simple solutions on individuals and families without costs. At least in part, his
experiences during the Russian Revolution persuaded him that they cannot.
If we apply this to education and inclusion, there are a number of resonances.
For example, the idea that there are simple solutions or formulations such as
“Good teaching for children with SEN is good teaching for all children”113
that can allow us to escape the need to think about the trade-​offs involved in
dealing with difference in the classroom. As well, the idea that simply chan-
ging attitudes and beliefs, that is teacher self-​interest, or teacher ignorance or
indeed teacher wickedness in not having the right attitudes and beliefs, in and
of itself can somehow solve these tensions. There are more areas which can
be noted, but the point is that inclusion as an unexamined concept does not
obviate the value tensions involved in education.
Critics of Berlin, notably Dworkin,114 have suggested that Berlin overplays
incommensurability, and that by restricting the scope of their conception of
values, i.e. so that (in some ways similarly to Rawls) more recognition is given
to their contingent composite nature (for example, liberty means freedom
to do what you want as long as it does not impinge on others), the issues
identified by Berlin become much less troubling. Berlin and others argue in
response that many people hold perspectives that are deeply attached to the
“pure” conceptualizations.115 However, if Berlin is right in proposing that
 Value Pluralism and Liberalism 47

values are incommensurable and that there are absolute losses involved in
making decisions, then, as such, decisions and trade-​offs still need to be made.
Crowder8,9 highlights that Berlin wants to highlight that national and local pol­­
itical decisions about such trade-​offs are very serious and significant. Crowder
agrees with Berlin that compromise is possible and that this can best come
about through processes that are both democratic and liberal and that pay due
regard to the importance of the values at stake; it involves “negotiat[ion] in
the spirit of … pluralist virtues”.8(p.255) Further, Berlin, in common with Kekes,
and as agreed with largely by Gray, argues that cultural tradition should play
a significant part in making choices amongst incommensurable values,8 and
linked to this, Gray4 argues that this implies that it is the pragmatic, con­
crete particulars of individual conflicts (which are inevitably cultural in a wide
sense) that need to be taken into account, as opposed to higher level idealist
perspectives, when making decisions.

Implications?
If then value pluralism is viewed as important in public policy, and there is
no easy idealist set of measures that can be appealed to in deciding between
different values, what should we do?
Mclaughlin53 adopts a similar stance to Berlin in his proposal that in
addressing such value conflicts in the classroom, teachers should adopt an
approach based on (an Aristotelian) phronesis, whereby teachers exercise
their localized professional expertise and experience. Thus, judging indi-
vidual situations based on our local practical wisdom offers the best approach
to choosing between values in day-​to-​day experience. Such decisions in rela-
tion to the particulars of cases will involve qualitative judgements based on
the ethical experience of that situation, rather than any quantitative measure.
In the context of education and inclusion, this might be considered a call
for the exercise of professional judgement based on both experiential know-
ledge116 and an individual’s wider understanding of their own individual con­
ception of the good life and what is accepted (in a limited fashion which
respects individual and family autonomy and diversity of perspectives) in
their society as constituting the good life.2,91 From Berlin’s perspective and
that of liberal educational theorists, as I have noted, that conception of the
good life would recognize that civics in common schools needs to be limited
in its scope. It would include a recognition that a range of values could be
recognized as worthy of note. It would hold a neutral perspective on the
good life.

Relativism?

This is not, however, a retreat into relativism. A frequent criticism of Berlin is

that he is, in proposing value pluralism, a sort of relativism and that he has no
clear defence against the paradox of toleration. Olssen7 makes this critique of
48 Value Pluralism and Liberalism

Berlin and proposes as a defence against such relativism, a moderate vitalism

such as that espoused by Deleuze or Bergson,117,118 whereby what contributes
to the continuation of life acts as an external reference point for deciding on
values. Olssen, in common with other thin communitarian critiques of the
liberal position, suggests that this gives a reasonable mechanism for making
decisions on what should be valued or not; however, Olssen’s preoccupation
with particular causes seems to suggest, again in common with similar critiques,
that it is more a question of his set of preferences that is being considered
rather than anything with an objective external purchase. It’s also untrue in my
view that Berlin adopts a relativist position. This is far from the case –​Berlin
was very clear in his opposition to totalitarianism. Ferrell119 argues that Berlin
did agree that there are issues in trying to simplistically resolve relativism in an
epistemological manner as this can lead to self-​contradiction. He also disagrees
with what he sees as the extreme subjectivism inherent in a cultural view of
relativism, i.e. that human societies and the value systems they create are cul-
turally and historically situated and thus can only be judged by local, not uni-
versal, criteria. Berlin3 argues that this suggests that different human cultures
and value systems are closed off and have no points of contact. Berlin instead
suggests that, whilst still being differentiated and specific, all human cultures
still have quite a lot of common points of contact –​what he calls a common
human horizon based on a set of universal values that we find in all cultures
forming, in an empiricist sense, a universal natural law. Others have proposed
similar approaches to value pluralism, such as Keke’s quasi-​natural law concept
of deep conventions.91
Berlin’s wider point is that, apart from within quite wide limits, which
in general even across cultures we can agree on, there are no defensible or
workable idealist solutions to the value trade-​offs we meet. That is not to
say that we don’t have frameworks or internal ethical resources to employ
in making decisions, far from it, but that, as Hayek44 argued, these are
inherently both limited (we cannot know everything or easily create uni-
versal rules) and, as Berlin agrees, generally local in character. As noted,
Mclaughlin53 argues that debates about political positioning with regard to
values in education has its limits and that teaching is inherently local and
contextual in character and, resonating with Berlin’s positioning, suggests
that it is local, experientially based professional knowledge and ethical
reflection (i.e. phronesis) that is primarily necessary in resolving the value
tensions inherent in education.
I have begun to touch on the potential value conflicts involved in education
and inclusion and where a proper account of different perspectives on values
might help illuminate, as Crowder indicates, the significance and seriousness
of the trade-​offs involved in making decisions in relation to these. I will briefly
now enumerate some of these in more detail to help orientate the discussion
further.
 Value Pluralism and Liberalism 49

Selected Sites of Value Incommensurability in Education and

Inclusion

Normality and Deficit

The issue of how to think about difference in the classroom inevitably relates to
the sociology of knowledge and the role of categorization. The sociological cri-
tique of the medical model, derived from a discursive approach, problematizes
the way in which, in education and more widely, the lens of the human sciences
focused on the child with special educational needs masks the ways in which
power might be wielded and abused. Thus, as in the Short Axe Education film,
the seeming objectivity of the IQ test is used to reinforce false assumptions about
the ability of boys of Caribbean heritage and then to use labelling, falsely, to allow
teachers to have low expectations about them and to impose those expectations
on the child, their family and their wider community. The sociological critique
deconstructs the very basis for the knowledge represented by the IQ test or psych-
ology more widely, positing the medical idea that some objective deficit in the
child themselves is based on a false ontological and epistemological assumption.
The idea of deficit thinking is prominent in contemporary educational
thought and practice, often linked to accounts of racist and classist modes
of thinking.120 Anecdotally, in teacher education, certainly in England, par­
ticular approaches to special educational needs which are based on categoriza-
tion and labelling are often criticized with phrasing such as “Oh that’s deficit
thinking”. Yet this is only one way in which this can be viewed. Mapping this
onto debates about liberal political values, there is unquestionably a link to
differing perspectives on knowledge. This is something I will explore in more
depth in Chapter 3. Broadly, scientific realism in some form112 which considers
knowledge, to a lesser or greater degree, as having a purchase independent of
what is perceived, i.e. to represent something that can be objectively known,
and that has some freedom from the social and cultural context in which the
knower and the known are embedded, is associated with classical and neo-
liberalism. Berlin in Historical Inevitability3(p.150) notes that if all things are
regarded as inherently subjective, then (a) they have no meaning particularly if
terms such as subjective cannot be taken to mean their opposite, and (b) such a
position robs us of the possibility of assigning choice (agency) or desert to indi-
vidual actors, who cannot logically be taken to have the possibility of escaping
their local contextualization. Thus, for Berlin and indeed most classical liberal
thinkers, notions of the objectivity of knowledge and of agency, responsibility
and by extension individual justice, are inherently linked. A liberal perspective,
whilst not at all ignoring concerns about differential treatment based on false
assumptions, nor the issues identified in the dilemma of difference at a process
level, raises the question of whether there is some sense in which we can and
indeed should sometimes, on ethical grounds, make empirical determinations
50 Value Pluralism and Liberalism

about individuals and their capacities that have some independent reality. This
raises a number of questions for education and inclusion, including the status
and role of assessment; whether there are truly deficits internal to the child;
and the status and relevance (e.g. for teacher education) of evidence on special
educational needs derived from the human sciences.

Disability as Identity
Disability activists have for some time made the argument to “re-​classify” dis-
ability not as a negative marker but as a form of identity. The sociological cri-
tique of the medical model, particularly in terms of its use of Foucault, provides
the space for resistance, and one way that can be seen to have occurred is
by oppressed groups taking the label applied as an act of oppression, and
subverting or reclaiming this as a badge of identity.121 Although originally more
visible in respect of clearly recognizable disabled groups such as the deaf com-
munity,122 in recent years the move towards such a reclassification has spread
more widely in terms of general societal perceptions, notably in relation to
the autistic community.123 Debates about perceived language markers have also
accompanied this development, and the move to use an adjectival label (i.e.
autistic person rather than person with autism) links directly to the move to
re-​claim autism as a badge of identity. The move towards disability as identity is
linked to motivations around representation, autonomy and agency, as well as
the desire to promote a sense of pride, and to autonomously negate the nega-
tive associations of the label. One can view such a move perhaps as part of a
biopsychosocial perspective on difference, in that it seeks to mediate between
internal characteristics (by positioning these as markers of identity), whilst not
denying their reality, and providing an alternative lens through which the inter-
action of internal characteristics with societal mechanisms can be viewed. They
also stake out a position on entitlement. They argue, in contrast to much of the
liberal perspective on difference and economics, that the criteria by which, for
example, resource allocations are judged, and thus what justice might be taken
to mean, are flawed. Thus, they argue against a social liberal Rawlsian notion of
justice as fairness, in terms of how difference is positioned as a deficit in terms
of mutual cooperation. They also reject a Rawlsian (and certainly more liber-
tarian) perspective on justice, which sees limits to the extent to which resources
should be allocated towards the needs of individuals with disabilities.
In the classroom, such considerations intercalate with previous questions
raised in this section, particularly the extent to which difference should be
accommodated to meet the needs of the minority, even when this conflicts
with the needs of the majority.

Family and Parents, and the Place of Voice

Earlier I set out a particular position on the child in relationship to parents and
the family in relation to the state, which might be called traditional, and which
 Value Pluralism and Liberalism 51

conceives of the child as being in a state of dependency and development. The

child is regarded as qualitatively different in philosophical as well as legal terms
from adults and from parents.81 In liberal thought, the child has the capacity for
autonomy and agency, but this still needs to be developed.57 Criticisms of this
conceptualization of the child have particularly come from theorists proposing
what is sometimes termed the new sociology of childhood.124 This questions the
cultural and historical normativity of this idea of the child and childhood and
alternatively suggests that seeing children as “becomings”, rather than as com-
plete individuals in themselves, both misreads the ontological reality of what chil-
dren are and, as a corollary, places unnecessary restrictions on children’s lives and,
in particular, children’s choices. The new sociology of childhood is closely linked
conceptually to the student voice movement, which aims to create structures,
processes and attitudes that will allow children’s views and perspectives to be heard
and empower them in making choices.125 In values terms, we might consider the
clash here between traditional and sociological perspectives on childhood, and by
extension the relationship between child, parents and state, as a clash between an
emphasis on tradition and an emphasis on debate and experiment. Of course, a
nuanced reading of the new sociology of childhood indicates that what is being
proposed is a recognition that children have the ability to talk about their own
lives and experiences and to express choices in that context, not that they in truth
have the capacities, particularly at elementary age, for autonomous political citi-
zenship.126 There are also points of connection between the new sociology of
childhood’s focus on voice and the recognition in the literature on education and
inclusion23 that one of the issues with liberal perspectives on education has been
the lack of consideration of how to promote, as noted, equal participation of chil-
dren with special educational needs and their families. It is also the case that clas-
sical liberal perspectives have similarly placed an emphasis on the autonomy of the
child. Further, as discussed, the unique relationship of the parent and the child
also raises issues for both liberal and postmodernist perspectives on education.
Space does not allow for a full consideration of the debates around
autonomy, protection, choice and ability inherent in these arguments, but
in terms of inclusion and education, the new sociology of childhood raises
questions including: how and if to promote autonomy in children with special
educational needs, including what account to take of “voice” (for example in
respect of autistic children who might not want in simplistic terms to learn to
be collaborative); and the balance between parental versus child perspectives
on educational and placement decisions in special educational needs. It is
also worth noting that such questions also have a particular dimension when
applied to children with profound and multiple learning disabilities who may
not be able to directly verbalize their ideas and choices.23,48

Performative Assessment

The sociological critique suggests that the way that the lens of the human
sciences is brought to bear on difference assumes a range of normative
52 Value Pluralism and Liberalism

liberal conceptions about difference and how difference is conceptualized.

This critique of liberal conceptions of difference and knowledge about diffe-
rence is particularly pertinent to the issue of assessment. National and local
testing systems, which are based on predefined (pre-​categorized) academic
benchmarks, often use a restricted set of assumptions about knowledge, the
relationship between knowledge and skills, and the relationship between
ability, effort and outcomes.127 As such, they can tend towards, in terms of
the sociological critique, a restricted conceptualization of, and parameters
for measuring, success and achievement within the educational system as a
whole, which tends to penetrate down through the age phases.93 Neoliberal
state policies often adopt a focus on excellence and wider economic devel-
opment and gain as criteria for curriculum, pedagogy and in particular
assessment.128 Debates about assessment represent, therefore, sites of com­
peting value tensions, particularly excellence (and liberty) versus equality of
outcome. In the next chapter, I will consider how debates on knowledge
relate to debates on liberalism, the sociological critique and education and
inclusion in more depth.

Notes
1 I do not use neoconservative in its “everyday” use which is usually conceived of
in terms of a particular stance on US and Western policy on foreign intervention.
Rather, I use it in the sense it is applied to Scruton, Hazony and other conservative
thinkers such as Robert George, in the last two decades, to denote those theorists
who have wished at least to some extent disaggregate traditional conservative from
classical liberal thought, particularly in terms of how the rationality of the liberal
Enlightenment opposed the idea of tradition and natural law. This is not to argue
that there are no connections from this mode of approaching neoconservatism
to the everyday use of the term, but rather to note the focus in neoconservatism
on the recovery of tradition on the political right, which is the sense in which
I approach it in this book.
2 I would contend that it is situations of resource constraint such as this that the cap­
ability model fails to provide a solution for.

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3 Knowledge and Liberal
Perspectives on Inclusion

Classical liberalism is often associated with particular perspectives on know-

ledge. Various forms of realism, particularly scientific realism, can be seen as
overlapping with classic liberal ideas, particularly as the emphasis in realism on
an autonomous knowing subject corresponds with the emphasis on individual
autonomy and agency in liberalism. In respect of education and inclusion, the
postmodern sociological critique, particularly of the knowledge of disciplines
such as psychology of the human subject, clearly stands in tension with such
realist positions on the knowing subject and the implied ontological basis of
such knowledge.
However, perspectives on knowledge and an account of values are linked.
In particular, the sociological critique, in decentring the knowing subject, as
well as undermining notions of typicality, also has a radically different view of
values, for example in relation to strict justice on the individual level, in that
if the individual is decentred, then such a strict notion of justice or indeed a
Rawlsian notion of justice as fairness, based on an account of the essentially
selfish individual, cannot be maintained. However, there has been little dis-
cussion in the literature specifically on the relationship between epistemology,
political structures, values and tensions in education and inclusion, as discussed
in this book. Debates have focused more on whether there is a specific peda-
gogy for teaching children with special educational needs. Norwich has argued
strongly, in what I argue is a variant of the “good teaching for children with
special educational needs is good teaching for all”, that no such separate peda-
gogy exists,1 although I have argued that such a position is hard to maintain,
based on what can be seen in terms of actual practice, particularly for certain
categories of need such as autism.2 However, there is broader agreement3,4
that there may be a set of knowledge specific to special educational needs
that may be relevant to teachers’ work. The argument being that drawing on
such a body of knowledge may help teachers in making appropriate pedagogic
decisions in relation to individual needs, even if the quality or form of such
pedagogy, at least as argued by Norwich,1 may not be substantively different
enough to constitute a separate pedagogy. However, how to conceptualize
such knowledge in terms of trajectories of thinking within the sociology of

DOI: 10.4324/9781003294894-4
60 Knowledge and Liberal Perspectives on Inclusion

knowledge and its application to education, or how such trajectories might

articulate with political value tensions and dilemmas relating to education and
inclusion, has not been given any significant focus in the literature to date.
Such a conceptualization can, and in my view should, have implications in
relation to (a) the curriculum for teacher education for inclusion, i.e. what
is it that teachers should or should not learn about special educational needs
and what relevance that has (or not) for effective practice for difference in the
classroom, (b) the wider debate on evidence-​informed practice in schools and
the linked question of the appropriate agenda and priorities for educational
research for education and inclusion, and (c) a circling back and connection to
prior arguments about values such as tradition, innovation excellence, democ-
racy, and the value choices involved in the practice of education and inclusion
in schools.

Debates on the Sociology of Knowledge

Young5 notes that debates about the sociology of knowledge in education
in the past had a somewhat impoverished quality, partly because educational
theorists have been somewhat insulated in disciplinary terms, as educationalists,
from important debates and trends in the purer discipline of the sociology
of knowledge. Young’s project,5 in his seminal role in the “knowledge turn”
within curriculum studies, was to reclaim this “purer”, more robust conceptu-
alization about knowledge from outside education as a discipline, and to insert
it back into the debates in order to provide a justification for an emphasis
on knowledge within the curriculum, within the wider ongoing controversies
over knowledge versus skills.6,7 Young’s preoccupations with curriculum and
knowledge for compulsory age schooling are not central to the arguments
I present here, although there are points of connection to the issue of the cur-
riculum for teacher education. However, his broad argument about the need
to think about the place of knowledge within education and the philosophical
/​sociological debates about that, and his investigation in particular of social
realism, are germane to my discussion of education and inclusion, particularly
in terms of how we can conceptualize difference in the classroom.

Realism and Its Critiques

The sociological critique of the knowledge of the human sciences in disability
studies and education and inclusion parallels the wider critique of realist epis-
temology. Realism proposes a Cartesian split between the mind and a world
that is independent of the mind /​the knowing subject, and proposes that
at least to some extent we can come to know, even if only in approxima-
tion, about that world in a way which has a measure of independence (object-
ivity) from ourselves, i.e. we can come to know about the world as something
separate from ourselves.8 In the philosophy of knowledge, the warrant for
how we might then know something or not about the world was traditionally
 Knowledge and Liberal Perspectives on Inclusion 61

considered as the justified true belief conception of knowledge. In this, know-

ledge is a belief that is known to be true because it is well justified, either
because there is empirical evidence to support it that can be observed in the
world, or because it is otherwise reliable (for example due to direct percep-
tion or memory).9 Despite considerable philosophical discussion (such as
the Gettier problem10), such an approach to knowledge does fundamentally
underpin realism as an epistemological approach. Realism also discounts a
wide variety of fundamental attacks on justified true belief, which amount, to
differing degrees, in scepticism of the possibility of any warrants for our beliefs,
repositioning them as just that –​beliefs, without any objective claim that could
constitute knowledge of something independent of ourselves.11
Realism also has a strong consequentialist or common-​sense claim to object-
ivity, in that the success of modern science, based on a realist perspective on
knowledge, in producing predictive claims that are materially borne out in our
experience of the world –​such as the application of scientific knowledge to the
achievement of flight, antibiotics, the internal combustion engine and so on –​
strongly supports the existence of an objective knowledge. Notwithstanding
sceptical positions, as Toulmin11 notes, the idea of a knowing subject somehow
independent of the world is the fundamental basis of realism and, it can be
argued, is in parallel fundamental to classical liberal beliefs. The arguments for
realism, as made in relation to the natural sciences, are of course more com-
plex when applied to the social field, as that field is both socially constructed
and includes knowledge (i.e. those who know and the way they know8). The
consequentialist argument for realism in the natural sciences, i.e. the success
of the predictions of science, is also much less compelling when applied to the
social field. Nevertheless, the basic arguments as to the agentic knowing sub-
ject, and the differentiation between the knower and what is known, can still,
I argue, be applied.
Of course, realism has come under sustained attack since the beginning of
the 20th century, from postmodernism, feminism, and other directions such
as postcolonial theory. Moore and Muller12 put these perspectives together as
“voice discourses”, i.e. because they resonate, in their view, with a focus on iden-
tity and the representation (voice) of groups who are traditionally oppressed.
Voice discourses propose an empiricist rather than rational view of knowledge
in which it is emotionality or experience, not a justified true belief based on
evidence and a notion of a structure of knowledge, that determines value and
truth. Moore and Muller12 also suggest that this discourse, by deconstructing
the idea of the knowing subject, represents a collapse into relativism. They go
even further in arguing that (a) such an anti-​realist relativist position is not
tenable in terms of any practical perspective on knowledge, and that (b) one
reason that such voice discourses has shown such tenacity in the academy and
more widely as a perspective is more because of the social function it serves for
academics and activists –​i.e. suggesting that the existing body of knowledge
and ways of knowing as false is both exciting and a way for new academics
to make a name for themselves. Young5 argues that the progressive left, in
62 Knowledge and Liberal Perspectives on Inclusion

adopting such a position, has in fact done real harm, not least because by
decrying realist perspectives on knowledge, and particularly the place of know-
ledge within the curriculum, it has denied oppressed groups the chance to use
such knowledge to help themselves overcome that very oppression. However,
in making such an argument, Young5 does tend somewhat towards the polem­
ical and somewhat elides the complex debates about realism, putting the horse
rather too much before the cart. Others have made similar moves. Stokes13 for
example has also critiqued decolonization as a movement within higher edu-
cation, without staking out the connection between accounts of realism and
its critiques and such a position. A particular gap in such accounts is to make
a reasoned connection between public policy positions, values and knowledge.

The Sociology of Knowledge and Ethics

Postmodernist perspectives on knowledge, as with the sociological critique of
the human sciences and their role in special educational needs, propose that
there are no very good bases for differentiating between perception/​experi-
ence and knowledge as an idea of truth,5 partly or mainly because they decon­
struct the very concept of the knowing subject and posit that the mind is
simultaneously and iteratively created by contact with the world at the same
time as engaging with it. As such, to suggest that the mind and the world
can in a meaningful way be separated so that we can talk about someone
knowing something independently of the world becomes meaningless. Some
including Young,5 as well as Willower14 and Moore and Muller,12 suggest that
this postmodernist critique engages in a sort of straw man argument. So it
may be the case that positivism, as a kind of scientism, proposes a very strong
Cartesian duality between knower and object, in which knowledge takes on,
in a Kantian sense, a free-​floating context-​independent quality that the mind
through rational investigation comes to know and into which no social or cul-
tural or historical factors come to bear. Going back to Small Axe, such posi-
tivism argues, for example, that the IQ tests used by the school on black boys
in that film were in fact objective. Of course, that view of positivism is non-
sensical and unsustainable. Yet, argues Young, the postmodernist critique uses
this as a straw man and suggests that any idea of knowledge and independent
purchase, in any way, is similarly fatally flawed. Realism’s project, so to speak, in
its different flavours is to rebut this charge and to show how such an objective
view of knowledge is still possible even when the social context of know-
ledge production and use is taken into account. This project coincides with,
or is identical to, liberalism’s focus on the importance of values of autonomy,
agency, and even perhaps tradition in our accounts of knowledge. A link can
also be made to Berlin and value pluralism, and Berlin’s modernist notion of
a common human horizon (and other similar arguments), in that it could
be argued from a realist perspective that if there is no claim to knowledge as
truth, and if knowledge claims that can be made need to be seen as both pos-
itional and thus relativist, then there is potentially no such common human
 Knowledge and Liberal Perspectives on Inclusion 63

horizon that is knowable. As per Berlin, in the extreme, the positioning of the
knower rather than knowledge as the arbiter of truth can be seen as lying at
the root of totalitarian abuses of the individual.
Young also suggests that the straw man argument put forward, as he sets
out, by some postmodernists against knowledge, by only engaging in a some-
what extreme position on knowledge, effectively avoids having to engage in a
proper debate about knowledge, and debates about knowledge become a form
of “attack”.5(p.25) I would argue that one could see this as a form of defended
idealism (not something picked up on by Young), which we can see in the
instantiation of inclusion as a concept without very clear content. Although
not directly stated perhaps in the postmodernist sociological critique, for some
academics and activists it still represents something of a final, even teleological
truth, and that leads to a monist tendency whereby critical engagement with
content becomes undesirable, leading eventually to a concept that is somewhat
empty. One aspect of this emptiness, following Young’s logic, would be an
inadequate account of both what knowledge is or could be, and its potential
or actual role in either policy or practice. In terms of teacher education for
inclusion, for example, following Young, if process and product in relation
to what we know about difference in the classroom are elided as in the post-
modernist critique, then there is no external independent purchase point for
determining criteria for what is true or useful for teachers to know. Further,
particularly relevant in terms of education and inclusion, if identitarian pos-
ition, i.e. who knows rather than what is known –​another aspect of denying
a properly independent purchase point for truth or value –​are given primacy,
as in some views within postcolonial15 and critical theory,16 then it is unclear
whether we have a useful or indeed true basis for deciding what it is that
teachers should know about that may help them with effectively dealing with
difference in the classroom. It can be argued that understanding the social and
cultural contexts of knowledge production and use, one aspect of which is
how individuals may feel about such production processes that exclude them,
or understanding the false application of such knowledge and its consequences
is important. I would strongly agree that it is. Social realism, however, argues
that equating this with the position that knowledge itself is relativist (the straw
man argument) is false.

Social Realism
Durkheim’s social realism attempts to give a more effective account of the
social context of knowledge by proposing that we can split off the social and
historical context of knowledge production from the independent constituent
features (the truth value) of such knowledge.17,18 All knowledge is produced
by social actors working in a particular time, place and a particular social and
cultural context. Thus, there is always a risk that there are cognitive biases in
what knowledge producers (science and scientists in its wider sense) choose
to focus on, the methods they use, and the way they interpret the evidence
64 Knowledge and Liberal Perspectives on Inclusion

that they procure. This can indeed result, taking the sociological critique
of the positioning of children with special educational needs by the human
sciences has demonstrated as one example, in unequal opportunity. However,
whilst recognizing these constraints, social realism simultaneously notes that
such biases are not inherent to the process of knowledge production and use,
nor are they necessarily the dominant factors. The development of systems
of knowledge, including the relationships between concepts, and their differ-
entiation from every day concepts are a key part of Durkheim’s theory,5 and
are linked to disciplinary rules and processes, which tend to be agreed across
groups of scientists. Such processes and rules thus provide a warrant for know-
ledge as justifiable belief. Thus, Durkheim was interested to seek out a demar-
cation, or the possibility of a demarcation between what is social and what is
independently true in knowledge production and use.
Durkheim also proposes a particular ontological basis for knowledge, based
on its social nature. Starting with the observation that social ideas such as reli-
gion arise from social fields yet are not linked to actual phenomena in nature,
Durkheim theorizes that this demonstrates the way in which networks of
concepts arise, which are validated and given their truth value by their social
acceptance within the group, and argues that scientific concepts, albeit linked
to observable phenomena, develop and are validated in a similar way. Durkheim
further argues18 that this validation arises from a correspondence between the
structure of society and the structure of knowledge. Thus, Durkheim’s view
on knowledge can be seen to be a quasi-​Kantian view where social structures,
which have an independence from (albeit supervening on) individual minds,
provide the inescapable structures through which knowledge is produced and
used. Within that context, classifications of structures of knowledge then have,
through their mapping back onto such (a priori) social structures, a claim to
objectivity.
However, as Young5 notes, Durkheim’s theory has a distinctly modernist
and indeed idealist flavour in that it suggests that the social structures that
map onto knowledge structures are often common across different societies,
which opens it up to the (sociological) critique that is ahistorical and indeed
even asocial (as if every society is essentially the same in these structures, soci-
etal differences, at least in terms of their mapping to knowledge structures,
dissolve). Thus, some argue that Durkheim either collapses back into a naive
realism (or positivism) or makes the perhaps more limited point that external
biases can impact on knowledge producers, which is something that we should
be careful to monitor for.5 I would argue that liberal/​traditional “natural law”
arguments, following Kant (discussed below), in terms of common societal
structuring (such as Kekes19), do provide further support, albeit not without
possible critique, for some common social knowledge structures across soci-
eties. However, I contend, as does Young, that despite these critiques, the
differentiation between external and internal factors is the most important con-
tribution that Durkheim’s theory makes, in that it provides support for a view
of knowledge that differentiates clearly between the value of what is known
 Knowledge and Liberal Perspectives on Inclusion 65

and the knower, at the same time as recognizing the potential biases arising
from the cultural and historical location of knowledge in a wider social field.

Scientific Realism, Knowledge and Values

Scientific realism also aims to respond to the critiques of postmodernism, fem-
inism etc., and parallel critiques by Kuhn20 and Feyerabend,21 which suggest
that the social context of knowledge production in science goes beyond
mere context and ontologically implies a relativist rather than foundationalist
account of knowledge. Dicken22 encapsulates scientific realism as essentially
Kantian in form. Kant’s Copernican revolution was a response to a key issue
with realism in that the idea that our sense impressions directly represent
the world is impossible to have certainty about, as the sceptics point out, as
acquiring such certainty would require us to have an independent purchase
point outside of our sense impressions, which we clearly can’t have.22 Yet given
the fact of the success of our scientific theories, Kant’s solution as to why this is
the case, and thus give a basis for realism, was a rationalist attempt to treat such
independent purchase as illusory, and to note that (a) experience of the inde-
pendent world must be accessed via our human sensory equipment, and that
(b) as these are the necessary conditions for any experience, then in a ration-
alist sense our theories must be true as they are created by those conditions
for experience.8 Causation, therefore, for Kant is an a priori synthetic, and
thus, as is one of the problematic issues with Kant’s account,23 the noumenal
world of “things in themselves” is something that in the phenomenal world
(i.e. the world as structured by our sense structures) cannot be accessed by
us.24 Whilst not getting into all the complexity of Kant’s epistemology (see for
example Ward23 for a useful account), I note that Kant’s transcendental idealist
account of perception and knowledge supports Kant’s wider ethical agenda in
the Copernican revolution in his three critiques, thus linking knowledge to
ethics (and values). This rests on the argument that given the split between
the noumenal and phenomenal world, and given that it seems to ourselves
that we at least in some conditions have agentic choice, then the only way
to explain this is via the noumenal world acting as a first cause for action, in
some way, in the phenomenal world, thus meaning that we can act as knowing
subjects who have autonomy and agency.24 Magee25 highlights this argument,
as noted previously, via the seminal finger test. If you sit in a room with no
distractions and look at your finger, and decide to move your finger up and
down once, and reflect on this, where is the first cause coming from such
an action that can be said to reside outside of yourself as an agent? Magee25
proposes that this is the root argument of Kant’s transcendental idealism
that his Copernican revolution in thinking about perception and knowledge
underpins. Thus, Kant’s epistemology implies the fundamental nature of
human beings as moral agents who are also, because of their unique ability in
the world (apart from G-​d) to be first causes, inherently ends and not means.
Kant’s ethics also subordinates such autonomy to a concept of natural moral
66 Knowledge and Liberal Perspectives on Inclusion

law, which also derives from his Copernican revolution and the idea that the
laws we have are necessary in nature and also related to the structuring of our
sensory equipment. At the same time, for Kant, autonomy is the autonomy to
make choices (i.e. first cause choices as ends and not means) in relation to such
natural moral law, and thus to do the right thing.23(p.152) Thus, for Kant, people
are autonomously moral and, within the phenomenal world, are also ration-
alist knowing subjects. We can trace a connection between Kant’s approach
to rationalist autonomy and choice and classical liberal ideas.26 Although it is
true that Kant’s transcendental idealism simultaneously opened up the idea of
constructionism, and thus perhaps also laid a path which lead to the decon-
struction of the knowing subject,27 Kant’s Copernican revolution lays out a
particular view of the knowing subject which is quite different in terms of its
focus on autonomy, agency, freedom and responsibility from that laid out in
postmodern frameworks.23 It also crucially implies a minimum common set of
values (as in Kant’s categorical imperative), based on the idea that as everyone
has fundamentally the same sensory apparatus, natural laws will be common
across culture, temporally and spatially.
Durkheim’s social realism, as I noted, follows Kant in its idealist positioning;
however, it moves the locus of the ideal “apparatus of perception” from the
individual to the social.

Critiques of Kant and Underdetermination

If Kant is taken as a starting point for scientific realism, then as Dicken22

notes, there has been consideration about whether Kant’s account survives
the challenges presented to it by later scientific developments which do not so
easily support the idea of a rationalist mapping between our sense structures
and their representations and accounts of the phenomenal world, such as
non-​Euclidean geometry. This has led to significant debates within scien-
tific realism and further attempts to give substantive warrant to our beliefs of
true knowledge and the evident material success of scientific theories.22 These
attempts have in particular followed linguistic lines which aim to replace a rep-
resentational idea of truth (things are true because our medium or represen-
tation is identical to them) with a linguistic one (i.e. things are true because
they follow on from our linguistic use of them22). However, as a defence for
realism this has not been particularly successful, as it would seem to suggest
that different languages or sets of speech codes within languages would lead
to both different knowledge production and scientific predictions about the
world. Thus, in the end such a position does not serve to provide a warrant
in any useful sense for why scientific theories are effective in practice. Indeed,
a very similar position –​that language both structures and represents what is,
without any substantive role for a knowing subject –​is an important element
of postmodernist thinking.
The debates about scientific realism are ongoing, noting that Kant’s
accounts do not in the end give a clear enough warrant for how we can achieve
 Knowledge and Liberal Perspectives on Inclusion 67

a purchase point outside of our own representation, and which continue to

seek an objective warrant for the success of scientific theories. A key element
of these debates is the issue of underdetermination of theory by evidence.28
This critique proposes that scientific theories are not, and indeed cannot be,
complete descriptions of reality (even from a Kantian perspective of the phe-
nomenal world). To take a prosaic example, science initially proposed that a
table is made up of atoms, which consist of neutrons, protons and electrons,
but then over time goes on to propose that such objects are constituted of
smaller and smaller entities such as quarks.28 This illustrates that what we think
of as scientific correspondence to reality changes over time, and this in itself
is an argument (pessimistic meta-​induction) for disbelieving that scientific
theories approximate objectively to a real world.22 It also highlights the idea
that science can perhaps only ever give us heuristic tools (models) that are
a way of making sense of our observations of the world, but cannot give us
any understanding, even if only approximate, in an objective sense about the
real world. There are plenty of defences to such critiques from realists,29,30
although space precludes considering here in any depth.

A Common-​Sense View of Knowledge

Given that no one really doubts the predictive success of scientific theories,
then even if justifications are only instrumental or pragmatic, many argue
that these debates about scientific realism, at least as applied to the nat-
ural sciences, are pseudo problems. Hilary Putnam,31 for example, holds an
“internal realism” perspective that if science can successfully predict the phe-
nomena of the real world, in ways that are useful (such as creating antibiotics
that stop people dying), then that is good enough. Putting this another
way, Putnam treats the debates such as the ones sketched out above as an
example of a category error, in that the point of such knowledge produc-
tion is whether they help us in organizing and making sense of the world,
not whether they fully represent in an objective sense an independent reality.
This can be regarded as a common-​sense view of what knowledge actually
means in the world. Berlin, in Historical Inevitability, makes a similar point
about both knowledge and the knowing subject,32 in the social field as well
as in relation to natural science. As with many others (e.g. Magee25), Berlin
notes that in our everyday lives, and indeed when looking back at history,
we apply standards of moral agency to individual actions. We view Stalin and
Hitler as having been moral agents who made very bad moral choices, which
were not just dependent on the impersonal forces of history. Similarly, today
we might apply such standards of moral agency to say Hamas terrorists who
raped young women on October 7th –​i.e. that they had moral agency inde-
pendent of impersonal forces around them, and made very bad choices as
moral agents. Berlin notes the parallel between the knowing moral agent and
the knowing subject more generally. Following Kant, he argues, that it is the
delineation between the knower and the subject, the fundamental ability to
68 Knowledge and Liberal Perspectives on Inclusion

categorize between one thing and another, in a general sense, that leads to
the ability to differentiate between good and evil, or between one value and
another and make choices in relation to them. Similarly, Furedi,33 mirroring
Adorno,34 has argued that this ability to differentiate between values is a fun­
damental ethical function, and that such differentiation interpenetrates with
how we ethically make sense of foundational knowledge concepts in society
as well. This can be linked to how we might make sense of difference in the
classroom so, for example, the very idea of different versus normal or typical
could be considered as consequent to the idea of a moral agentic knower
differentiated from what is known. This presents quite a different perspective
on the role of categorization in special educational needs from that of the
sociological critique. Such a position resonates with Young’s5 and Moore and
Muller’s12 consideration of an emphasis on “voice discourses” coming out
of postmodernist and other progressivist positions as being a threat, perhaps
similarly to Putnam, to the application of useful knowledge in society. Thus,
an interrogation of what knowledge is is recast as not just a debate on know-
ledge but on values as well.

Implications for Education and Inclusion

What then are the implications for such debates about knowledge for educa-
tion and inclusion?
Two key areas are the curriculum for teacher education for inclusion and
related debates about evidence-​informed teaching. I have previously argued
that too little consideration has been given to knowledge, particularly propos-
itional knowledge in teacher education for inclusion.2,35 As Young36 and Rata37
have noted, one of the risks of postmodernist and other critiques of realist
positions on knowledge is that they can deny particular groups things that
they need and want. Thus, if voice and identity discourses are, as suggested,
sometimes a way of giving primacy and status to those who are challenging
the status quo with regard to knowledge, then they run the risk of, as in
Durkheim’s analysis, not differentiating carefully enough between external
bias factors and internal objective truth value when considering the proven-
ance of knowledge. In this context, Rata38 notes that if disciplinary know­
ledge is excluded from children from lower socio-​economic groups, partly on
the basis that such children either can only access local knowledge situated
in their “own culture”, or are somehow better suited to experiential rather
than scientific kinds of knowledge, then this translates in fact to a poverty of
expectation, and means that their chances to compete in the labour market
(i.e. to have equality of opportunity) are usually, in practical material terms,
reduced. Rata37 also notes that the people (academics, activists, politicians)
who promote such a “voice discourse” view are often those who have them-
selves benefitted economically from school curricula and pedagogies focused
on such disciplinary knowledge. Such debates are common in education
policy and have significant interplay with political philosophies and value
 Knowledge and Liberal Perspectives on Inclusion 69

tensions in education and inclusion. For example, during the 2010–​2015

Conservative-​led UK government’s period of office, Michael Gove was the
Secretary of State for Education (primarily with responsibility for England as
education is a matter devolved to the four nations). Gove39 waded strongly
into the skills versus knowledge debate and pushed hard for a move towards
a more knowledge-​based curriculum. There was also some debate40 as to the
extent to which this “knowledge turn” in policy was or was not influenced
by the “knowledge turn” in academic debates on curriculum, spearheaded
as it was by Michael Young. Due to these and other largely neoliberal policy
developments, Gove became very unpopular amongst education academics,
teacher unions, and many (although certainly not all) teachers.41 In many
circles, including the ones I mixed in as a teacher educator, to have spoken
about inclusion, education and Gove in the same sentence, would, I think,
have been met with either ridicule or icy stares. Yet taking a step back, and
as I have proposed, looking beyond inclusion as a hegemonic yet perhaps
somewhat empty concept, we can see that there are arguments on both sides.
For a particular school system, in a particular country, particularly a liberal
democratic capitalist technologically advanced society, there were choices to
be made about disciplinary knowledge and difference. Although not mapping
quite directly onto the previous discussion on value tensions, this debate on
knowledge I think does highlight different approaches to achieving justice
and promoting autonomy. We can see Gove as adopting what might be
termed a Durkheimian cognitive view of the social basis of knowledge, in
which knowledge has a common cultural basis independent of who it is who
knows, and thus viewing all groups as being entitled to access and benefit
from that. An alternative postmodernist critique sees the social basis of know-
ledge and its inherent biases and positioning with regard to power as consti-
tutive of such knowledge, and in its activist form sees the role of education
as to both uncover and correct such biases. Both may well have a similar aim
in wanting to improve the lives of children, but it’s not clear that a priori, in
terms of “inclusion”, one perspective is immediately preferable to the other.

Teacher Education

I have elsewhere argued that a similar critique to Rata’s can be brought to bear
upon the relevance of disciplinary knowledge from science, mainly psychology,
for children with special educational needs, in terms of teacher education
and inclusion.2 Such knowledge might include disciplinary knowledge from
psychology about for example autism as a diagnostic category, or could also
encompass knowledge often straddling psychology and education about the
effectiveness of particular evidence-​based practices3,42 in relation to different
categories of need such as social, emotional and mental health or areas of phys-
ical disability. This could also include knowledge about typical and atypical
child development, and common pedagogies that are thought to be effective
or helpful.
70 Knowledge and Liberal Perspectives on Inclusion

Models of education and inclusion based on a postmodernist critique –​

such as Florian’s43 –​discredit, based significantly on Foucault, the idea of
any essentialist difference within children and thus implicitly of the role of
any disciplinary knowledge, or even of there being meaning to such a con-
struct, in the teacher’s understanding of said children. It is of course a post-
modernist lens on disciplinary knowledge, albeit in relation to curriculum
content, that provoked such a reaction from many educationalists against
Michael Gove and the UK Government’s refocusing on disciplinary know-
ledge. They argue that knowledge about the child is not something that can
be found in notions of normality or typicality and ability within the child.
There is no possible model of justice that can be based on desert and a com-
bination of the child’s innate differential ability with their efforts. There can
be no such notion of justice as desert at the individual level, the justice of
Rawls or Nozick (despite their differences) or Kant, as the child as a knowing
agentic subject does not exist, or cannot be seen at all in isolation from their
surrounding social bonds and constraints. Knowledge is not a justified true
belief with independent purchase, but rather something more akin to experi-
ence that arises intersubjectively in the interaction between teacher and child
or parent and child, and is constituted not primarily by two knowing subjects
but by a notion of knowledge as equivalent to that localized experiential
contact. The concept of inclusion that arises or is possible in this context
is contingent, therefore, not primarily on values of strict justice, individual
freedom and agency, but rather on other values such as community, reci-
procity and a revised conception of (social) justice as primarily, not second-
arily, redistributive in character.
Yet, following on from Rata’s38 argument, what if knowledge from psych­
ology could make a difference to children with special educational needs?
What if a liberal perspective on the child as a knowing subject, associated
with a recognition that internal ability and effort, both as qualities of that
subject which are differential to others (albeit noting the difficulty of differ-
entiating between these in practice in any sphere or human endeavour), led
to a recognition that disciplinary knowledge from psychology might be able
to help teachers help these children achieve their potential? A Durkheimian
view of the social basis of such knowledge would necessarily need to recog-
nize and compensate for the potential for biases, particularly the bias and
risk of a fixed view of ability (and effort, and effort’s interplay with ability),
and of preconceptions about spurious associations between different groups
and ability. This opens up the possibility that knowledge about special edu-
cational needs, if its pedagogical relevance is established, can and should
have a place in teacher education and inclusion. Otherwise, the risk that
Rata37 identifies that the benefits of disciplinary knowledge, of the fruits of
scientific knowledge which the Enlightenment led to, which could make
a difference to the lives of marginalized groups, are lost. Where we have
been amiss in thinking about inclusion is not to recognize the possibility of
this as a loss, an absolute loss in Berlin’s terms. This is particularly the case
 Knowledge and Liberal Perspectives on Inclusion 71

given the mass of evidence relatable to special educational needs produced

by the academy. As I have noted elsewhere,44 this is particularly the case in
relation to autism education, with a range of evidence-​informed approaches
to interventions and pedagogical methods available. To take one example,
there is now a range of evidence that video modelling can be an effective
approach for developing social communication skills in autistic children.45,46
Of course, the predictions of social science and psychology in this type of
study do not have the same predictive power as predictions deriving from
natural science. Nevertheless, a realist position of whatever flavour would
surely have to imply that at least some of this evidence may have implications
for the classroom, and may have at least some predictive power in promoting
the effective learning of children with special educational needs. Such a
proposition also has implications for how such knowledge, if deemed to be
potentially of use, could be accessed by and made use of by teachers. There
is not enough space to address this point in depth here, but in Mintz and
Roberts,42 we considered the challenges and complexities of achieving this.
One could argue, as Rata does in relation to other marginalized groups, that
not at least recognizing this possibility can impact on a range of elements
linked to values, such as the potential for autistic children and their families
to participate fully in society via enhanced communication and equality of
opportunity and outcome via the support for academic and social learning
that such an evidence base could support.

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43. Florian L, Black-​ Hawkins K. Exploring inclusive pedagogy. Br Educ Res J.
2011;37:813–​828. doi: https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​01411​926.2010.501​096
44. Mintz J. The role of universities and knowledge in teacher education for
inclusion. Int J Incl Educ. Published online 2022:1–​ 11. doi:10.1080/​
13603116.2022.2081877
45. Wong C, Odom SL, Hume KA, et al. Evidence-​based practices for children,
youth, and young adults with autism spectrum disorder: A comprehensive review.
J Autism Dev Disord. 2015;45(7):1951–​1966. doi:10.1007/​s10803-​014-​2351-​z
46. Wright JC, Knight VF, Barton EE, Edwards-​Bowyer M. Video prompting to
teach robotics and coding to middle school students with autism spectrum dis-
order. J Spec Educ Technol. 2021;36(4):187–​201. doi:10.1177/​0162643419890
4 Implications for Education and
Inclusion in the Classroom

Teachers and school leaders are faced with choices all the time, about how to
put to best use the inevitably limited resources they have. I contend that these
choices usually involve tensions about which values to give primacy to. As a
way of illuminating who this operates concretely, particularly within the class-
room, I set out in this chapter a number of scenarios and then explore the
value tensions at play. Firstly, I draw on a recent study by Tse.1 Tse, writing
in 2023, explores the value tensions that school leaders and teachers experi-
ence in working with children with special educational needs in kindergarten
settings in Hong Kong. Hong Kong has a significant level of private provision
of early years education, and principals in such settings have considerable lati-
tude in setting their own admissions criteria and in making decisions about
whether or not to admit individual children with special educational needs.
There are also considerable pressures on principals (i.e. leaders of settings)
in the early years sector in terms of expectations from parents with regard to
the academic level that children will achieve. This is particularly so in relation
to early reading, in the context of significant competition for places in well-​
regarded elementary and higher-​level educational institutions. Such parental
expectations also create pressure, at least in the minds of principals, about
the potential impact on resources and the overall academic success profile of
all students that might arise from admitting children with special needs into
their settings. In Tse’s study, in two kindergartens, both principals and class-
room teachers were concerned about the impact of children with special edu-
cational needs, who had been admitted to their settings in some numbers, on
resources, particularly the (limited) resource of teacher attention. Teachers’
perceptions were that some children with special needs, in their classes,
required them to give them more individual time and attention, raising the
question of how “teaching resource should be allocated between the majority
and the minority”.1(p.156) One of the teachers in the study expresses the view
that “everyone is equal” and that it is not fair that the “bright ones get less
attention”.1(p.157) One of the principals suggests that with the right training
and “accommodations” teachers can effectively deal with children with

DOI: 10.4324/9781003294894-5
 Implications for Education and Inclusion in the Classroom 75

special educational needs in their classrooms; however, she adds the caveat
of “even if it requires slowing down on academic learning…”.1(p.159) Although
the teachers in her study were not inexperienced, Tse goes on to consider the
extent to which additional training about how to deal with varieties of need
in the classroom might alleviate the concerns of the teachers in the study, a
point also reflected upon by the principals themselves.
This example illustrates value tensions between equality of opportunity
and equality of outcome, pithily expressed in the teacher comment “it’s not
fair that the bright ones get less attention”. Equality of opportunity would
suggest that all children independent of their background are entitled to
equal teacher attention. In contrast, a Rawlsian social perspective on justice as
fairness might well suggest that there is a sufficitarian argument for resources
to be unequally distributed to ensure that everyone gets to a minimum
level of outcome. A social relational perspective on rights, such as Felder’s2
emphasis on the need to promote equal representation, would suggest that
children with special educational needs should be given more attention and
time so that they can develop the capacity for representation, an argument
that also resonates with a classically liberal perspective on education’s role
in promoting autonomy. A postmodernist or postcolonial sociological cri-
tique would significantly discount strict justice and equality of opportunity,
and regard a Rawlsian sufficitarian redistributive theory of justice as unten-
able, and rather emphasize the achievement of equality of outcome as a key
value. There is also a further evidentiary aspect to the discussion in that the
question of whether additional training in “inclusive” approaches would
allow teachers, even if resources of time and attention remain limited, to use
that time more effectively to meet the needs of all students. Some theorists
argue forcefully that universalist approaches involving modified pedagogy can
overcome, at least in many cases, resource constraints and attendant tensions.
A particular example is Universal Design for Learning (UDL) which involves
varying (a) presentation of content in different modes to meet different
needs, (b) engagement, particularly promoting small group collaborative
learning, and (c) expression/​assessment, giving children choices in how to
present their knowledge and understanding.3 However, given in particular
the lack of penetration of UDL into compulsory phase education or strong
evidence for its impact,4 although I agree that considering the potential of
such approaches is important, whether they can actually in many case over-
come the reality of resource constraints and value tensions in the classroom
is I contend much less clear. Other theorists, such as Florian,5 suggest that
resource limitations and attendant tensions can be resolved in the classroom
by the right mix of attitudes, techniques and training for teachers. I contend
that this is similarly unrealistic, and serves to place too much of the burden
for resolving resource constraints on teachers, treating their time and energy
as far too elastic in character.
76 Implications for Education and Inclusion in the Classroom

Teacher Deliberation
Tse’s study illustrates well how value tensions are very often played out in
the thinking and ongoing reflection on practice (as per Schön6) of teachers.
Mclaughlin7 places an emphasis on phronesis, noting that the tensions over
political values in education usually (although not exclusively) play out in the
decisions that teachers have to make in the course of teaching. For education
and inclusion, as with education in general, these tensions imply value choices
that teachers have to make. To explore these tensions in more depth, I now
bring a series of further case studies which illuminate particular value choices
facing teachers in the classroom.

Case 1: Implications of “Successful” and “Unsuccessful” Inclusion

Consider the following imaginary but, I would argue, quite realistic scenario.
It involves a fifth grade (age 10–​11) public school classroom with 25 chil-
dren in a relatively affluent but still socially and ethnically mixed suburb of a
medium-​sized city in New England. A new child, Daniel, joins the class after
his parents moved from another city for work. The class has an experienced
teacher, Mrs Marks, who takes the class for most subjects, and a teaching aide
who is there with the class in the mornings. Daniel is a personable child but
Mrs Marks notices fairly quickly that Daniel finds it difficult to sit still in class
or to focus during whole class teaching. Despite using a range of well-​honed
classroom management strategies, Mrs Marks feels after a couple of weeks
that Daniel has not really settled well. This is a small school and Mrs Marks
has a strong relationship with the school principal Dr Clancy and Mrs Marks
meets with her to discuss Daniel. Mrs Marks recounts that Daniel frequently
gets up to move about the class, constantly fidgets, and quite often provokes
or distracts other children by poking them or pulling funny faces. Although
Mrs Marks employs a range of positive behaviour management strategies with
Daniel and the class, and she feels that there is not significant disruption to the
learning of other children, she is concerned that Daniel seems both socially
isolated and is not really engaging with learning. Mrs Marks and Dr Clancy
spend time discussing potential approaches. They touch on the question of
whether Daniel might have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
but don’t feel that seeking a formal diagnosis at this stage is warranted, nor that
this might make any difference to the pedagogical approaches they would con-
sider. They agree that Mrs Marks will arrange to meet with Daniel’s parents.
Mrs Marks does this, and the parents report that Daniel has similar issues at
home and at his previous school, and that they feel that his academic self-​
concept as a learner is very low, and they are happy to work with the school in
any way to support his learning and development. Mrs Marks comes up with a
plan for Daniel, based on her discussion with Dr Clancy, the parents, her pro-
fessional experience of working with children with similar issues to Daniel over
her career, and various post qualification programmes on inclusion that she has
 Implications for Education and Inclusion in the Classroom 77

attended. The plan includes providing Daniel with a visual schedule outlining
the programme for each day designed to help him stay organized and on track,
and a sensory tool (stress balls) that Daniel can ask to access during the day
if he is finding it hard to concentrate. Mrs Marks also tells Daniel that if he is
finding it particularly hard to concentrate, he can ask for a “time out” and Mrs
Marks will give him a task to do which involves getting up and moving around,
like taking something to the office or another class. Over the next few weeks,
this plan has a positive effect: Daniel becomes calmer in class, the provocation
of other children stops, and he begins to contribute to class discussions. Mrs
Marks notices that at break times he is becoming more socially integrated
with the other children. Mrs Marks also skilfully leverages the sense of cama-
raderie and caring for each other that she had already fostered in the class, to
help the other children recognize that Daniel has particular needs (such as
accessing the stress balls), which the children seem to accept with equanimity.
Mrs Marks is pleased with how things have gone and meets with Dr Clancy to
review the progress made. Dr Clancy congratulates and praises her but at the
end of the meeting also asks how Mrs Marks’ plans for a reading group were
going. Mrs Marks and Dr Clancy had in the last month discussed setting up
a reading group for some of the more advanced readers in the class who were
particularly interested in current events. Mrs Marks says that she has not had
time yet to think about this but will get on to it. At home that evening, talking
to her husband Mrs Marks discusses what has been happening at school, and
expresses some resentment that teachers are just supposed to deal with any
new student who might turn up to their class out of the blue on top of every-
thing else they have to do.
This is an imaginary example but not, I think, an unrealistic one, and many
teachers and academics will no doubt recognize elements of it, and indeed
there are many such accounts in the literature.8,9 In this example, the concept
of inclusion might be seen as the implementation of a set of pedagogical and/​
or classroom management strategies to address difference in the classroom
and meet the needs of individual students. Imaginary Mrs Marks demonstrates
that such a body of knowledge exists, as well as perhaps that this might indeed
involve differential pedagogical strategies for students with different needs. It
illustrates that professional experience and training can be brought together
by teachers to meet individual needs. It is also an account, albeit in a restricted
context, of what might be thought of as successful inclusion in that Daniel has
his needs met, at the same time as the needs of the rest of the class also being
attended to. Yet, even in this successful restricted scenario, value tensions are
of course not absent. In my design, Mrs Marks’ concerns about workload,
again something which I think is quite realistic in terms of teacher experience,
raise value tensions. Meeting Daniel’s specific needs, although in this scenario
possible and successful with an attention to individual pedagogic adaptations
and thus satisfying from an equality of outcome perspective Daniel’s partici-
pation and achievement, does come with a resource cost that may impinge on
the equality of opportunity of others. As in the previous example, the time
78 Implications for Education and Inclusion in the Classroom

and attention resource directed to Daniel has to come from somewhere. Mrs
Marks’ capacities are, as with anyone, limited, just as are those of the school
as a whole. The group of children with more ability and/​or interest and/​or
effort in reading did not benefit from the additional pedagogic input that Mrs
Marks may have had time for if Daniel had not arrived in her class. These chil-
dren thus suffered a loss, in terms of having elements of their needs met, or
having them met in a timely fashion. The argument is also, of course, poten-
tially iterative, in that the allocation of time to the specific needs of the chil-
dren due to having the reading group could be similarly judged or weighed
against a notion of equal time allocation to all children in the class.
This (constructed) scenario also serves the purpose of highlighting how the
issue of where this resource comes from can be glossed both from the per-
spective of the sociological critique in education and inclusion and, indeed, as
argued by Done and Murphy10 in neoliberal accounts of the welfare state which
assign an unmeasured elasticity and associated unlimited locus of responsibility
to staff such as Mrs Marks in this example. It could be argued, as many do,11–​13
that this is “part of the job”, and that an open-​ended commitment to meeting
all and every need is one of the virtues12 that we might in the modern world
expect of teachers and indeed of schools as institutions. It is also legitimate to
argue that a loss of a fair allocation of resources is reasonable, particularly if
we might argue that in the round –​although at certain times certain children
will have particular needs that require more attention,​over say for example
the whole of a school year, this roughly equals out. It could be that Daniel’s
needs are temporary, or that the time and attention required by Mrs Marks to
meet them will reduce over time, especially as Daniel settles and the particular
pedagogic approaches put in place become just a routine part of classroom life.
What, though, if this scenario worked out differently? Teachers, whatever their
experience, can be challenged at any point in their career.14 What if, despite the
good intentions and hard work of Mrs Marks and the school, Daniel did not
settle? What if over the rest of the school year he continued to be distracted
in class, and his provocation of other children became worse and really started
to disturb lessons? What if his social integration into the class went back-
wards, and he became unhappy at school and started to refuse to come to
school on some days, making it even more difficult for Mrs Marks to attempt
to include him in class and ensure he progressed in his learning, when he was
in school? What if Daniel’s parents’ marriage happened to break down, and
his self-​concept deteriorated further, and he became even more demotivated
in class? Again, although fictional, I think it is as much a plausible scenario
as the first iteration –​one that many teachers will recognize and instances of
which also feature, perhaps with even more regularity than the first, in the
literature.15–​17 Mapping out fictionally what might happen with this turn of
event –​let’s say that Mrs Marks in conjunction with the Dr Clancy, Daniel’s
parents and other staff members of the school and outside agencies –​all spend
considerable time thinking about how to address Daniel’s needs and in trying
out different pedagogic approaches with Daniel. Mrs Marks never has time to
 Implications for Education and Inclusion in the Classroom 79

come back to the idea of the reading group, and Dr Clancy knows better than
to raise it with her as he is well aware of the limits on her time and energy and
indeed is concerned that even with her extensive experience, the issues with
Daniel are taking a considerable toll on her. It could be argued that there is an
absolute loss in terms of equality of opportunity for other children in the class.
Their teacher has less time for them, gives them less attention, and perhaps
even has less energy and creativity as a teacher. One could argue that there
are compensations –​perhaps the children in the class both learn about values
such as kindness, compassion or caring, or even love. Perhaps Mrs Marks still
maintains a collaborative ethos within the class in which there is still a sense of
joint camaraderie and enterprise as a class and as a school in working together
to help Daniel. Yet children are required to go to school. They do not get to
choose the classes they are in or who their classmates are, and in this scenario,
they do not get a choice as to whether or not they want their teacher to spend
far more time with Daniel and his needs than on them and their needs. A lib-
eral political perspective highlights the question of whether the exercise of
values such as kindness or compassion and their consequences can be imposed
on people without limit, as opposed to freely chosen, even in the case of chil-
dren. If we take Berlin’s point that values are incommensurable, the loss of
equal opportunity –​of teacher attention, and of learning that might otherwise
have happened –​for the children, and perhaps by extension for their parents,
has an absolute quality. In that sense, equality of opportunity for all is not so
easily resolved with differential resource allocation to achieve equality of out-
come for some. There is also a values issue in terms of the loss of energy and
time for Mrs Marks. Perhaps she takes the problems in class with Daniel home
with her, worrying about what else she could do to help him. We know from
a fair bit of literature18–​20 that teachers often take intractable problems in the
classroom home. She likely also spends far more time now on planning and
preparing for Daniel’s needs, on top of all the other planning and assessment
commitments that are just there as for any teacher. She spends far more of her
time, a limited resource, on her job than would otherwise be the case. This
is an absolute loss in terms of strict justice for Mrs Marks, as the effort of her
(unchosen) labour goes unrewarded.

Impact on Teachers

Salamanca,21 and other supranational and national legislation all have clauses
about reasonable adjustments/​accommodations. They tend, though, to say
little substantively about justice as a value as applied to teachers. A reason-
able adjustment implies that value tensions in relation to limited resource
allocation can be resolved, as long as the trade-​off is reasonable, and usually
this is about what might be reasonable in terms of school budgets or impacts
on other children, not in terms of teacher welfare. Berlin’s liberal account
of value pluralism22 reminds us that such trade-​offs are not so simple. They
may well be necessary in modern technological societies. They may well be
80 Implications for Education and Inclusion in the Classroom

unavoidable. Yet they have, as Berlin insists, as public policy approaches, ser-
ious consequences.22 In the example above, they are serious for the other chil­
dren in Daniel’s class who in the second iteration of the scenario lose out on
the time and attention of their teacher for a large segment of the year. They
are serious for Mrs Marks and her work/​life balance. They are of course ser-
ious as well for Daniel and his parents. Deciding what is the best decision or
decisions in such situations is not easy. It’s not easy at a policy level and it’s not
easy for teachers and schools. Mclaughlin’s focus on phronesis7 highlights that
whatever the policy context, it’s teachers who take on the brunt of the respon-
sibility for making these decisions in the context of the day-​to-​day life of the
classroom. The point I draw from this extended-​thought experiment about
Daniel and Mrs Marks is that it is unclear precisely how our current notion
of inclusion, with its tendency to elide these tensions, helps in grappling with
these decisions.

Resources to the Rescue

A possible solution to these tensions, of course, would be for the school to

utilize more resources to meet Daniel’s needs. The school could, for example,
introduce a second teacher to team-​teach with Mrs Marks for some part of the
week. There is some evidence for the effectiveness in terms of meeting indi-
vidual needs of team teaching where two qualified teachers work together with
one class,23 and it is possibly a better policy choice than introducing teaching
assistants, given the concerns about their potential negative impacts.24 So let’s
imagine that resources were unlimited, that the school did not have budget
pressures, and could say introduce team teaching into Daniel’s class for three
days a week. This might increase the capacity of the school to meet Daniel’s
needs, and the needs of the whole class. All sorts of things are possible if
resources are not limited. Yet from the head-​teacher’s perspective, what other
significant competing demands on the budget would need to be ignored in
order to achieve this? What is reasonable to meet the needs of an individual,
the question posed in Rawls’ account of justice? The term “reasonable”, in
reasonable accommodations, does a lot of heavy lifting. I contend that, as
with the concept of inclusion more broadly, it tends to elide the significant
value tensions that are, in public policy terms, whether national or local or
micro-​local at school or class level, at the heart of dealing with difference in
education.

Case 2: Prepare the Child for the Road, Not the Road for the Child?
This again is a fictional but, I would argue, potentially highly realistic scenario.
Alexia is a “high functioning” autistic girl in grade 6 (11 to 12 years of age)
in a class of 30 children at Condol Elementary, a large mainstream elemen-
tary school in a medium-​sized city in New Mexico with a diverse cultural and
linguistic intake and many children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
 Implications for Education and Inclusion in the Classroom 81

A relatively new Charter school in the area with stronger academic results
has recently started to attract parents away from Condol, leading to a fall in
enrolments, and this in conjunction with wider budget cuts by the school dis-
trict has led to significant budgetary pressures on the school leadership team.
Ms Rivera, the class teacher, has ten years of experience and has had consider-
able training in inclusion in the classroom including specific courses on meeting
the needs of children with autism. Alexia’s revised Individual Education Plan
(IEP), following consultation with the school’s educational psychologist at
the end of the summer term in the previous school year, recommended that,
due to her sensory sensitivities, she would benefit from a low arousal envir-
onment. During the previous school year, with a newly qualified teacher with
the class, Alexia’s behaviour had deteriorated, with an increasing frequency of
“acting out”, which caused considerable disruption to the learning of other
children. The psychologist was aware of both practice related to comprehen-
sive frameworks for autism education and support such as TEACCH,25 which
included low arousal as an element, and wider research independent of such
frameworks which shows the potential benefits of a low arousal approach as
a generalized strategy to managing challenging behaviours with autistic chil-
dren.26 The psychologist consulted with Ms Rivera and Alexia’s parents before
the beginning of the new school year and they all agreed that aiming for a
low arousal approach might give a new start to Alexia after the summer break.
However, Ms Rivera found implementing this low arousal approach challen-
ging at the start of the term. In particular, the grade 6 classroom was a new
build construction compared to the lower age groups and has bright fluores-
cent lighting. Ms Rivera worried that his may be over stimulating for Alexia.
Ms Rivera aims, in line with the low arousal principal in the IEP, to mitigate
noise levels in the classroom; however, Ms Rivera tends towards a high-​energy
teaching style, and her training and experience in terms of what works for chil-
dren of this age, in general, gravitate towards lots of open discussion, group
collaboration and fun. Despite her best efforts to minimize noise levels, Ms
Rivera struggles to strike a balance between meeting Alexia’s need for a low
arousal environment and facilitating active engagement among the other chil-
dren. As part of the IEP, Ms Rivera set up a quiet space area at the back of the
classroom, which is a desk facing the wall with two wooden panels on either
side to provide a barrier to reduce distractions. Alexia does make use of this
space quite frequently during the school day, but Ms Rivera notices that she
seems quite sad when she is there, and Ms Rivera has a sense, when Alexia
comes back to the class as a whole, that she is lonely and misses the closer com-
pany of her peers in the main classroom area. As part of the IEP, Ms Rivera
restricts the amount of colourful display on the walls of the classroom, out
of concern that this may add to visual over stimulation for Alexia. However,
the grade 6 school curriculum includes an extended art project during the
term, and the children create a series of colourful images based on the work
of impressionist period painters. Ms Rivera feels that it would really add to the
class’s sense of achievement from this project to have this work prominently
82 Implications for Education and Inclusion in the Classroom

displayed within the classroom, but at the same time does not want to further
increase the visual clutter for Alexia. Alexia also very much enjoyed the art
project and produced some of the most high-​quality work in the class.
Although this is, again, a fictitious scenario, I think it is one quite recog-
nizable in many classrooms, and is also reflected in the literature. Jordan27 in
particular has pointed out that it is difficult to see how making such changes
in mainstream classroom settings for autistic children will necessarily be peda-
gogically effective for other children. She has considered the type of concerns
in this vignette, i.e. that some, perhaps most children, particularly in elemen-
tary school settings, will benefit from the use of involved classroom displays
and effective “social constructivist” learning may often involve reasonable
levels of noise which would not align with a low arousal approach. This scen-
ario exemplifies in particular tensions between equality of opportunity for the
majority versus equality of outcomes for minority of children. It also illustrates
issues about autonomy, and about the place of knowledge concerning special
educational needs in teacher practice.
From Berlin’s28 perspective, this exemplar case could be considered to
illustrate incommensurability in value pluralism, i.e. that meeting the needs
of individuals causes a loss for the wider group. This case also illuminates
tensions in relation to autonomy. Issues of autonomy and identity have had
particular resonance in relation to autism over a number of decades.29 Of
course, issues of autonomy in the context of education apply to all children.
It is an issue which every teacher (and every parent) negotiates every day, in
every classroom. The child wants to do A and the adult wants them to do
B, often because the adult thinks that A is not good for them or not good
for them at that particular time, and B is. A parent wants their 15-​year-​old
to stop playing their video game and take out the trash. A teacher wants a
child to read their book in silence with the rest of the class, not chat to their
friend next to them. A parent wants their six-​year-​old to go to school even
though they really want to stay at home, and forces them to go, perhaps with
the child crying on the way. Discussions about issues of autonomy in rela-
tion to autism tend, though, to have a more intense quality. Peter Hobson,
an influential theorist on psychoanalysis and on autism,30 argued that autism,
with its impairments in intersubjective experience, pushes difference right up
in the face of society. As I have argued,31 how far we should go in chan­
ging the environment to meet the needs of autistic individuals, as opposed
to working to increase their capacity to engage with others on their terms,
is a key question for autism education. Hobson30 made this point particu­
larly in relation to impairments in social communication and social imagin-
ation. He proposed that the relationships resulting from these are “gifts”,
and not gifts which we should so lightly exclude autistic individuals from. In
2024, these are much less fashionable views. Rather, it is more fashionable
to consider autism, or more widely neurodivergence, from an identity per-
spective, in which any concept of deficit or indeed impairment is excised.32,33
A sociological critique proposes that it is society that needs to change, not
 Implications for Education and Inclusion in the Classroom 83

individuals or groups. As Tom Shakespeare has pointed out, in relation to

disability activism,34 such a stance can lead to absurdities in terms of resource
requirements, and I would extend the point by noting that taken to its logical
conclusions, it also leads to absurdities, or perhaps better irrevocable losses
for others, from the perspective of equality of opportunity. In Alexia’s case,
there is no a priori reason to think that it is out of the question, on any level,
that Alexia can change as opposed to the classroom changing. Of course,
there are a whole range of factors (or values) to consider. What any child can
change has limits, just as for adults. Sometimes change might mean suffering
and there are many other important values, such as compassion or care,35 that
need to be taken into account. Some change may not be possible at all due
to internal limits. Again, this is somewhat of an unfashionable view, perhaps
because it is elided or confused with the notion of fixed ability. However,
these are distinct ideas: no one can truly know what another’s internal capaci-
ties are, nor their capacity for effort, and the sociological critique’s point that
what we are now and what we can do now is not predictive of what we might
be able to do tomorrow is not the same as saying that there are no limits to
capacity. Few argue, for example, that people with profound and multiple
learning disabilities do not have limits on what they can do now or in the
future.36 Alexia may not now or ever be able to tolerate the noise and bustle
of group activities, or she might, or she might grow to be able to tolerate it
but hate it. We have of course many personal accounts of how autistic people
make adjustments like this all the time and the personal costs to them (“the
hating it”) involved.37,38 It is also possible, as Hobson30 argues, that Alexia
may hate it in the moment but also come to recognize the benefits in time.
Teachers like Ms Rivera are faced with thinking about all these things in terms
of the decisions they make, just as all adults are in the decisions they make
for the children in their care. These decisions all relate to values –​in Alexia’s
case and for autistic children like her we could list –​autonomy, agency, inde-
pendence, love, compassion, caring, friendship, participation, identity/​com-
munity, tradition (the tradition of the class, the norms of society) and so on.
The arguments about these also do not of course just go one way. Liberal
public policy promotes the idea of all children being able to develop the cap-
acity to engage in autonomous democratic decision making. This might be
something which is much more difficult for Alexia to achieve if she is always
in her own space. Felder’s emphasis on the need for there to be more focus
on developing participation for disabled groups2 may be hard to achieve for
Alexia as an individual, without her developing some capacity to engage in
collaboration. The teacher, and her parents, may need to balance this with
Alexia’s agency in saying “I want to be alone”. As well, the educational aim of
autonomy can go both ways. Alexia’s parents may want her to develop some
engagement for social engagement and collaboration, as they may want her
to have friends. This may be because they think that this will make her happy,
the aim of virtually all parents for their children. Or they may see this as an
element of a common culture (similarly to Hobson’s point about the gift of
84 Implications for Education and Inclusion in the Classroom

communication) that they want her to develop, even if it is difficult for her.
Ms Rivera may have a similar view to the parents in terms of the value of
cultural tradition, and may also feel that this intercalates with an idea of the
school culture. Alexia herself may also, particularly in terms of friendship,
want to develop the capacity to have friends. There is extensive literature
showing how many autistic children want to be engaged in meaningful social
relationships and friendship,39–​41 even if it involves difficulty and effort. Both
her parents and Ms Rivera may think that she is too young (too immature, yet
lacking in capacity) to understand how developing collaborative skills today
may help her with friendship and belonging now and in the future. This
myriad web of interlocking values and tensions are likely at least in parts
incommensurable. For example, some of the suffering by Alexia now would
be absolute, as all suffering is, when offset against future gains in friendship
and participation. Thus, I contend that there are no easy answers. If inclu-
sion means something, it means not an empty idealism, not one rationalist or
Hegelian answer, but a series of complex choices about values. Usually, what-
ever the wider public policy context, these are messy, difficult choices made
by teachers. They are often painful choices as they involve choosing value
A over value B, and not even being sure that what you choose will lead to A or
B. They are painful because they are choices about other people’s lives, and
inevitably sometimes they are wrong and don’t work out. Of course, some-
times they do, which leads to the magical moments, too far and few between,
that make the life of the teacher worthwhile.

Prepare the Child for the Road

I positioned quite a few of the tensions in this case along the classical social
model /​sociological critique axis, i.e. –​in Lukianoff and Haidt’s42 terms –​
should we prepare the child for the road or the road for the child? The socio-
logical postmodernist critique posits a different pattern of emphasis for the
values that I set out above as being in tension. In particular, the value of
tradition and the notion of a set of cultural norms for the classroom, along
with associated pedagogical practices, would have less primacy compared to
equality of outcome linked to ensuring the freedom of particular groups from
oppression. This critique would posit that the emphasis on the knowing sub-
ject and the human sciences in knowing about Alexia in a particular way fun-
damentally misconceives the way in which learning happens for Alexia and
the class. It is from this misconception that the difficulties perceived by the
school, by Ms Rivera and indeed by Alexia and her classmates arise. In terms
of values, resistance might be considered important in the actions of both
Alexia and Mrs Rivera. Losses in terms of justice as desert –​for example the
desert of individual children say in terms of having their individual artistic
efforts celebrated by displaying their work within their own classroom, given
that the very idea of the knowing individual subject is questioned –​would
take on a different weight. It also accords different weight to the issue of
 Implications for Education and Inclusion in the Classroom 85

resources, and inherently critiques the individual focused idea of reasonable-

ness of adjustments, in that the premise of that is rooted in a sufficitarian
concept of redistributive justice which gives primacy to the losses of other
individuals when redistribution occurs.43
Whilst maintaining, in Berlin’s terms, a joint common human horizon
across these different epistemological positions, the sociological critique in this
specific case illustrates the complexity of value pluralism in practice. Of course,
Ms Rivera no doubt is also aware, at least to some extent in terms of its sig-
nificant wider cultural penetration and specific positioning within teacher edu-
cation, of this critique and its implications, which adds further complexity to
the decisions she needs to make. Yet as I have noted, the sociological critique
of inclusion and education has presented very few, if any, tools for thinking
through resource issues. In Ms Rivera’s classroom and for the school as it is,
the resource limitations are there just as much if the issues are considered from
a sociological critique perspective (or indeed a capability theory perspective).
Similarly, the cultural norms are also there. The norms in society, the norms in
terms of how making friends requires social skills. These norms can in theory be
adjusted, both in the classroom and more widely. Employers can, for example,
learn about and implement policies that will make their employees more aware
of and better able to engage with neurodiversity,44 and schools can do the
same.45 Up to a point. Up to the point of reasonableness, and reasonable
adjustments still involve very significant value tensions. For example, in liberal
democratic societies, in fact in any type of society except perhaps some forms
of totalitarianism, people like to be able to choose their friends. They would
not like the idea of the state telling them who they should be friends with; the
idea of some Ministry of Friendship that pre-​allocates people to friendship
groups in advance is clearly ludicrous –​an absurdity like those Shakespeare34
points out as the limits of disability inclusion. Perhaps people can be nudged
more towards being more accepting of difference, but there will be limits, as
the value of freedom and perhaps also intimacy as a value are incompatible and
incommensurable with a notion of directed friendship. There will be limits in
how society and the role of cooperative social engagement operate, because
the way they operate has benefits for individuals in terms of freedom. Thus,
there are limits for Ms Rivera in terms of how far she can go in making other
children be friends with Alexia, if they perceive that she is giving off signals
that she wants to be alone. To some extent, Alexia, as Hobson30 suggests,
may have to move some way in terms of her social skills, even if it is difficult
for her, to meet her classmates. For sure, they can also move to meet her, but
not to the extent that the school can institute a localized Ministry of Friends
and make the children be friends with her. There is a limit to how much you
can change the road, or at least how likely it is to change for the children in
Ms Rivera’s class, including Alexia. We might also posit that in liberal dem-
ocracies, there should also be a limit to the extent to which the state aims to
change people’s social interaction patterns, i.e. their individual liberty, even as
children, to follow established patterns of communication and indeed from
86 Implications for Education and Inclusion in the Classroom

a liberal perspective, the role of state education in promoting such change

without limit can be questioned.46

Knowledge and Special Educational Needs

This case also raises the issue of the place of knowledge about special edu-
cational needs. Molloy and Vasil noted in a well-​cited paper on Asperger’s
Syndrome, which effectively lays out the sociological critique of knowledge
(the “voice discourse” in Muller and Moore’s terms), the following in respect
of special needs:47(p.410)

Key assumptions in special education are that disability is a pathological con-

dition that students have, diagnosis is an objective and useful practice, and
special education is considered to be a rationally conceived and coordinated
system of services for the benefit of diagnosed students…A child’s poor
performance in school is thus due to some problem within him or her
and not as a result of educational practices…learning disabilities practice,
which stresses (a) adaptive behavior; (b) coping strategies; and (c) right (i.e.
normal) ways of thinking…has the effect of ‘normalizing’ students while
leaving unchallenged conventional notions of what is normal or natural.

This succinctly sets out the “voice discourse” critique of knowledge in educa-
tion and inclusion and its intimate connection to political values, particularly
liberal or conservative values about tradition and normality. The application
of Molloy and Vasil’s analysis to the case of Alexia is clear. Autism and know-
ledge about it represent an accretion of culturally and historically laden asso-
ciations of power and privilege, predicated on a particular view of normality,
which is designed to position difference as of lesser value. As Young points out
in his analysis of the knowledge turn, such knowledge definitely can be this,
and definitely has been this. Yet as I have noted, if we adopt a Durkheimian
realist view of bias, we can contend that we can split off the accretions of
bias from what might be actual knowledge. This may be knowledge about
people and their lives that could have the capacity to help them in some ways.
Earlier I referred to the evidence on team teaching and its potential. As Cook
et al.23 discuss, the evidence of effectiveness in terms of student outcomes is
mixed, but Scruggs et al.48 set out how theoretically its focus on collaboration,
planning and joint content mastery can bring benefits when dealing with diffe-
rence in the classroom. A school interested in evidence-​informed practice and
in developing its organizational capacities around this might through, for
example, a teacher study group engage with this literature.49 The school lead­
ership might consider that, as with Daniel’s case, for classes with children with
differences in learning, spending resources on hiring an additional teacher to
team-​teach might be worth exploring. They might pilot this say with a supply
teacher for a while, and then if it proved effective, decide to make a permanent
appointment. They might decide to reduce their budget in other areas –​say for
 Implications for Education and Inclusion in the Classroom 87

example two teaching assistants retire or resign, and they decide not to replace
their posts. They might monitor the impact, for example, on social engage-
ment and friendships of autistic or otherwise neurodivergent children in the
classes, and make further decisions on whether or not to roll the approach out
more widely. In doing so, they would be dealing with knowledge –​knowledge
about special educational needs and knowledge derived from academic work
in the human sciences. A fictional example perhaps; however, there are plenty
of examples in the literature about the use of evidence to inform practice in
working with children with special educational needs.50,51 A social realist per­­
spective on knowledge would admit of the risks of bias, but would maintain
that there is the potential for an independent purchase point on what we can
know and understand about special needs and effective teaching practices that
can add value to practice.

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49. Cain T. Becoming a Research-​Informed School: Why? What? How? Routledge; 2018.
50. Brown C, MacGregor S, Flood J, Malin J. Facilitating Research-​ Informed
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feduc.2023.987688
5 Wider Aspects of Education and
Inclusion

A Broad View of Education and Inclusion

In much of the book so far, I have focused on difference in respect of special edu-
cational needs, in the context of education and inclusion. Notwithstanding the
inherent ontological tensions, there is an ongoing debate in the field, in K-​12,
about narrow versus broad views of education and inclusion, with a narrow view
focusing on special educational needs and a broader view focusing on other aspects
of difference including racial and cultural identity, language, sexuality and class.1,2
In the last five years or so, there has been a softening of this divide, partly due to
the increasing dominance of sociological and identity perspectives on inclusion,
which as discussed have problematized the very idea of categorization (see for
example Cruz et al.3). Nevertheless, partly (or perhaps mostly) due to the need,
as the line of broadly realist scholars from Kant, Durkheim, through to much
more recently Furedi4 and Rata5 have argued, for categorization and structures of
knowledge in order to think about anything at all, this divide between narrow and
broad conceptualizations of education and inclusion persists.
In this chapter, I will focus on this broader view, thinking particularly about
language and cultural diversity as aspects of difference, and the implications of
liberal and other perspectives for education and inclusion in respect of these.
Reich,6,7 in considering multicultural education and (classical or neo) lib­­
eralism, argues, similarly to Mclaughlin8 and Kymlicka,9,10 for a “thin” liberal
policy perspective on education which focuses on a shared limited public cur-
riculum for civics, at the same time recognizing and valuing difference in the
classroom. This needs, as Reich6 argues, to be linked to an understanding by
schools, teachers and the system, of the lessons of the sociological critique.
Thus, teachers need to avoid notions of fixed ability linked to biases about
particular groups. In particular, biases about the capacities or abilities of chil-
dren based on their language, their race, or their cultural background need to
be both recognized and avoided.6 Reich is writing in the US context, and the
long and ugly history of such discrimination in relation to these biases at indi-
vidual, school, state and national level is extensive and hugely significant.11–​13
That such discrimination and bias is still with us in the US, the UK, and inter-
nationally is hard to doubt. Just to take one example of many possibilities,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003294894-6
 Wider Aspects of Education and Inclusion 91

Hope et al.’s participatory study of the experiences of black young people in

high schools in an urban context in the US included the following quote from
a Grade 12 student Jamal:14(p.96)

Interviewer: Why did you change schools?

Jamal: Racists.
Interviewer: And why, how do you know they were racist?
Jamal: There was thing that would be done, if um a white person,
we was in an academy so therefore we had to wear uniforms,
which was strictly color based. You can wear any solid color
polo, any solid color pants, and gym shoes, cool. But the
only thing was your shirt must be tucked in. And we would
notice that the Black people have their shirts tuck, tucked
out and then they’ll be all, and there’ll be all types of
hollering and yelling going on, well you need to get your
shirt tucked in…or a white guy would be walking around
in school cussing and the principal will laugh and all this
other stuff with ’em, and as he’s cussing, but if we were to
say anything of that nature it would be a problem.

Other quotes from the young people in this study indicate a similar pattern
of perceptions of differential treatment in terms of behaviour and in terms of
expectations for academic success. As Waitoller15 and Artiles16,17 have noted,
there remains a need to think, beyond simplistic notions of colour blindness,
more deeply about how such issues can be effectively addressed in schooling.
The parallels to some of the debates around difference as special educa-
tional needs are clear –​notions of fixed ability, bias in relation to labels, the
sociological construction of deficit, ideas of normality, and so on. How the
sociological critique of classical liberal perspectives could be applied is also
quite apparent –​particularly in terms of how models of knowledge and
accretions of power, which have a historical and cultural trajectory, could be
masked as asocial rationality.18 The use of intersectionality as a lens also has
the potential to further unmask such biases. Crenshaw’s19 seminal analysis of
overlaps between employment discrimination of Black women illustrated how
sometimes a focus on just individual elements can obscure the full picture.
As discussed earlier on, in terms of education and inclusion, there is evidence
about how the (low) expectations of teachers20 and the achievement of chil­
dren who are both black and classified as having special educational needs is a
particular intersectional locus of concern.21,22
There is much which could be written about the above, but space is limited,
and in terms of the aims of this book to consider the implications of liberal
perspectives on education and inclusion, it will be fruitful to be more focused.
Based on my concerns about value tensions in education and inclusion,
92 Wider Aspects of Education and Inclusion

I particularly want to consider culturally responsive pedagogy and to trace

from this what I will call a negotiation approach to inclusion which allows
more space for the consideration of these tensions in practice and policy.

Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

There is longstanding interest in culturally responsive pedagogy as an
approach, and recently there has been growing interest in its application to
the field of education and inclusion. Waitoller and Thorius23 have termed
this an asset (as opposed to “deficit”) pedagogy, linking it to critical theory
perspectives on disability. For Waitoller,24 the focus is on race and ethnicity
and linguistic marginalized groups, encompassing aspects of culture, identity,
epistemology, (social) justice and content (i.e. self-​referential consideration of
epistemological aspects for example in the context of teacher education for
inclusion). In its earlier iterations, sometimes referred to as culturally respon-
sive teaching, Geneva Gay,25 one of the seminal writers in this field, proposed
that it was not just the existence of direct bias, whether conscious or not, such
as limited expectations for academic achievement, that were holding children
from minority groups back. Rather, or clearly in addition to that, children
from minority groups have particular modes of local knowledge and local cul-
ture that are often not reflected in the structures, the curriculum content,
and particularly the pedagogy of the teachers, often coming from different
backgrounds from the children themselves. Gay’s work sits within a quite long
tradition of aiming to understand how to match the common school to the
experience and knowledge of minority students (see Gladson-​Billings26 for an
overview). Gay, and many more contemporary authors,27–​29 argue that this is
not just about recognizing and validating the identities of children (although
that is important), but rather about transforming pedagogy to take account of
the different, as Bernstein30 might put it, codes that underpin the hidden and
open curriculum and pedagogy of the classroom and school. It is still possible,
I contend, even within the context of such a transformative agenda, to apply a
Durkheimian social realist perspective,31 differentiating between external and
internal bias, rather than proposing as many theorists working in the space
of culturally responsive pedagogy do32, a completely new pedagogy and cur­
riculum. Reich6 undertook such an analysis of critically responsive pedagogy.
Reich identifies that there clearly are externalities, which if not necessarily
flowing from bias (although they might) can also come just from ignorance of
other cultures. Reich makes a dividing line between what we might term these
externalities and internalities about knowledge itself. Linked to this, Reich also
heavily criticizes Gay25 for proposing that there might be particular learning
styles that suit particular minority groups, which Reich rightly notes was a sig-
nificant aspect of Gays original formulation of culturally responsive teaching.
Thus, Gay25 and Banks33 proposed that, for example, African American learners
prefer kinaesthetic or active instructional activities, and Native American chil-
dren prefer visual and spatial to verbal information. Reich notes that there is in
 Wider Aspects of Education and Inclusion 93

fact no evidence for this and later research,34,35 which has been critical of the
whole idea of different learning styles for different groups, tends to reinforce
this conclusion. Reich6 also similarly objects to the idea that there is a par­
ticular set of knowledge, a particular curriculum, which is the property of one
group as opposed to another, and in keeping with his focus on a thin liberal
policy perspective on education suggests that the limits of multicultural educa-
tion, in such a framework, imply a common civics and a common knowledge
set across society. In proposing this, Reich does not it seems, any more than
Rawls, have a formulation for solving the issue of how, for minority groups,
a delineation in civics between public and private in education might work
in practice. Thus, it could be argued, for example, that the oppositional sub-​
culture identity that some groups of young people might form in school36,37
precisely demonstrate the difficulty in proposing a public civics that is split off
in school from the private experiences that young people have of their home
culture and identity.

Critiques

Culturally responsive pedagogy, at least in its earlier iterations, has also been
criticized for having too restricted a view of cultures, seeing it as something
both too undifferentiated, and lacking a perspective on the agency of individ-
uals to use or respond to their culture in a flexible and responsive way.33,38,39
Linked to this, the focus on modifying teacher patterns of interactions, in
some way, was critiqued for ignoring wider structural perspectives, i.e. not
giving enough emphasis to culturally and historically embedded aspects of
perceived power differentials between different communities.40 Thus, cultur­
ally responsive pedagogy can be seen as essentializing (and thus homogenizing)
the cultural practices of minorities. A shift to postmodernist critiques26,28,32 in
response to such concerns has, however, meant that issues of resourcing and
of what values might be at play, the potential tensions, and what this means
for teachers on the ground are, I would contend, mostly absent from the field.

Value Tensions

The issue of adolescent oppositional identities developed within schools has

some resonances with the case of Alexia and autism in the previous chapter. Of
course, just to be clear I am not in any way saying cultural practice differences
and autistic identity are the same thing at all, but there are parallels in terms
of the potential for value conflicts. Although there is not enough space to
consider all the possible value conflicts that might be at play in depth, they
could include liberty, autonomy, tradition, representation and identity. There
is though a clear tension between, from the perspective of the school and the
teacher, the promotion of a public civics centred around tradition, cultural
norms, and excellence and achievement from a (neo)liberal perspective on
knowledge, and from the children’s perspective values of liberty, autonomy,
94 Wider Aspects of Education and Inclusion

identity and resistance. A culturally responsive, activist postmodernist, or

Marxist perspective would of course reframe the weighting of these factors,
just as it would in the case of Alexia. The notion of normality implicit in the
cultural norms of the school and the focus on excellence in its liberal (cap-
italist) form could be considered as an element of oppression tied to a par-
ticular privileging of one form of identity and freedom (as a value) from that
oppression. Thus, giving primacy (and indeed equality of opportunity) to that
identity or at least recognizing its concerns, perhaps in terms of very radical
restructuring of the operation of the school and of society more widely, might
be promoted.
Nevertheless, it would not be wholly unreasonable for a teacher, perhaps
a teacher who emphasizes the value of “care”, to consider that developing
the capacity of a child to engage with society as it is, and to develop the
knowledge and skills that will allow them to achieve their potential in that
society (i.e. equality of opportunity), which might involve some (perhaps
significant) element of challenge to that oppositional culture, might be
important. It’s also entirely possible that the parents of the child might agree
with the teacher on this. This is of course, from a Durkheimian realist per-
spective, potentially an important internality aspect which needs to be care-
fully differentiated from particularly bias as an externality (of course, the
sociological critique posits that the latter too easily gets presented as, and
confused with, the former).
Such tensions are all around us in education, whether they have par-
ticular labels or not. As with Alexia’s case, I would contend that the wider
implications in terms of tradition and culture, as well as equality of oppor-
tunity, are important to consider –​particularly given that there is not, and as
Berlin argues likely there should not be, any public consensus in liberal dem-
ocracies on a universal conception of the good life. Postmodernist and Marxist
critiques are just perspectives, and there are very good reasons in terms of the
structuring of political systems in liberal democracies, based on the values of
liberty and justice, as to why they remain just perspectives. Given this, denying
children from marginalized groups the opportunity to develop the know-
ledge that will allow them to succeed in society is itself a values-​based choice
with consequences. Suggesting that society as a whole should change cultural
practice so that it becomes easier for the minority practice of certain groups
involves value tensions –​the value tensions that Berlin and Crowder identify as
complex and difficult. Similarly to my argument about education and inclusion
for special needs, so too here in relation to culturally responsive pedagogy, we
can agree with the aims. We can agree with Artiles17 that a simplistic notion of
blindness –​i.e. let’s just treat everyone the same –​is insufficient. But equally,
simply identifying that there are cultural differences that could and likely do
have an impact on pedagogy, in and of itself, is not particularly helpful for
teachers or school leaders on the ground who are having to navigate these
complex issues every day. My argument is that the most useful thing we can
do is to bring these tensions out into the open, so that we can discuss them,
 Wider Aspects of Education and Inclusion 95

and teachers in particular can think and crucially talk about them, which might
then develop their professional capacity for working through these difficult
decisions that they meet every day.

Value Tensions in Responding to Cultural Diversity

I will bring now another example, more of a future forward consideration
of the implications of dealing with cultural and racial differences in the class-
room, and further discussion of some of the value tensions involved. Glenn
Loury, at time of writing Professor of Social Sciences and Economics at Brown
University, is a well-​known African American academic and social commen-
tator, sometimes described as conservative leaning, although his views have
become more progressive over time.41 He grew up in a deprived neighbour­
hood in Chicago in the 1950s, and via community college won a scholarship
to Northwestern where he completed a BA and then went on to PhD study at
MIT, followed by a very successful and influential academic career.
Discussing his own life, Loury42 describes how he was born to working
class parents and attended five different public schools before he had finished
fifth grade. He goes on to paint a rich and vivid description of his early life
and the energy and verve of the community that he grew up in. The sub-
stantive point I want to make, though, with which I think Professor Loury
would agree, is that when he became at age 33 the first black tenured pro-
fessor of economics at Harvard, this was somewhat against the odds. Professor
Loury spoke recently about his achievements in relation to the US Supreme
Court’s 2023 judgement that race-​based affirmative action programs for uni-
versity admissions were in violation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protec-
tion clause, which mandates that “…nor shall any State…deny to any person
within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”.43 Professor Loury,
discussing this decision and the ensuing political debates in the US about
affirmative action, in relation to his own life and experiences, said, in a video
for his Substack channel in 2024, the following:44

My genius, my gift, my extraordinary abilities, were what carried me for-

ward, notwithstanding the vicissitudes of racism and discrimination in
America. To have that minimized by somebody presuming that ‘Oh you
didn’t get to MIT without affirmative action’…God Damn It, Don’t dis-
honor my amazing achievement by chalking it up to favouritism. I resent
it, I don’t like it. I don’t need it. I don’t want it…I’m defending my own
dignity here… .

There are of course considerable nuances and complexities in Professor Loury’s

position both here and on the topic more broadly, although his passion for
the topic still comes through even when transcribing his spoken words onto
the page. It’s certainly not my intention here, nor would I presume, to either
speak for him or to gloss over those nuances. As Professor Loury says in the
96 Wider Aspects of Education and Inclusion

full account, this is not an overtly party political, but rather more personal
position he is taking. Nevertheless, from the perspective of education and
inclusion, the segment does illuminate different value positions. Affirmative
action programmes through their aim to compensate for perceived structural
inequalities promote equality of outcome by distributing resources differen-
tially to ensure that different groups, with different resources, can achieve
more similar outcomes. They involve unequal allocation of limited resources
(in this case the limited resource of places at elite academic institutions). As
Professor Loury forcefully points out, such programmes, for particular indi-
viduals, inevitably represent losses in respect of other values. In his case, a
loss of dignity (perhaps a particular value) came about through a societal per-
ception that his abilities were or would not be recognized for what they are.
Professor Loury, in focusing on ability as an inherent quality –​an intrinsic
and internal attribute of the individual –​also, I think, implicitly illustrates the
point that allocating the scarce resources of elite university places based on the
social, cultural or ethnical background of individuals may mean that others
not within those groups, who do have innate exceptional academic ability
(and/​or extraordinary effort), will lose out on access to that scarce resource.
Thus, from the perspective of justice as desert and liberty (i.e. the freedom of
people to make free use of their abilities and their effort), some people will
lose out. What then is an inclusive position in relation to affirmative action
programmes? I chose this example because when watching Professor Loury
speak about his experiences and the force and passion with which he speaks,
there is a real sense of something being lost for him. Yes, we can strive for
criteria with which to judge between these competing values, and perhaps as
Olssen45 suggests democratic debate, deliberative or otherwise, is an effective
way of making such judgements. However, to propose that there are some
overarching “inclusive values” that can be applied to this scenario is I believe
false. There are rather competing incommensurable values that are in tension,
and there is a dilemma about their resolution and the inescapable fact that any
resolution involves an absolute loss on one side or the other.
Although I am arguing that the possibility of full resolution of value
tensions in relation to education and inclusion may, as per Berlin, be unreach-
able, that does not mean that the overall aims (the common human horizon)
of the good life in relation to difference in the classroom are not amenable
to critical analysis or frameworks that may serve to promote, particularly for
teachers, ways of at least promoting more effective professional reflection on,
and thus resolution of, the issues they need to deal with. We have in the litera-
ture a rich development of tools, interventions and pedagogies –​such as for
example the considerable evidence base about how carefully considered school
programmes based on culturally responsive pedagogy as a framework have
been successful in promoting the success of children from minority groups.26
Rather, what I am arguing is that we need frameworks for helping teachers
consider the value frameworks and tensions that lie at the heart of decision
making when working with difference in the classroom. I propose that such
 Wider Aspects of Education and Inclusion 97

a model would have at its centre a notion of local negotiation, based on

understanding of the varying perspectives of teachers, children, families and
their localized cultures and identities, and simultaneously drawing out into the
open the value tensions extant in dealing with difference in the classroom. One
perspective, in my view, that is worth considering further in relation to this is
that of the funds of knowledge approach.

Funds of Knowledge
Funds of Knowledge sits within a set of attempts in the 1980s and 1990s to use
anthropological approaches to consider how to link home and school cultures.46
However, it has undoubtedly been the most successful and influential of these
over time.47 Moll and González’s48 initial work on US-​Mexican households,
drawing on Wolf’s49 research into household economies, focused on using
anthropological approaches to allow schools and teachers to better understand
the individual lives, culture and knowledge of the children in their classes,
particularly through the use of a type of ethnographic home visit. Home visits
were, in the fully developed model, followed up with new classroom practices
developed by teachers based on the visits and reflective teacher study group
meetings. González et al.50(p.133) define funds of knowledge (FoK) as “histor­
ically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills
essential for household or individual functioning and well-​being”, related to
“social, economic, and productive activities of people”50(p.139) in local commu-
nities, including “social history of households, their origins and development
… the labour history of families”, and “ ‘how families develop social networks…
including knowledge skills and labour, that enhance the households’ ability to
survive and thrive”.50(p.133) The implications of this knowledge for schools is a
key outcome of their analysis, and González et al.50 themselves consider the
FoK approach as one way of conceiving of a culturally responsive pedagogy.
González et al.50 present their notion of FoK from a (sociologically) crit­
ical pedagogy perspective, although the specific type of critical stance they
take is not always fully clear, and their roots in anthropological methods open
up, I would argue, at least the possibility of considering the FoK approach as
having elements of compatibility with more realist perspectives on knowledge.
Thus, it does not seem necessarily the case within the approach to adopt a
deconstruction of the knowing subject, and the FoK approach could equally
be considered as a way of presenting children and families as knowing subjects
drawing on and interacting with cultural knowledge. I contend that this gives
the potential to open up dialogue between teacher, school, child and parents
that allows for a growing shared understanding of knowledge and what this
might mean for pedagogy. In particular, I think this can be considered from
the perspectives of a social realist division between external bias and internal
knowledge in relation to epistemology, pedagogy and curriculum in the
classroom. In particular, the FoK approach eschews a biased deficit view of
marginalized communities, or just communities that are different from the
98 Wider Aspects of Education and Inclusion

majority, as well as potentially recognizing the knowledge that exists within

those communities, including both, in Durkheim’s terms, natural and scien-
tific knowledge. Through communication between school and family, the FoK
approach can explore the potential for how this can be represented within the
classroom.
Having said that, little if no attention has been paid in the literature to
considering FoK from non-​(sociologically) critical perspectives in any pro-
ductive sense, with those that have addressed potential points of connections
being critical, such as Zipin et al.51 arguing that social realism’s conception of
(social) justice is too “thin” as to be effective. I contend that this is not the
case and in doing so it is worth noting that I am proposing a novel, if not
quite revolutionary perspective on FoK. I also do not want to elide the value
tensions that impinge on using FoK in this novel way, particularly in relation
to the wider body of literature, but nevertheless, I contend that inherent in
the work of González and Moll and its focus on drawing out the experiences
and knowledge of children and families is the possibility for opening up a
space for productive dialogue that crucially maintains (a) a thin view of public
policy on civics and (b) recognizes (without bias) the multiple political value
systems that might be held and have influence for the actors in the educational
field, thus allowing for the open discussion of value tensions. Thus, this use of
FoK also resonates with Berlin’s insistence on the need to take account of the
importance of localized cultural context and identity. At the same time, FoK, as
González et al.50 consider, views culture not in an essentialized static manner,
but as dynamic and varying in the context of local activity. Thus, it avoids sim-
plistic accounts of how children interact with their parents and wider cultural
backgrounds, opening up space for critical discussion of children’s autonomy
and agency. It is also in this context that FoK potentially has capacity to take
account of liberal democratic values such as individual freedom.

Developments in Funds of Knowledge

Since the original work on FoK in the 1980s and 1990s, it has been applied
in a range of contexts, across an increasing range of curriculum subject areas.
There has also been some limited application to approaches to disability in
schools (see for example Stone-​MacDonald47). There has also been a move
away from the emphasis in the earlier applications on parental knowledge
towards greater recognition of children’s own knowledge, as well as commu-
nity situated contexts for knowledge such as churches.52 Theoretically, there
has been a developing focus on co-​construction with children, as well as links
to social capital models, particularly of note being Yosso’s53 critical theory-​
based “Community Cultural Wealth” model which focuses on illuminating the
cultural capital held by minority and marginalized children.52 Finally, there has
also been developing interest in the idea of difficult knowledge,54 accounting
for traumatic aspects of culture such as migration experiences.52
 Wider Aspects of Education and Inclusion 99

An Example

In exploring my perspective on FoK and its possible applications to educa-

tion and inclusion, as negotiation, it will be instructive to consider a case that
González et al. present, in their 2005 book, from one of their early research
projects in the 1990s on the FoK approach using the ethnographic home
visit to construct a view of the cultural knowledge of Mexican children in
the southwest US. González et al.50 present a persuasive historical analysis of
the economic forces related to industrialization that have driven migration
flows across the Mexican-​US border since the late 19th century, which led
to the development of a US-​Mexican identity. They also consider the well-​
documented55,56 history of marginalization within the school system in the US
of Spanish (and indeed other “minority” language) speakers. González et al.50
note that ability grouping for minority language students was often based, as
has been the case internationally in the West, on unwarranted assumptions
about their language abilities. Although I would be cautious in discounting
the complexities that second language (L2) teaching can add to classrooms,57
there is of course significant evidence that L2 learners may well have more
well-​developed cognitive and comprehension skills.58,59 González et al. further
note how this positioning of the Spanish language, and often the active deni-
gration of its use as part of a wider “Americanization” drive within US schools,
had an impact on the cultural identity of US-​Mexican families, leading them to
example anglicize their surnames and arguably internalize an oppressed iden-
tity as second-​class citizens.1
González et al. also note that prior to the economic pressures of industri-
alization that led to cross border migration, the ancestors of most Mexican
families in the Southwest were farmers or engaged in craft and manufac-
turing in rural settings. They discuss the considerable practical knowledge
skills predicated on this –​they list for example animal husbandry, complex
agrarian knowledge about soil, weather, pests, and plant biology, as well as
skills around mechanics, blacksmithing, building, carpentry etc. required for
example for equipment maintenance, and further knowledge on medicinal
herbs and first aid, particularly relevant given the possible lack of doctors,
and their expense even if available. Strikingly, they note that these “nat-
ural systems” of household and community knowledge were disrupted in
a number of ways, including increasing barriers to cross-​border movements
between Mexico and the US as border policies tightened (which disrupted
wider family kin ties and the knowledge held within these), industrialization,
and the separation of local knowledge in the home and rigid disciplinary
knowledge structures in the school. There is also, in their accounts, a parallel
to neoconservative perspectives on family, community and knowledge, with
faith and tradition playing an important role in the cases that González et al.
present.
100 Wider Aspects of Education and Inclusion

Faith and Tradition in Funds of Knowledge

In the case presented, set in the 1990s, Hortencia and Tomas are in their fifties
and have four children, three of whom are married and live by with their chil-
dren. Hortencia’s parents live very close by. She has worked as a bank teller
for many decades. As with Hortencia, Tomas’s family had migrated to Mexico
within the last generation, but Tomas, born in Phoenix, was “repatriated ” to
Mexico with his parents. After his father’s death in 1945, Tomas migrated to
Tucson by himself at ten years old. He was placed in foster care and at 18, with
the equivalent of a seventh-​grade education, joined the army and was trained
as a maintenance mechanic. Tomas now works (at the time of writing of the
case study) in a maintenance role for the Arizona national guard.
The idea of passing on of parental technical and economic skills is also
an important element in the reported case50 –​Hortencia spent much time
and effort teaching her children and now grandchildren maths computational
skills, which she was expert in due to her many years as a bank teller. Tomas
also exposed his children and grandchildren to his own skills, engaging them
in woodwork and getting them to assist him in making and repairing house-
hold items, and learning from the process. The case, as mentioned, also gives
an account of the importance of the Catholic faith for both parents, ritual
activities with the children in the household and wider engagement with the
Church and Church social and other activities.
Structural aspects are also presented as part of the case as sadly Tomas
developed a debilitating long-​term reaction to the toxic chemicals that he was
exposed to spraying industrial cleaning solvents, without any personal pro-
tective equipment over many years. When asked by the researchers why he did
not ask for gloves and a mask, he said that wearing them slowed him down and
he did not want to be seen as a “lazy Mexican”.50(p.57)
It is a compelling case and I think a fine piece of ethnography that illustrates
both how the FoK approach can uncover, for the outsider, something of what
community and identity means for a family, with a particular focus on the
interplays between “economic” knowledge embedded within kin networks.
It does, though, I think, also illustrate some value tensions, which I think are
not clearly articulated in González et al.’s account, but could be considered
if an openness to a range of perspectives, including liberal and neoconserva-
tive ones, as held by the actors in the field, were allowed. In this specific case,
although it inescapably includes the emphasis on faith within the family, as
noted, there is something of an almost dismissive way in which this is handled,
which does not fully reflect an openness to differing value systems.
For example:50(p.59)

Because households depend on their social networks to cope with the

borderland’s complex political and changing economic environment, they
are willing to invest considerable energy and resources in maintaining
good relations with their members. One way they do this is through
 Wider Aspects of Education and Inclusion 101

family rituals: birthdays, baptisms, confirmations, ‘coming out’ rituals

(quinceañeras), wedding showers, weddings, Christmas dinners, outings,
and visitations. Not only do these events bring members of one’s network
together ritually to reaffirm their solidarity, but staging them also often
requires members to cooperate by investing their labor or pooling their
resources. Moreover, such rituals broadcast an important set of signals about
both the sponsor’s economic well-​being and the state of social relations with
other members—​through both lavishness and attendance… [My italics]

Well, on one level this may well be true, but it also illustrates a perspective on
faith as something which is largely instrumental. It ignores, or more than that
denies, as Mclaughlin60 puts it when discussing Phillip’s61(p.186) view of religion
and faith, that “believing in G-​d…equates…with participating in the religious
attitude, the eternal, and living according to it”. Although space precludes
getting into the full complexity of these arguments, the point is that, as argued
by Scheffler,62,63 faith has a meaning on the inside, which cannot be adduced
from external critical analysis of it. There is a similarity here to Ramaekers and
Suissa’s argument about the unique intimacy of the family and parent-​child
relationships.64 They are uniquely and mutually constitutive on the inside, and
they go “all the way down”64(p.ix) –​i.e. that one element such as holding a
lavish event cannot stand in isolation from the faith context in which it takes
place. Hortencia and Tomas place a value, a conservative traditional value,
on tradition and family which is entwined with and inseparable from belief.
Their identity is not just as a family, nor just as an extended kin network, but
as a part of a wider faith community which is an important part of their iden-
tity as Mexicans. This aspect of tradition (perhaps tradition in its conservative
sense) is, clearly, for the researchers, somewhat in tension with the sociologic-
ally critical lens that they wish to bring on the case. Such tensions are of course
much more widespread than just this case –​see for example Lewis and Lall’s65
account of the subversion (in their view) of postcolonial theory in tradition-
alist /​authoritarian regimes.
The case as presented thus may well be in conflict with the values weighting
of educators aligned with Marxist or postmodern perspectives, and indeed
it is possible that some of the views within the faith tradition might be in
conflict more widely with liberal or communitarian theorists (and indeed the
state) adopting a thick perspective on civics, such as in relation to the rela-
tive emphasis placed on values of experiment and debate. However, it is still
the case that the FoK approach serves to bring these different value systems,
at least to some extent, out into the open. I am drawn to the FoK approach
in respect of inclusion and education in terms of the capacity it offers to,
in a sense, stake the ground for the values and perspectives of children and
families from minorities, and open up the possibility for debate by schools
and teachers. Thus, the anthropological basis of FoK inescapably positions
the different localized political value systems of the actors in the social field as
matters for consideration.
102 Wider Aspects of Education and Inclusion

Bridging Knowledge between Home and School in Funds of

Knowledge
In their account of the application of the FoK approach in the classroom,
González et al.50 report on a further project in which teachers undertook
school visits to children’s homes and worked collaboratively together in study
groups to reflect on what they observed and to consider implications for peda-
gogy. One case involved a US-​Mexican child Carlos whose family, as in the
case above, were socially and religiously conservative. Carlos was, partly in
response to economic pressures in his household, a budding entrepreneur
and had been involved in trading all sorts of things, with customers such as
neighbours, including bicycle parts and in particular candy (quite a wide term
in the local context covering not just sweets but a range of snacks such as sun-
flower seeds). Based on the home visits, his class teacher worked with Carlos
and the whole class to plan a unit of work on the topic of candy. This involved
a parent coming in to talk about making a Mexican form of candy:50(p.83)

…Mrs. Rodríguez, came in to teach us how to make pipitoria, a Mexican

candy treat. This turned out to be the highlight of our unit. Before she
came in that morning, the students divided up to make advertising posters
and labels for the candy because we were going to sell what we made at the
school talent show. When Mrs. Rodríguez arrived, she became the teacher.
While the candy was cooking, she talked to the class for over an hour and
taught all of us not only how to make different kinds of candy, but also such
things as the difference in U.S. and Mexican food consumption and pro-
duction, nutritional value of candy, and more. My respect and awe of Mrs.
Rodríguez grew by leaps and bounds that morning. Finally, the students
packaged and priced their candy…

The unit of work went on to cover aspects of maths, science, health, adver-
tising, food production and the children also generated their own questions
such as “What is candy like in Africa?” and “What candy do they eat in China?”.
It is interesting how in this case there is not a clear break between natural
versus scientific knowledge,66 but also that there is at the same time quite
a realist view of knowledge. In the case description, we learn that Carlos’
parents, as was likely with many other parents in the class, put a high value on
education, as well as on good behaviour, respect for teachers and hard work.
There was not a sense in the case of there being, for example, either on the
part of the parents, or the children, for some radically different curriculum,
or in Young’s terms, a more voice-​based discourse on knowledge. It was not
that particular forms of knowledge seemed to be valued because of who held
them or where they came from, but more of a recognition that the children’s
home lives and cultures were also sources of knowledge, and that their home
lives involved sophisticated application of such knowledge. It could be argued
that the case study did, for the teacher, help to reduce, in Durkheimian social
 Wider Aspects of Education and Inclusion 103

realist terms, external cognitive biases about the children and their lives, or
alternatively opened up horizons for responding in pedagogically valid terms
to the culture(s) of her students. There was also a sense, in this case, and others
presented by González et al.50 and later González and Moll67 of a process
of negotiation, whereby the teacher, the class and more widely the parents
reflected on what might be taught, why it would be taught, and what would
be achieved. Such a process of negotiation did not necessarily negate or gloss
over differences and value tensions, but at the same time a space was created
for them to be considered, particularly by the teachers and the schools. In the
accounts of González et al.50 and González and Moll,67 this is not always fully
worked through, although there is some limited attention in later studies with
the FoK approach68,69 of how to take into account differences in political value
perspectives within the context of classroom teaching. So, for example, there
may well be considerable tensions, in many classrooms and schools, in going
off topic to focus on a particular area of interest to one particular child, given
the need quite often to follow a prescribed scheme of work and curriculum.
As well, as noted, in approaching other areas such as faith traditions in their
wider sense, there may well be value tensions, in varying ways, between the
perspectives of the teacher, the school, the state and those of the child and the
family.

Towards Negotiation
Different positions on the public role of the state in promoting civics also raise
some potential tensions with FoK as an approach. Still, what is striking about it
is, perhaps because of its diverse roots in critical perspectives and anthropology,
is the space that FoK opens up for bringing out the different perspectives
between school and home for discussion, and from that the potential for dis-
cussion of those different perspectives. I would take this further, and argue
that both from the perspective of a culturally responsive pedagogy and more
broadly for education and inclusion, this idea of discussion or better negoti-
ation is what is needed. Inclusion as an idealist position is a limited concept.
There are no simplistic rules for teacher decision making in respect of working
with difference in the classroom, just problems that involve trade-​offs. For me,
what the FoK approach highlights with its emphasis on uncovering different
perspectives and its respect of local cultural contexts and knowledge is that we
need to think of inclusion not as an ideal, not even as one specific question
to be answered, but a whole series of interlinked questions that require nego-
tiation. A “realist” negotiation centred on culturally responsive pedagogy,
then, would be one that recognizes that (a) biases exist and need to be and
can be countered, and (b) that there are different perspectives and values
across home and school which can be in tension in multiple ways, and that by
bringing these out into the open, this can lead to negotiation, and ultimately
to decisions. This is somewhat different both to critical perspectives on FoK
and specifically the idea of co-​production, a term associated and aligned with
104 Wider Aspects of Education and Inclusion

both later FoK trajectories and more broadly voice discourses across educa-
tion.70 Co-​production implies that knowledge subsists in the process of inter­
action, and implies a deconstruction of the knowing subject, as well as a range
of assumptions about power being at the root of such knowledge creation. As
a concept, it assumes too much. Negotiation is a much more open and flex-
ible concept that accepts, from liberalism, that positions and values, including
about epistemology itself, are multiple and in conflict. It recognizes that chil-
dren and adults are inherently in different positions, that families and schools
may have much to disagree about, that families and children may have much
as well to disagree about, but that crucially through dialogue we can come to
understand what we agree on, what we don’t agree on, what we know from
multiple sources, what we don’t know and what we might want to know and
why. Inclusion as negotiation then becomes a series of questions to be posed,
and answered, as best we can.
However, the questions that are posed, and the answers that can be
considered, are not without limits. The question of limits is complex. In com-
pulsory phase education, there is, though, wider acceptance that there are
limits to both questions and answers. A concern with values of protection
and the development of autonomy and agency, and freedom from oppression,
converge at least to some extent across liberal, communitarian and post-
modern /​postcolonial modes of thinking, in terms of some of the things we
should teach children in schools. The rules of the playground in early years
and elementary schools have a sort of universal acceptance. There are few
teachers who think that keeping your hands and feet to yourself, learning
to share your toys, not stealing your friend’s pencil or snack, or even not
leaving people out of your games so that they feel sad are areas of disagree-
ment. Berlin’s common human horizon71 seems, at least within limits, to be
somewhat simpler in compulsory teaching phases. However, when we start
to think about education and adults, and post-​compulsory education, things
are not so simple.

Note
1 The role of the state and common schools in promoting a thick or thin public
common set of values, or common culture, and how this relates to the rights of
minority communities, are, as discussed, one of the key issues considered within lib-
eral perspectives on education.

References
1. Hick P, Matziari A, Mintz J, et al. Initial Teacher Education for Inclusion: Final
Report to the National Council for Special Education. National Council for Special
Education; 2019:1–​ 220. Accessed March 5, 2024. https://​ncse.ie/​resea​rch-​
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2. Mintz J, Hick P, Solomon Y, et al. The reality of reality shock for inclusion: How
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6 Inclusion and Higher Education

In higher education, it is of course the case that the issues I have highlighted
about education and inclusion both in terms of a narrow view of inclusion
focused on special educational needs and a broader view focused on aspects of
difference, such as culture, class, language, sexuality etc., are present in many
forms. For example, issues of equality of outcome versus equality of oppor-
tunity in terms of the effective inclusion of autistic students in universities are
also sites of significant tension and debate. There is also a recognition in the
literature and in practice that particularly in relation to special educational
needs, there has been much less attention paid to post-​18 settings, although it
has been an area of increasing attention in the last ten years.1,2
In terms of the theoretical considerations about values and value tensions,
the questions posed in higher education are also often similar to those in
schools. A key difference is, however, that particular contextual elements
present in compulsory phase education are not present in the university.
Protection as an imperative (or a value) is not present in the same way within
universities and, crucially as adults, issues of autonomy and agency and how
if at all these are aspects for development rather than exercise are much less
clear. To illuminate the specificity of issues related to education and inclusion
in higher education, I will focus on decolonization as a movement3 and the
wider implications of this for value tensions both within the university and
more widely. In doing so, I will attempt to set education and inclusion within
the context of the rationale and aims of the modern university, both in terms
of what universities themselves (their leaders, their faculty) and society (for
example taxpayers) more widely might consider those aims to be. As I noted
in the introduction, my thinking on this has been significantly influenced by
the rise of antisemitism on campus in the wake of the October 7th atroci-
ties. This rise in antisemitism has clear points of articulation to the imple-
mentation of decolonization and Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) on
campus, and I contend for the broader programme for education and inclu-
sion. Later in the chapter, I reflect on what the implications of this discussion
on higher education have for how we conceive of education and inclusion

DOI: 10.4324/9781003294894-7
110 Inclusion and Higher Education

across the educational phases including schools, also linking this back to the
prior discussions on value tensions.

DEI, Decolonization and Inclusion

Decolonization and DEI are very often connected in terms of the implemen-
tation of decolonization on campus and more widely.4–​6 The movement for
decolonization, and concomitantly DEI, has developed a powerful momentum
within universities7,8 in recent years. For example, at Exeter University,
there has been a whole programme of curriculum development focused on
revising the curriculum.9 It is somewhat curious how, within universities, such
programmes are presented, as just something that should be done, and that
internally, there is at least in recent times, in terms of their implementation,
limited critical focus on the underlying theories and values that underlie this
programme in terms of their translation into a programme of implementa-
tion within Western universities.7 For example, Ian Pace10 has written about
the simplistic ways in which decolonization has been applied within the field
of musicology. Decolonization is presented as a “good” to be promoted. In
some ways, as a programme for thinking about curriculum and pedagogy, it
presents itself as something historically and socially detached. Similarly, in the
academic literature on DEI, there is such little focus on definitions. A litera-
ture search on SCOPUS using the terms “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” and
“Education” indicates that most of the literature focuses on implementation,
predominantly in nursing, medical and STEM disciplines, as well as literature
from human resources management and industrial psychology. Sources go
back to 2011; however, the vast majority of literature is from 2019 onwards.
The provenance of the term DEI itself is unclear in his literature and there is
a lack of sustained critical theoretical engagement with the potential meanings
of the terms involved. For example, writing about DEI in Nursing Education,
Ganek et al.11 draw on the American Association of College Nurses pos­
ition statement on Diversity, equity, and inclusion in academic nursing. The
definitions covering the three terms total 94 words. Such brief accounts of def-
inition and theory are common in this literature, and although there are some
more in-​depth accounts such as Freebody et al.12 in 2019, these focus more on
social justice topics than the specific concepts of diversity, equity and inclusion.
Decolonization, though, in particular has a history, and not just a history
but a set of linked assumptions about knowledge and vales. In Moore and
Muller’s13 terms, it sits broadly as a voice discourse, and certainly has points of
connection with activist postmodernist thinking in that it aims to deconstruct
hidden aspects of power. The key driver of decolonization, certainly in the
academic literature on decolonization in academia, is postcolonial theory.3,14
It is somewhat strange that, in its implementation within universities, decolon-
ization has been somewhat deracinated, unanchoring it as a movement from
its impressive intellectual origins. In particular, as Gopa7 argues, the dialectic
aspects of postcolonial theory, in relation to the colonized and the colonizer,
 Inclusion and Higher Education 111

point rather towards a dialogue with the liberal canon, not its relativization,
a point which seems often absent in day-​to-​day discussions of decolonization
on campus.

Postcolonial Theory
Postcolonial theory has its roots in literary and cultural studies and focuses on
the legacy of colonialism and imperialism and their influence on society in the
past and today. Perhaps its most seminal writer was Frantz Fanon. Fanon was
born in 1925 in Martinique and experienced the discrimination and racism of
colonial society.15 He joined the Free French forces during the Second World
War and then trained as a psychiatrist and worked in Algeria, also playing a
key role as a spokesman for the National Liberation Front –​Algeria’s inde-
pendence movement. He died from leukaemia in 1961, but before that sad
untimely death wrote a number of influential texts, most particularly The
Wretched of the Earth.16 It is true that much of Fanon’s writing dazzles par­
ticularly for its brilliant rhetoric and for the visceral sense of the experience of
oppression that it conveys.17 In one sense, the argument of postcolonial theory
as put forward by Fanon is straightforward –​certain societies have colonized
others and used their power of arms to subdue those colonized societies for
their own economic gain. In doing so, they have misused liberalism’s supposed
commitment to individual rights and pluralism by positing either deliberately
or unconsciously that some societies are better than others, thus giving them
rights both of exploitation and of rectification. This produces a skewed lens
through which non-​Western cultures are viewed, and even with the fall of
actual colonial rule, this lens continues to influence how non-​Western cultures
are considered in the West and within the societies subject to colonialism
themselves.

Violence, Dialectic and Culture

There is and always has been interest in the role of violence in postcolonial
theory and in the writings of Fanon in particular. Fanon was clearly, at the very
least in the Algerian context, a supporter of armed struggle against colonial
powers.18 There is disparity in the field on his views on violence, and some19
have interpreted his writing to suggest that he was a strong advocate of vio-
lence. Others such as Shatz17 argue that his views on violence are nuanced.
Certainly, as a psychiatrist he recognized the corrosive impact of violence,
when undertaken, on the perpetrator. He also viewed violence as having both
redemptive and undermining consequences, in a cycle within the oppressor/​
oppressed dynamic –​the colonized man he wrote16(p.16) was “the persecuted
man who constantly dreams of being the persecutor”. This ambivalence,
argues Shultz,17 also transcends simplistic binaries, arguing that these were
the narrative of the colonizer and that only a more nuanced understanding of
identity would allow for peace both for those who had colonized and for those
112 Inclusion and Higher Education

who had been colonized. Shulz argues that Fanon felt, somewhat in parallel
to what Arendt20 called natality, i.e. the inherent innovation and creativity
inherent in us all (as “natal” new beginnings), that only through such new
beginnings can we overcome the accretions of history. Thus, Shultz17 positions
Fanon’s revolutionary thinking as both dialectical and redemptive, illustrating
postcolonial theory’s Marxist underpinnings. As Robert Young18 notes in his
overview of postcolonialism, postcolonial thought has been fundamentally
based on the idea of economic oppression of “North” over “South” and the
historical processes of reclamation of the economic power writ large. However,
postcolonial thinking transcends just economic considerations and recasts the
basis for how that process may occur in terms of its subjective affects, i.e. its
particular cultural expression, in what Abdel-​Malek21 called the tricontinental
context of Africa, Asia and Latin America. It is perhaps in the emphasis on
this localized cultural expression, such as local knowledge and practices of
indigenous people, which both Fanon16 and the other foundational and sem­
inal writer on postcolonialism, Edward Said,22 illustrate in their writings, that
postcolonialism can be distinguished from both “Western” Marxism and crit-
ical theory. Thus, in a sense, postcolonialism notes that Marxism’s strength
as a universalist (indeed fundamentally idealist) framework has a tendency to
underplay local culture, and postcolonialism, whilst accepting Marxism’s fun-
damental tenet about economic power and historical processes, and indeed
international struggle, aims to reintroduce the “local”, as it is the loss of the
local, in terms of identity, that lies at the heart of revolution, albeit dialectic-
ally, against colonial oppression.
Young18 proposes that postcolonialism is thus inherently a form of activism,
whose focus on the local means that different political foci (gender, race,
for example as well as class) can come within its orbit. Postcolonial theory
contends18 that the imperialist project of the West, post 1492, was in form
qualitatively different from prior imperial projects, due to its size, and the
extent of its dominance, partly facilitated by its technological superiority, such
as in terms of sailing ships that could extend geographical reach far beyond
that of the empires of the ancient world. The imposition of the colonial (by
implication liberal) lens on subjected peoples and their cultures, whether in a
homogenous fashion as under the French empire or a looser form as under
the British created, for both the colonized and the colonized, in postcolonial
theory, a false account. Edward Said’s important contribution was to provide,
in a similar way to some postmodern accounts, a framework for conceptually
and discursively analysing that false account, and thus uncovering other ways
of conceiving of local culture and society, which similarly allowed them to
be freed from colonial oppression. Thus, Said posited colonialism not just as
acts of conquest but, in his seminal text Orientalism,22 as a discourse of forms
of domination. This focused particularly on a linguistic deconstruction of
concepts used to describe the East by its conquerors from the West, although,
as Young18 notes, significantly, the connections to postmodern forms of
deconstruction and specifically Foucault’s analysis were not at all fully worked
 Inclusion and Higher Education 113

through by Said. In particular, whether he fully followed the implications of

Foucauldian analysis in terms of the discursive production of knowledge which
decentres a knowing subject altogether, or whether instead he adopted a repre-
sentational critique23 which perhaps simplistically notes that the Orient created
a skewed portrait which had no relation to the real and then self-​referenced
this in Western texts and thoughts, is unclear. There is not enough space here
to go through the significant literature commenting on this aspect of Said’s
work in depth. What is key is to note that the achievement of Said was, in a
sense, to bring a sociological critique to bear, from a cultural perspective, on
the norms not just of society but of the academy and academic knowledge.
Said thus highlighted the, in his view, cultural hegemonic positioning behind
the (liberal) claim of the academy that its knowledge was objective. In Michael
Young’s terms, Said presaged the discourse of voice within the academy, a
voice that has only grown louder and louder. It is this voice that sits behind
the movement for decolonization in higher education.3
Postcolonial theory thus questions realist perspectives on knowledge and
problematizes the liberal canons of the academy, which is the critique that
underlies decolonization as a movement. As with other voice discourses, this
of course raises the issue of whether we can have any objective forms of know-
ledge at all, and unsurprisingly such critiques have been made within the post-
colonial field itself.24–​26 Parry26 points out that if a fully discursive position
on knowledge is taken, by what external reference point can we then judge
the material and political reality of the anticolonial movement, i.e. how is a
collapse into relativism avoided. The issue of ethical and moral relativism in
postcolonial thinking has been given new impetus, for many, by the rise of
antisemitism on campus in the wake of October 7th.

Jews Don’t Count

October 7th was a seminal event and proved a driving force, particularly in
the US, but also in the UK and Europe, for the return of open antisemitism
in society.27,28 What has been particularly striking has been the justification in
demonstrations, teach-​ins and interviews, of the Hamas terrorist massacre,
by faculty and by students,29–​31 and the lukewarm, at best, response to this by
university leaders.28 Murder, rape, beheadings, and burning alive of families by
Hamas, and their promise to do the same, was, it seems, greeted by some in
the academy even with joy.32 Dara Horn, former visiting professor in Jewish
Studies at Harvard, has discussed how the reaction to October 7th was and is
primarily a celebration because “someone was super successful in murdering
Jews”,33 tying into the premise in her wider writing that Jews are only accept­
able to non-​Jewish society when they are either dead or politically impotent.34
The rise in antisemitism in the West in relation to events in Israel has
been seismic35 for Jewish communities at large, and particularly so for Jewish
students and staff on Western campuses.36,37 This seismic development has
raised the question, for many Jews and non-​Jews, of how this could happen
114 Inclusion and Higher Education

after the years of implementation of equal rights legislation such as Title VII
in the US and the Equality Act38 in the UK, and the significant growth in
DEI programmes after the rise of Black Lives Matter in 2020,9,39 and the
added impetus this gave to decolonization, interpenetrated as it is at with
DEI, within the academy.6 This question is, I believe, important, not only in
its local sense (i.e. how can we address and counter campus antisemitism),
but also, crucially, because it illuminates wider concerns about education and
inclusion, which are relevant not just in higher education. I will consider the
links between inclusion and the Jews, its intercalation with value tensions in
public policy and education, and what this tells us about the models we cur-
rently have for education and inclusion more widely, particularly in terms of
postcolonial theory.
British writer David Baddiel has noted, with respect to the positioning
of Jews in relation to notions of equal treatment in society, that Jews Don’t
Count.40 By this, Baddiel means that as a minority, the cultural modes of
respect and consideration, which seem to apply to other minority groups, do
not apply to Jews, which he traces to the embedded nature of antisemitism in
society. There is a (albeit not overly extensive) contemporary body of scholars
worldwide interested in antisemitism, who write about how to account specif-
ically for modern forms of antisemitism.41,42 These have partly focused on what
has been termed the new left antisemitism,43 and the points of connection
between antizionism and antisemitism. Broadly theorists advocating this per-
spective note several points:

1 Modern antisemitism operates as a form of fetishized anti-​capitalism, with

Jews being scapegoated for the perceived ills of capitalism,44 intertwined
with conspiracy fetishism, where Jews are seen as the “Other” and blamed
for a world conspiracy.45 Fetish as used in this sense has an originally
Marxist derivation, i.e. that it represents a reification of an element of social
relations, investing them with mystical or magic properties.
2 Influenced at least in part by antizionism and masked antisemitism,
promoted to a significant degree by the Soviet Union, from the 1950s
onwards,43 the Western academy adopted a position on Zionism which
incorporated many earlier tropes of classical religious and economic anti-
semitism, applying these to now not only the Jews, but the nation state of
the Jews.
3 This “left mindset” on Zionism46,47 and Jews filtered out of the universities,
over time, being incorporated more widely across society, bolstering latent
reservoirs1 of antisemitic thinking.27,41

For some time there has been concern about how, if at all, DEI programmes
and the DEI culture within universities can account for the new left anti-
semitism, most notably because either the antizionist /​antisemitic conspiracy
theories underpinning them have come from, and are often promoted, by fac-
ulty directly or indirectly involved in DEI programmes, and/​or because they
 Inclusion and Higher Education 115

have simply downplayed the importance of antisemitism.46–​48 This reflects the

marginalization of considerations of antisemitism and Jews in postcolonialism
as a field more broadly.49,50 As Hirsh presciently noted, in some of its
instantiations on campus, decolonization can seem tinged with antisemitism.51
So, how can this be the case in institutions on the face of it committed so
strongly to antiracism and inclusion, and what implications does it have for
education and inclusion more widely? The awful events of October 7th and
their aftermath in terms of the explosion of on campus antisemitism, have
given this question much greater impetus.

Decolonization, Nation and the Jew

“It is necessary to refuse everything to the Jew as a nation and to grant every-
thing to Jews as individuals”. This somewhat infamous quote from the Count
Claremont-​Tonnerre at French National Assembly in 1789,52 in the wake of
the revolution, reflects the deep ambivalence about tensions between equality
and liberty in relation to minorities at the heart of debates about cultural and
religious identity in modern Western liberal democracy. Claremont-​Tonnerre’s
statement implied a thick view of public policy on difference, i.e. that the
benefits of equality come with the proviso of a significant expectation of giving
up local attachments (and prejudices, customs, traditions etc.) and replacing
these with what the state deems to be the mores and customs, and outlook
which will promote egalitarianism across society. You can be equal but you
cannot be free to just choose your own culture. Such tensions are very much
present in the modern day and call into question how we then understand the
society of the nation state. Liberalism primarily focuses on the freedom of the
individual, and the idea of citizenship is about that individual, not sub-​groups.
As we have seen, much of the debate about classical liberalism, in response to
communitarian and other critiques, has focused on how sub-​groups and sub-​
group attachments and their differences should or can be accommodated, and
thus on what the parameters of multicultural societies should be. This question
was particularly pertinent in modern (i.e. post 1789) Western states, as the
Jews were perhaps, as they had always been, particularly stubborn in clinging
to their “medieval” ways.53 Such concerns, though, had an ancient pedigree.
Concerns about Jewish practices and their differences from wider culture were
common in the ancient world.54 As Berlin55 noted, the Enlightenment, and
Enlightenment rationality in particular, incorporated notions of both nega-
tive and positive liberty, and of associated tensions between the universal
and the particular. The notion of the nation state as the mechanism for the
operationalization of Enlightenment rationality, which involved bringing dis-
parate groups together in the service of the idea of the liberal, democratic
nation, implied positively changing sub-​groups to join together in this idea
of the liberal nation. As Berlin55 argued, revolutions based on this positive
idealism, whether egalitarian or Marxist in nature, carry the risk and, as the
historical record shows, the actuality of oppression. The Dreyfus affair, perhaps
116 Inclusion and Higher Education

a logical consequence of sentiment of Claremont-​Tonnerre with which the

revolution was imbued, some hundred years later, is just one of many prom-
inent examples in history.
The idea of multiculturalism, i.e. a cultural pluralism, challenges the idea
of a monolithic national identity and re-​inserts the question of how sub-​
groups relate to each other, as well as how they compete for recognition,
status and resources. In the US in particular, the demonstrable failure of the
Enlightenment idea of equality to encompass all groups, specifically the experi-
ence of African Americans with slavery, the Civil War, then Jim Crow and the
necessity of a civil rights movement, suggested that the equality promoted
by liberalism was not in fact based on universalism, but rather just masked
the privileging of those who already held privilege –​the white Christian
male. Thus, the sociological critique offered a different view that the road
to freedom was not through trying to treat everyone the same (as they were
and are not), but rather to recognize, understand and act on their differences.
Where, though, does this leave the Jew? In America, Jews could pass as white
and enjoyed, over time since the Second World War, increasing success at inte-
grating into wider society. They were not viewed as marginalized in the same
sense as African Americans. It is important to note, as Ben Freeman56 has, that
in order to be accepted in this way, as part of a homogenous national culture,
Jews had to give many things up. Passing as white, an experience also common
with some African Americans, was not in any way cost free. This can be seen
in countless ways. Some Jews who arrived from Europe as refugees early in the
20th century would start a job on a Monday and would be fired when, due
to their observance of the Sabbath, they said that they could not work on a
Saturday. This cycle might go on for weeks and weeks until many would just
stop observing the Sabbath so that they could live.57 Similarly, many Jews in
the US post October 7th (such as myself) have stopped wearing visible signs
of Judaism in public –​perhaps choosing to wear a baseball cap instead.58 This
is nothing new in Jewish experience in the US, the UK or more widely, but as
Freeman56 notes, it comes with an enormous cost –​the cost of denying one’s
own identity.
In America, fetishistic economic and conspiracy-​driven antisemitism has
positioned Jews, partly because of their perceived success at integration,
as “hyper-​white” or “white adjacent”. Thus, Jews inhabit, as Biale et al.59
note, a boundary position –​both insider and outsider, their precise place
in the nation state unclear, just as it was for the French after the revolu-
tion. Jews simultaneously benefitted from the emancipation offered from
the Enlightenment, and rationality, yet suffered from as critical theory has
posited,42 its internal contradictions, from which a path can be traced both
to the Shoah, the virulent antisemitism of the Soviet Union, and modern-​
day campus antisemitism.
 Inclusion and Higher Education 117

Decolonization and Nation –​Implications for Education and

Inclusion
What then of decolonization? One of the issues that has increasingly come to
be recognized in postcolonial theory, as Dirlik24 notes, is, as Fanon’s writing
had always hinted at, the structural dialectic between the colonizer and the
colonized. This dialectic in postcolonial theory has, in common with critical
theory,60 Marxist and Hegelian underpinnings, although in contrast to critical
theory, there is more of a focus on Marxist-​Leninist perspectives on the role of
the state in bringing about revolutionary change. This emphasis on the role of
the state, and thus the nation, in Marxism-​Leninism is key, as how the nation
comes into being and what it then represents is what remains unresolved in post-
colonial thinking.24 Memmi, an influential 20th century Jewish postcolonial
theorist, notes the mutual interactions, which create new sets of identities
and relationships between colonizer and colonized.61 Memmi61 notes how, in
dialectical terms, those who are colonized regain and exercise that authority
(such as those who are privileged both during and post colonialization), yet
retain an identity of domination from their prior oppression. Thus, the simple
Manichean division in some postcolonial discourse, between colonizer and
colonized, is critiqued, such critique being prompted, as Dirlik24 notes, by
some of the failures of many postcolonial regimes, i.e. their authoritarianism,
corruption and oppression. Thus, the suspicions of violence that Fanon had,
even in his possible promotion of it, when borne out in the reality of the
decidedly non-​liberal and non-​democratic oppression of their own people by
such regimes, cast doubt on the simplicity, if not the surface reality, of the
colonizer-​colonized binary.
One key element this critique uncovers is how the nation (and the nation-​
state) is conceived of within postcolonial theory. Dirlik24 argues that the cre­
ation of a nation comes out of the imposition of a national set of ideas and
customs on top of more local tribal customs and affiliations (i.e. in place of the
culture and norms that arise from extended kin networks). Such imposition,
and the erasure of what came before, is as an essential element of the colonial
project, but what then if it is also through a dialectic of both opposition to
and adoption of the culture of the colonizer that the very idea of a nation for
the colonized emerges. The colonizer and indeed colonized nations them-
selves also, it can be argued, emerged out of similar earlier processes of migra-
tion and colonization, albeit over longer time frames. Putting this another
way, if there was no nation to begin with, and the nation only arises through
colonization, colonialism takes on a more complex meaning. This paradox
of the nation continues to be a matter of debate within postcolonialism,
with nationalism being both its source but also the cause of its postcolonial
dissatisfaction.25,62,63
118 Inclusion and Higher Education

Nation and Jew

Emmanuel Levinas64 proposed a privileged singularity of medieval and modern

Jewish experience in terms of oppression and suffering, for which he has been
criticized.65 I would argue that his meaning was precisely in the terms that
Dirlik puts it –​i.e. that the nation dialectically comes into being, but at least
at that point of coming into being there is a certain realization of identity
and release from suffering. It is this realization and release that comes with
it that Levinas notes is absent for the wandering Jew. Further, in continuing
with their wandering, so to speak, i.e. their resistance to adopting any alterna-
tive national identity, and in modern terms staying outside of the colonizer-​
colonized dialectic, they, as Memmi also notes, highlighted the uncomfortable
tensions about the very idea of nationhood which remain within modern soci-
eties and nation state. Writing about his experience as a Jew during decolon-
ization in Tunisia, Memmi66(p.246) says:

It is in the very way in which new nations were born that differences became
clear…It is in the way that Tunisia became a nation like other nations that we
[Jews] became, as we were everywhere else, a civic and national negativity.

Thus, colonialism and anticolonialism can both be seen as being part of

the same Enlightenment-​driven notion of the nation and the classical lib-
eral assumptions underpinning the idea of nation. Yet, at the same time,
anticolonial liberation movements usually conceived of themselves as anti-​
liberal and anti-​capitalist. It was at the fault line of this contradiction that the
liminal Jew was located, as the outside, ripe for the imposition of the fetish-
istic economic and conspiratorial fantasy that, as Memmi67 noted, could act
as a salve, if not, of course, as a resolution, to these conflicts. When the Jews
had the audacity to aim, for themselves, to solve the conundrum of their own
continued oppression as the “Other” by creating their own nation state, par-
ticularly one which strived for liberal democracy, it was not surprising that this
too became the locus for these virulent fetishistic attacks.42 It is much easier to
retreat into Manichean binary divisions and to attack the Jews and their state
than to try and solve the unresolved dialectic tension of nationality and iden-
tity in postcolonial society.
It is the failure to address these tensions at the heart of postcolonial theory
that poses problems for decolonization and antisemitism in the universities.
For example, it seems that very few, if any, of those working in DEI have even
stopped to consider how many of the dead white males that they might want
to decolonize are not white, but Jews. I think of the Jews cited and providing
a theoretical foundation for this book –​a long list from Arendt and Bernstein,
through Milton Friedman, Nozick and Popper, to Vygotsky and Wittgenstein,
and of course including Berlin.
Many, such as Bernstein, took refuge from fascism and totalitarianism.
Are they white? Hyperwhite? Privileged? Should they be deleted from our
 Inclusion and Higher Education 119

textbooks and silenced, just as Jewish students have silenced themselves to

pass as white in the wake of the antisemitism that has followed October 7th?

Value Tensions

This is a question of values. Although postcolonial theorists who have been crit-
ical of the tensions inherent in postcolonial theory, such as Dirlik and Memmi,
might not wish to admit it, but the logic of their critique, and the way these
tensions can be resolved, is by recognizing that as well as the sociological cri-
tique, other value systems including liberalism and conservatism have a point
to make here and that value tensions need to be recognized and explored.
Thus, Memmi61 and many others including Fanon argue for postcolonial soci­
eties that value individual liberty and democracy –​that follow the intentions
of the classical liberal thinkers and the Enlightenment, and to varying extent
ideas of strict justice, including those of private property, and the associated
respect for the rule of law that a notion of such justice requires. They also
thus inescapably have to recognize that these values came from the West and
from the Enlightenment, and that a Manichean binary between North and
South or between Orient and Occident, or between oppressor and oppressed,
is not, particularly as Dirlik24 notes, in the context of globalization, either pos­
sible or meaningful. I also contend that these perspectives need to give much
more value to a political settlement that balances liberal and communitarian
perspectives on minority and majority, whilst fundamentally recognizing that
the limits of such a settlement are set by the bounds of liberal democratic
principles which grant minorities the negative liberty to maintain their local
culture, their faith and their languages, at the same time as trying to solve the
conflicts of the nation state inherent in colonialism’s complex legacy. As Berlin
has noted, there are no idealist solutions to such conflicts and tensions that
will not involve greater oppression than that which they supposedly seek to
solve. I would contend that DEI and inclusion in education on campus have
been examples of just such an attempted idealist solution. What history has
shown us is that it is the Jews who most often tend to end up as the targets of
that oppression, particularly when such idealist solutions try to paper over the
conflicts inherent in human activity. It is not by accident that the idealism of
Marx, when put into practice, led to the persecution of the Jews, and then led
the crusade to extend that persecution to the nation state of the Jews. None
of this is to say that postcolonial theory does not have anything to teach us in
terms of education and inclusion. However, if it is to avoid these dangers, as
before, it may be necessary to distinguish, as per a Durkheimian social realist
position, between internal and external aspects.68

Internal, External and Edward Said

There has been considerable debate in postcolonialism about whether Said
proposed a simple realist representational account of colonialism.18 Ashcroft
120 Inclusion and Higher Education

and Ahluwalia,69 in their analysis of Said’s thought, argue that Said was nego­
tiating between a classical realist view that sees the text as simply representing
the outside world and a structuralist position in which language mediates both
what is said and the way it is talked about. Said adopts an intermediate pos-
ition, rejecting the endless of the chains of signification of Derrida, and rather
positing that the text simultaneously reflects the world of which it speaks at
the same time as being inextricably influenced by the contingencies of the
world in its formation.69(p.22) Dirlik goes further and proposes that we can look
at colonialism as a whole as a distorted representation, which has accretions
of bias, and that there is scope in postcolonialism for these can be illuminated
and corrected through critique, thus adding to the accuracy and the quality
of the “hybrid”24 engagement between cultures. Such a stance implies
at least to some extent a realist position on the knowledge, and associated
values, of the West, deriving from both rational and empirical enquiry. At
the same time, there is a recognition that knowledge can come from mul-
tiple sources, not just from the Western cannon, and that there can be bias
about the relative positioning of sources of knowledge as well, which also
needs to be recognized. When associated with the idea of negotiation –​i.e.
an understanding that there are multiple perspectives and multiple values and
value conflicts between perspectives, and between nations and faiths, and that
talking about and understanding these conflicts is necessary for us to under-
stand them–​it can lead us to a space that avoids the binary thinking into which
postcolonial thinking has fallen. Such a space also recognizes, through nego-
tiation, that value pluralism still places boundaries and recognizes a common
human horizon. It also recognizes the limitations and dangers of oppositional
binaries, and their particular risks for how Jews might be conceived of in such
contexts.

Inclusion on Campus and Beyond

The current decolonization programme in universities and associated DEI
initiatives are very far from the above. The complex contradictions within
postcolonial theory, and in particular critiques of oppositional Manichean
binaries, and the calls for violence sometimes associated with them, are absent
from the implementation of DEI. In fact, ironically, they are presented, as in
Dirlik’s24 description of the colonial erasure of history, in similarly deracinated
terms. Similarly to inclusion, they are presented as over simplified truths,
without history or derivation, and thus ultimately largely denuded of con-
tent, except in their simplistic assertion of one side good, other side bad. Is it
any wonder then that so many students, when presented with such simplistic
analyses that position Jews on the side of the bad, have in recent times risen
up in Jew hatred on campus? I think this illustrates the point of this book.
Berlin55 cautioned that the unrestrained idealism of positive liberty had great
dangers, great dangers in terms of the oppression of minorities and minority
views. The only alternative was to recognize that the world was full of value
 Inclusion and Higher Education 121

tensions and, through exploring these, come to a recognition –​in my terms,

through a process of negotiation which recognizes localized context –​as to
how these could be approached. In the final chapter, I will consider further
the implications of the discussion on antisemitism for inclusion and educa-
tion more widely, and how an approach based on negotiation could offer a
path forward.

Note
1 For a more detailed account of (2) and (3) see Hirsh.43

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attack from SU President. Jewish Chronicle. www.thejc.com/​news/​gol​dsmi​ths-​
to-​supp​ort-​jew​ish-​acade​mic-​david-​hirsh-​after-​unwa​rran​ted-​att​ack-​from-​su-​presid​
ent-​i1r1k​s9e (Published June 27, 2022). Accessed March 6, 2024.
124 Inclusion and Higher Education

52. C. I. E. The French National Assembly Debates Citizenship for Jews. Center for
Israel Education. Published n.d. Accessed March 6, 2024. https://​israe​led.org/​
fre​nch-​natio​nal-​assem​bly/​
53. Biale D, Galchinsky M, Heschel S. Insider/​ Outsider: American Jews and
Multiculturalism. University of California Press; 1998.
54. Feldman LH. Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World: Attitudes and Interactions
from Alexander to Justinian. Princeton University Press; 2021.
55. Berlin I. Two Concepts of Liberty. Clarendon Press; 1958.
56. Freeman BM. Jewish Pride: Rebuilding a People. No Pasaran Media; 2021.
57. Garelick A. The Fight for the Sabbath. Jew Curr. 2022;(Winter). Accessed March
6, 2024. https://​jew​ishc​urre​nts.org/​the-​fight-​for-​the-​sabb​ath
58. Stephens B. Opinion | Why I Can’t Stop Writing About Oct. 7. The New York
Times. www.nyti​mes.com/​2023/​12/​19/​opin​ion/​octo​ber-​7-​jews-​hamas.html
(Published December 20, 2023). Accessed March 6, 2024.
59. Biale D, Galchinsky M, Heschel S. Introduction. In: Biale D, Galchinsky M,
Heschel S, eds. Insider/​Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism. University
of California Press; 1998:1–​14.
60. Fuchs C. Foundations of Critical Theory. Routledge; 2021.
61. Memmi A. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Beacon Press; 1967.
62. Cocks J. On Sovereignty and Other Political Delusions. Bloomsbury; 2014.
63. Sajed A, Seidel T. Introduction: Escaping the Nation? National Consciousness
and the Horizons of Decolonization. Interventions. 2019;21(5):583–​591.
doi:10.1080/​1369801X.2019.1581643
64. Levinas E. Philosophical Essays. Martinus Nijhoff; 1990.
65. Slabodsky SE. De-​ colonial Jewish Thought and the Americas. In: Bilimoria
P, Irvine AB, eds. Postcolonial Philosophy of Religion. Springer Netherlands;
2009:251–​272. doi:10.1007/​978-​90-​481-​2538-​8_​14
66. Memmi A. Portrait of a Jew. The Viking Press; 1971.
67. Memmi A. Decolonization and the Decolonized. University of Minnesota
Press; 2004.
68. Young M. Bringing Knowledge Back In: From Social Constructivism to Social
Realism in the Sociology of Education. Routledge; 2008.
69. Aschroft B, Ahluwalia P. Edward Said. 2nd Edition. Routledge; 2008.
7 Conclusions

Inclusion and the Public versus Private Debate

Universities are not ahistorical monoliths. They were, in the Western context,
European creations reflecting societal trends and preoccupations, most not-
ably changes in perspectives on faith, knowledge and society, including the
Restoration, Reformation and Counter-​Reformation,1 and in England, Wales
and Ireland in particular the dissolution of the monasteries. At the same time,
they played a key role in the development of a notion of secular as opposed
to clerical knowledge following the Reformation and this scientific revolution
and the accompanying rise of the Enlightenment in the late 17th century was
centred on and fanned out from European universities. In particular, the idea
that the pursuit of knowledge needed to be systematic, cooperative and useful
underpinned the development and raison d'être of the universities.2,3 In the
19th century, the growing realization that economic development and success
might be dependent on education more widely, and scientific discovery and
development more specifically, led, often through governmental pressure, to
the first iterations of the modern research university, with specific disciplines.
Although the picture is of course highly complex and local, in particular in
terms of the relative emphasis between humanities and science disciplines,
nevertheless a line can be traced to the modern focus and debates of the roles
of universities today. What cannot be denied is that universities have always
been there to serve a function in relation to knowledge, the economy and
government3–​5 in terms of what was valued and not valued, which, although
always a two-​way conversation, was never just set by university leaders, staff
or students in isolation.6 Putting this another way, an emphasis either purely
on activism or purely on individual student agency and autonomy, in thinking
about values, education and inclusion, is as misguided as a sole or primary
basis for decision making in universities as it would be in schools.
This is why the question of antisemitism in higher education is relevant
because in liberal democracies, certain values are regarded as important, the
most important of which, as Berlin has highlighted, in contrast to authori-
tarian regimes, is freedom from oppression, within a broad agreed human
horizon. This is a liberal democratic value. It is not a value in all societies –​the
DOI: 10.4324/9781003294894-8
126 Conclusions

ISIS caliphate did not extend it to the Yazidis and the Chinese Communist
Party did and does not extend it to the Uighurs, to Tibet, or to Hong Kong. If
the decolonization and DEI movements cannot identify that antisemitism and
the justification of the burning Jewish families together by Hamas as resist-
ance are similarly not liberal values or part of a common human horizon, then
they cannot fall back vacuously on a mixture of activism and free speech as a
justification. Particularly not at the same time as promoting notions of diver-
sity, equity and inclusion that exclude Jews. This is an incoherent position that
implies that there is no link between wider societal values and education. If
that is so, then there is no possibility of any meaningful content for the term
inclusion in relation to education, in universities or elsewhere.
Further, universities and the school system are also embedded within a
liberal perspective on what knowledge is and what its function should be.
Value pluralism is also a liberal value and as we have seen, there is significant
debate as to the extent to which and how the state should impose values via
the education system. This question, sitting squarely in the middle between
Berlin’s7 positive and negative liberty, is not one that it can be suggested, in
a liberal democratic society, is not up for debate. Even if we take a (in my
view wrongheaded) view of democracy, as say Olssen8 or Marion Young9
does, as primarily about being deliberative (i.e. about coming to consensus
on such matters), that would put the locus for such decision-​making in the
hands of the democratic apparatus of the state, not of universities them-
selves. Yet if we take DEI and decolonization, there is manifestly no or at
most very limited debate. There is no recognition that the state and wider
society in creating and funding universities still expect them to adhere in
some sense to the idea of knowledge production that is both systematic and
useful.5 Rather, there is just a one-​dimensional deracinated view of post­
colonial theory, which replaces a complex contested field of study with a
Manichean binary of some groups good, other groups bad. There is no rec-
ognition of viewpoint diversity such that liberal, conservative, traditional or
even communitarian political perspectives and values, and their implications
for public policy, are considered. This is the case even when certain key clas-
sical and neoliberal values are to a greater or lesser extent at the heart of
the societies who pay for them through their taxes or through fees. There is
no recognition that there are debates possible in liberal societies about the
extent to which the state, and thus universities, should direct particular value
sets in education. There is no longer any sense that the teacher as activist is
an idea open to critique. An idea of inclusion in education that is based on
the debate-​free thinking presented in decolonization and DEI programmes
in universities opens up all the risks of idealist overreach that Berlin warns us
about. As he wrote:10(p.i) 1

…So what is to be done to restrain the champions, sometimes very fanat-

ical, of one or other of these values, each of whom tends to trample upon
the rest, as the great tyrants of the twentieth century have trampled on the
 Conclusions 127

life, liberty, and human rights of millions because their eyes were fixed upon
some ultimate golden future?
I am afraid I have no dramatic answer to offer: only that if these ultimate
human values by which we live are to be pursued, then compromises, trade-​
offs, [and] arrangements have to be made if the worst is not to happen. So
much liberty for so much equality, so much individual self-​expression for so
much security, so much justice for so much compassion. My point is that
some values clash: the ends pursued by human beings are all generated by
our common nature, but their pursuit has to be to some degree controlled—​
liberty and the pursuit of happiness, I repeat, may not be fully compatible
with each other, nor are liberty, equality, and fraternity.
So we must weigh and measure, bargain, compromise, and prevent the
crushing of one form of life by its rivals. I know only too well that this is not
a flag under which idealistic and enthusiastic young men and women may
wish to march—​it seems too tame, too reasonable, too bourgeois, it does
not engage the generous emotions. But you must believe me, one cannot
have everything one wants—​not only in practice, but even in theory. The
denial of this, the search for a single, overarching ideal because it is the one
and only true one for humanity, invariably leads to coercion. And then to
destruction [and] blood…

It leads to crowds who cannot reconcile how equality for all can encompass
the individual liberty of the Jews to always, always be different. Crowds who
cannot abide the tension between universalism and particularism inherent in
the idea of the nation, and can abide it even less when it comes to the idea of
the nation state of the Jews, chanting “Death to the Jew” in Paris in 1894,11
and awful chants about Jews outside the Sydney Opera House in 2023.12
It leads to Jewish students being abused by their teachers in England13 and
hiding in fear in libraries from marauding crowds of their fellow students in
New York.14 This is the ultimate risk of treating inclusion as any empty con­
cept. Promoting antisemitism is not the function of universities in society. In
particular, there is no possible sense of justice in spending our tax dollars on it.

The Attractions of Binary Thinking

Fanon, whatever his faults, cannot be simply regarded as a binary thinker. He
was too aware of the complexities of the relationship between colonizer and
colonized, and his Marxist/​Freudian perspectives added considerable depth to
his analysis. Yet, any perusal of discourse in the academy makes it clear that DEI
and decolonization in their implementation tend towards undertheorization
and a risk of simplistic binary thinking.5,15 Scruton,16 writing on Hayek, asks
why progressive critiques tend to promote simplistic binaries and why such
thinking persists. Hayek, discusses Scruton, notes that “no socialist ever loses
credibility due to the extravagance of his ideas”. 16(p.222) Discounting resource
limitations makes it easy to come up with simplistic solutions, and then to
128 Conclusions

position those who promote these as good, and those who oppose them,
or dare to point out their impracticality, or the tensions inherent between
different values when making decisions based on limitations, as bad. Good
versus bad, in which all the bother of having to deal with tensions, and hard
decisions, and compromise and complexity is deposited in the bad, is a heady
political vision. It always has been, and as Berlin noted, it has a particular
attraction to the young. In one sense this may be not altogether a bad idea,
as the idealism of youth is a potent thing. However, youth’s idealism does
not rob those of us who have been around a while longer of our responsibil-
ities for discernment. I am reminded, in thinking about Scruton and Hayek’s
question, of Melanie Klein’s ideas on splitting in object relations theory.17 In
Kleinian theory, splitting refers to a defence mechanism in which a person
unconsciously separates aspects of the self or others into polarized, extreme
categories of good or bad. This splitting often originates in infancy and early
childhood as a way to manage overwhelming emotions and experiences.
According to Klein, the process of splitting serves to protect the ego from
anxiety and conflict by simplifying complex emotional experiences into more
manageable components.18 Maturity comes when as the infant develops, they
come to understand that the hate and envy that through splitting they have
projected onto others is just that, and they develop the capacity for reparation
and gratitude, a process which inevitably involves recognizing the good and
bad that resides both in ourselves and others. There is no zero sum game, as
Marx might have us believe, in human relations and human activity. As I have
traced, postcolonial theory in potential and actuality can move past simplistic
oppressor-​oppressed binaries to a more complex view of the development of
nation and identity. Yet as it is instantiated in DEI, as an element of education
and inclusion, it has become denuded of this complexity.
In a sense, we could characterize inclusion as a concept within education, as
too early on in the process of redemption that Klein outlines, as too prone to
the simplistic solutions that come from splitting the world into good and bad.
This is not something that we can easily lay at the door of Fanon or Said. It is
the responsibility of the faculty and leaders of today. That in universities, and
schools, antisemitism has so easily have reared its ugly head since October 7th
is, I think, all the proof that is needed for this contention.

What about the Schools?

In La trahison des clercs, Julien Benda accused the academics and universities
of the 1920s, in the context of the rise of fascism in Europe, of dabbling in
“the racial passions, class passions, and national passions…” of their day.19(p.1)
As Arendt20 noted, the totalitarian instincts of the right are not much different
from those of the left, and it was the latter that had such an impact on Berlin
in his childhood. Niall Ferguson21 has carefully traced the ways in which the
German and Austrian academy both contributed to and acquiesced to the rise
of the idealism of fascism. To be clear, I am not drawing a direct parallel to
 Conclusions 129

today, simply noting that the academy has some form on this. As Benda notes,
the distinction between critical scholarship and activism is crucial if the space
for the critical exchange of liberal ideas is to be maintained. Of course, there
is a tension here that Berlin was too well aware of –​as Popper put it –​the
paradox of toleration,22 but it is our responsibility in liberal democratic states
to navigate between pluralism and liberty. The core of the idea of liberal dem-
ocracy is that we need to have both; the lesson of totalitarianism, so lost on
the academy of today, is both that there are no idealist solutions and that we
need to have the courage to accept that. Popper argued that free expression in
free societies crucially allow bad and simplistic ideas to be exposed to critique;
however, this puts a responsibility on people to speak up, a responsibility so
often avoided by the academy. Yet the academy cannot easily ignore its respon-
sibilities given its huge influence on wider society.
Both during World War II and during the rise of fascism in Europe, the
failures of the academy were closely intertwined with what went on in the
schools.23 In modern times, particularly with the growth of the influence
of the universities internationally on professional training, both pre-​and
in-​service teacher education and teacher leadership,24,25 it is perhaps not sur­­
prising that confusion about the role of schools and teachers in promoting a
thin as opposed to thick perspective on civics and a conception of the good
life has arisen.26–​28 Thus, for example, in England, even where legislative
guidance has been explicit about limiting the role of teachers in promoting
partisan political perspectives,29 frequently teachers and school leaders are
positioned as agents of change in respect of social justice.30,31 The debates on
the role of the state and education based on debates between liberal, com-
munitarian and postmodernist perspectives are, for much of the teaching
profession lost, particularly given how heavily influenced they are in their
training by the mindset of the academy. The idea of the activist teacher
committed to social justice has become something like a given in teacher
education,32,33 with much of the complexity and value tensions inherent in
such a stance unaddressed. At my workplace, The Institute of Education
(the name it is best known by), since 2014 a faculty of University College,
in London, has led the field of education internationally on the Quacquarelli
Symonds World University Rankings for years at the time of writing.34 It says
in its mission statement:

We embrace cross-​ pollination, collaboration and excellence to create a

future that is inclusive and just.35

This is of course very well intentioned and mirrors similar statements in

mission statements across the sector. But the idea that inclusion and justice
in the context of education are such easy bedfellows, or that it is the role of
university institutions, which have such an influence on teachers in the UK
and internationally, to prescribe the future of policy rather than be a forum in
which it is debated, is I think open to argument.
130 Conclusions

Since October 7th, we have seen not just in England, the UK and the US,
but across the world, an explosion in antisemitism in the common school, just
as we have in academia.36(p.24),37,38 This raises the same question as before –​how
can those committed to creating a future that is inclusive and just, who have
been trained in just this, have somehow allowed antisemitism to rear its ugly
head, so often without restraint? What meaning then can inclusion in the con-
text of education have?

Towards Inclusion as Negotiation

Berlin wrote, in the conclusion of Two Concepts of Liberty:7(p.168)

But if we are not armed with an a priori guarantee of the proposition that
a total harmony of true values is somewhere to be found –​perhaps in
some ideal realm the characteristics of which we can, in our finite state,
not so much as conceive –​we must fall back on the ordinary resources of
empirical observation and ordinary human knowledge…The world that we
encounter in ordinary experience is one in which we are faced with choices
between ends equally ultimate, and claims equally absolute, the realisation
of some of which must inevitably involve the sacrifice of others. Indeed, it
is because this is their situation that men place such immense value upon
the freedom to choose; for if they had assurance that in some perfect state,
realisable by men on earth, no ends pursued by them would ever be in
conflict, the necessity and agony of choice would disappear, and with it
the central importance of the freedom to choose. Any method of bringing
this final state nearer would then seem fully justified, no matter how much
freedom were sacrificed to forward its advance…The necessity of choosing
between absolute claims is then an inescapable characteristic of the human
condition.

Inclusion in the context of education, as I have tried to trace, cannot escape

from these conclusions. Any idealism, whether rational or empirical, whether
Marxist, or critical, or postcolonial, or indeed conservative and traditional, can
produce the reconciliation of all good things into one space and all bad things
into another. The risks, just to take one example, of conservative perspectives
descending into blood and soil nationalism and fascism are well trodden.39
Inclusion in the context of education is too often considered as a deracinated
idea, where all the inherent tensions between, as I have considered: equality
versus liberty; autonomy /​agency versus protection; equality of opportunity
versus equality of outcome; justice versus mercy or compassion; freedom versus
solidarity; diversity versus community; debate versus agreement; experiment
versus tradition; and negative versus positive liberty, are thought to either not
exist or not matter. Classical and neoliberal perspectives cannot bring solutions
to these tensions. It is not my view that there is a left or right solution to
these tensions inherent in inclusion and education. Values are both plural and
 Conclusions 131

incommensurable, and that all we can do is grapple with them using our critical
faculties and our understanding of local contexts. Liberalism also highlights
for us the crucial role of resource constraints. Many of these tensions could be
dissolved, if resources were unlimited. But as Scruton16 notes, for idealism in
its progressivist versions, this point is often not recognized, and perhaps this
is partly why progressive idealism is so attractive. I am not, though, proposing
that in relation to education and inclusion, it is not legitimate to call for more
allocation of resources. It very much is, and often allocating more resources to
marginalized groups is very much what we should do. But at the same time,
resources have limits, and the value tensions that flow from those limits need
to be recognized. In particular, the limits of time and energy that teachers have
need to be given more weight in debates on education and inclusion.

Liberalism at the Extreme

Liberal ideas, such as those of Hayek and West, have of course their limitations.
Often, it is hard to see how their perhaps extreme commitments to strict
justice, for all that they might have a logical force on their side, can make sense
in the modern, complex technological societies within which we live. I don’t
claim that these liberal perspectives do necessarily make sense. However,
I think they do serve a purpose –​a purpose similar to radical calls that come
from the other side. The sociological critique of education is in the end deeply
radical. In the context of education and inclusion, its call is for revolution,
for society to be radically different from the way it is now, even in the face of
the evidence that such revolutions always end in failure. It cries out against
the injustice of oppression. It is both an important call and a seductive one.
Bias and oppression need to be challenged. Yet what comes after that is more
difficult. The tensions do not go away. Similarly, Hayek and West, as with
Nozick, also call for a radically different society –​where the weight of the state
and its dead hand of oppression are also removed from our lives. This would
be a different way of living entirely, and as with the radicalism of the other
side it would involve heavy losses, losses it would be impracticable for us to
bear. To take just one example, it is not really clear how say Hayek or Nozick
think that the coordinated international research response to the HIV virus
in the 1990s would have happened in their proposed societies. How would
all the communitarian and state-directed pooling of resources and knowledge
to build the health and research infrastructure that facilitated the wondrous
scientific miracle of creating anti-retroviral drugs and reversing the death
sentences faced by so many have occurred? I worked as a medical researcher
on an HIV/​AIDS Unit in London in the 1990s and watched people die from
AIDS, so I know a small something of what a miracle this was. Yet, at the
same time, liberal thinkers remind us also of other injustices, particularly,
the multiple risks of the injustices of the state against the individual, and the
absoluteness of losses that individuals suffer in aiming to achieve equality of
outcome, at all levels of society, including within the classroom when dealing
132 Conclusions

with difference. In particular, in relation to teachers, Nozick and Hayek and

West, and Rawls, would all raise what I think is the necessary question against
the idea that teachers can “magically” achieve inclusion with limited resources.
They would bring the “radical” notion of questioning where the additional
time and energy might come from to be those teachers. They would ask: how
is it possible for all the complex issues raised in terms of value tensions when
dealing with difference in the modern-​day classroom to not have any resource
implications? I ask that question on behalf of teachers, particularly in terms of
newly qualified teachers, as some of my empirical work has focused on how
the transition from the pre-​service phase is already inherently very challenging,
without having the added burden of being an active “change agent” for inclu-
sive education.40 As Berlin says, there are no perfect solutions, only problems
to be addressed.
The lesson of liberal perspectives on inclusion is that resources matter
and resources are limited. The tensions that arise from this lead not to easy
solutions, but, most importantly in the classroom, to a series of questions for
teachers about the best way to resolve these tensions. I have argued that if we
truly want to help teachers to enact inclusion in educational contexts, then
what they need is for these questions to be brought out into the open. They
need the oxygen of discussion. I have posited that there are some trends within
culturally responsive pedagogy, particularly the Funds of Knowledge approach,
which point towards how teachers could go about this in ways which allow for
an understanding of the local and the specific. In particular, if they can come,
with open minds, to understand the lives of the children in their classes, and
their communities and traditions and ideas, they can begin to consider how to
put those into the context of the multiple aims that they, their schools, parents
and families, and the state have for education. This points towards a way in
which difference can be considered in the classroom, as process of negotiation
leading to shared understanding, particularly between teachers and children.
Such an approach also has application at university level. A university, based on
an idea of inclusion as negotiation, would involve an open engagement with
the cultural and knowledge backgrounds of all students and of all faculty. It
would also involve recognizing diverse viewpoints, and would give primacy
to critical and rigorous debate, which recognizes the complexities involved in
thinking about culture, nation and identity, within the bounds of a common
human horizon. The role of the university would be to serve as a crucible
for such debate, not itself to adopt a platform for activism. Just as in schools,
this model positions the role of the teacher and the school as being to under-
stand diversity in support of learning, not to impose a particular view of the
good life.

Inclusion as Negotiation in the Classroom

There has to be a recognition that simplistic binary solutions are just that,
simplistic. Putting it bluntly, my contention is that Berlin’s warning about the
 Conclusions 133

risks of positive liberty leading to blood applies directly to inclusion in the

way it is currently employed in educational settings. A deracinated content-​
free concept of inclusion, i.e. the one we sometimes have now, from which
all tensions have been removed, provides fertile ground for the kind of split
binary thinking that can lead to the glorification of murdering Jewish chil-
dren. Rather what we need is to reframe inclusion as a series of questions
to be negotiated between teachers, children and families, or at one remove,
between the state, teachers and families in terms of public policy develop-
ment. This might well involve pointing out that more resources are needed,
for example, to support the transition of children with disabilities into employ-
ment41 so that they have the possibility of equal participation in society. Such
an approach to inclusion would also entail a different approach to teacher edu-
cation. The academy needs to be refocused away from the idea that it can be
both a political activist organization and an organization involved in the open
critical pursuit of knowledge that supports the wider aims of society. This also
needs to apply to teacher education. The immense failure of teacher education
for inclusion has been the international explosion in antisemitism in schools
and universities in Western liberal democracies in the wake of October 7th.
Teacher education for inclusion needs to recognize the complex debates about
the place of the state in both fostering elements such as autonomy and agency,
but also the limits that are implied in liberal democracies as to the extent to
which the state can go in promoting one simple idea of what the good life
entails. It also needs to develop an understanding that in liberal democracies
there is a plurality of values across individuals, families and cultures, and that
different values come into tension with each other, particularly in terms of
dealing with difference in the classroom. There has been a growing realization
in teacher education for inclusion as a field that teachers need to develop the
capacity to deal with difference not through being taught about it directly, but
more as a type of enquiry or problem-​based approach. So, for example, Hick
et al.42 proposed that posing problem scenarios about issues for inclusion,
as preparation for practicum, and then reflecting on scenarios experienced
on practicum and considering decisions and options, with fellow students, is
one way of approaching this in teacher education. Norwich and Jones43 and
Seleznyov et al.44 explored the use of lesson study to similarly promote joint
enquiry and reflection by pre-​service teachers, focused on particular examples
of complexity in dealing with difference in the classroom. I would suggest that
such an enquiry-​based approach can be positioned to include the notion of
inclusion as negotiation, encompassing a consideration of the value tensions
that underlie the many questions that are raised by dealing with difference in
the classroom. This could also include the probing, as in the FoK approach, of
the cultural and individual reservoirs of knowledge, as well as the differences
in value perspectives, of children and families, so that through open enquiry
teachers and their classes can have the necessary information to help them
navigate towards answers. Such an approach would reframe inclusion not as
some sort of idealized good in and of itself, but as a series of questions to be
134 Conclusions

answered. At the very least, by bringing these questions out into the open,
it will give teachers the space to explore them, and as Berlin argues,7 these
questions cannot be glossed over however much we might wish for that, but
can only be resolved by the hard work of weighing up what will be gained and
what will be lost. Much of the impetus for my academic interest in education
and inclusion stems from my experiences as a class teacher. I was often preoccu-
pied with the question of how to deal with difference in the classroom, and the
feeling that I was failing at it. I guess looking back at my younger teaching self,
the realization I have come to, which I think is an important one, is that there
is no easy answer to what we should do in any given classroom with any given
child. There is only the moral responsibility to respond to the question, and to
respond to it as best we can for all the children that we work with as teachers.

Note
1 From a speech composed for a ceremony commemorating his acceptance of an hon­
orary degree at the University of Toronto in 1994. This was presented on Berlin’s
behalf and then published under the title “A Message to the 21st Century”.

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Index

ability vs. effort, teacher differentiation autism and autism education, 59,
of, 41, 43–​44, 70 69–​71, 79–​80; Asperger’s Syndrome,
activism, 2–​4; critique of DEI and 86; autistic identity, 50, 82–​83, 93;
decolonization in higher education autonomy and, 51, 82; case study
and, 126–​127; disability as identity of, 80–​84; in higher education, 109;
and, 50; idealism and idealizing social communication development,
tendency in inclusion in education/​ 71, 82–​86; video modelling and,
SEN and, 8–​9, 35, 45–​48, 126–​127, 71. See also inclusion in educational
130–​131; postcolonialism as form of, settings/​SEN
110, 112, 126; social justice, 3, 14, autonomy: in autism/​SEN education
46, 70, 98, 110, 129; student voice and students, 51, 82; disability as
movement, 51; teacher as activists, identity and, 50; implications of in
125–​126, 129, 133; as unopen to school, 42–​44; Kant and, 65–​66; as
critique in higher education, liberal state value and, 35–​37, 41–​42,
125–​126, 129, 132; voice-​based 51, 115; as liberal state value vs.
discourse on knowledge and, 51, 61, duty and tradition, 36–​37, 39, 93;
67–​68, 86, 102, 104, 110, 113 objections to liberal position on,
agency: moral agency, 61, 67–​68; 26–​27, 30, 41; teacher differentiation
objections to liberal position on, of ability vs. effort and, 41, 43–​44, 70
26–​27, 30. See also autonomy
antisemitism: DEI and postcolonialism in Benda, J., 128–​129
higher education and, 109–​110, Berlin, I., 3, 12, 22, 94, 126–​127;
114–​121, 126–​127; marginalization critique of idealist universality/​positive
of, 114–​115; negotiation in liberty and, 22, 24, 29, 47, 126–​127;
value conflicts for, 120–​121; new critique of value pluralism/​relativism
left antisemitism and, 114–​115; of, 47–​48; focus on liberty over state
postcolonialist binary thinking and, power of, 22–​24, 29; Historical
117–​119, 126–​128, 132–​133; rise in Inevitability, 29, 49, 67; on justice,
in higher education post-​October 7th 26; on knowing moral agency, 67;
and, 109, 113–​117, 119, 130, 133; on oppression in revolutions, 115;
rise in in schools post-​October 7th Two Concepts of Liberty, 29, 130;
and, 130. See also Judaism and Jewish on utopian movements, 8; value
identity incommensurability and, 45–​47.
Asperger’s Syndrome, 86. See also autism See also negative liberty (freedom)
and autism education bias in knowledge producers, 63–​65,
assessment and inclusion, 49–​50, 52; IQ 68–​70, 86–​87; need to challenge,
tests and, 1, 49, 62 131
138 Index

binary thinking, 127; negotiation for and, 49, 59, 65–​67; sociological
avoiding, 120; as oversimplistic and critique of difference and, 2; traditional
oppressive, 117–​119, 126, 132–​133 natural law arguments for children/​
Bion, W., 2–​3 families, 37, 39, 48, 64, 66; traditional
biopsychosocial perspective on difference, values/​duty in, 27; as underplayed
5, 8, 41, 50 in inclusion literature, 9; universalist
Black Caribbean identity in England, vs. particularist, 24, 27; universities
educational disparities and, 1 and maintaining liberal values
Booth, T., list of inclusive values of, and, 128–​129; value tensions with
16–​17 communitarian perspectives and, 46;
values of in public vs. private sphere,
capability approach, 5, 40–​41, 44, 85 28–​29, 35–​36. See also neoliberalism
children and children with SEN, 46; common-​sense view of knowledge, 61,
children/​parents and state education, 67–​69
33–​34, 46; critical thinking skills and, communitarian perspectives, 48; critique
35–​37; development of autonomy, of agency/​autonomy and, 26–​27,
35–​36, 39, 41, 51; equal 36, 41; critique of Rawls and, 30; as
representation and protections and, underplayed in inclusion literature, 9;
41, 75; new sociology of childhood/​ value tensions between liberal and, 46
student voice movement and, 51; community action/​empowerment, 1;
parent-​child relationship, 38–​39, “Community Cultural Wealth” model,
50–​51, 101; traditional natural law 98
arguments for children/​families and, compulsory state schooling, 34–​35
37, 39, 48, 64, 66 “conception of the good”, 8, 25, 29, 31,
choice, as liberal value, 23, 26. See also 36, 47, 94, 129
educational decision-​making; value critical theory, 2; “Community Cultural
tensions in inclusion in education/​ Wealth” model, 98; antisemitism and,
SEN 116; culturally responsive pedagogy
civics curriculum, 28–​29, 33, 36, and, 92; decolonization and nation
47; critical thinking skills for and, 117; identitarian position of, 63;
democratic engagement skills inclusion and democracy and, 15; vs.
and, 35, 37, 42 postcolonial theory, 112; sociological
classical liberalism, 3; autonomy as liberal critique of difference and, 2
state value and, 35–​37, 41–​42, 115; critical thinking skills, teaching of,
critique of idealist universality and, 35–​37, 42
22, 24, 29; critique of liberal position Crowder, G., 24, 45–​48, 94; on tradition
on agency and, 26–​27, 30; critique of in liberalism, 27
resource allocation/​economics and, cultural diversity: “Community Cultural
50; education and education policy Wealth” model, 98; cultural disparities
issues and, 33, 40–​42, 44; educational and, 1–​2; cultural norms and, 84–​85,
decision-​making and, 49–​50; equal 93–​94; culture and values, 48; Funds
representation and protections and, of Knowledge approach and, 97–​104;
41, 75, 115; equality in, 2, 115; forms need for understanding social/​cultural
of, 24; good life in, 8, 25, 29, 31, contexts of knowledge, 63, 69–​70,
36, 47, 94, 129; justice values, 26; 126; Spanish speakers in US, 99–​100;
justice/​social liberalism of Rawls and, value tensions in response to, 95–​97.
24–​27, 30, 41; knowledge and, 52, See also “Diversity, Equity
59; limits of liberalism/​society, 85–​86, and Inclusion” (DEI);
130–​131, 133; Marxist critique of, 27, multiculturalism
29; multiculturalism and, 115–​116; as culturally responsive pedagogy, 92–​93,
non-​solution to value tensions, 132; critiques of, 93; oppositional
130–​131; postcolonial theory critique culture/​identities and, 93–​94, 117,
of in academics, 113; scientific realism 120; value tensions and, 93–​94
 Index 139

curriculum, 43; “knowledge turn” in, duty/​traditional values: autonomy as

60, 69, 86; civics curriculum, 28–​29, liberal state value vs., 36–​37, 39, 93;
33, 47; critical thinking skills and, in classical liberalism, 27; parent-​child
35–​37; differentiated instruction, relationship and, 39; as value tension,
6, 13, 40–​41, 43; placement and, 93
11; public political vs. private values
and, 28–​29, 35; as site of tension in economics. See neoliberalism; resource
dilemma of difference, 11–​13; for allocations
special educational needs children and, education policy. See inclusion policies;
70–​71, 80–​87; Universal Design for political value positions and public
Learning (UDL), 12, 43, 75. See also policy
culturally responsive educational decision-​making: autonomy
pedagogy vs. resources issues, 42–​44; binary
curriculum for teacher education of SEN, thinking in, 127–​128; classical liberal
69; “knowledge turn” in, 60, 69, 86; perspectives on, 49–​50; misguided,
disciplinary knowledge and, 68–​70, 125; study of, 74–​76; values in, 16,
99; evidence-​informed practices 47–​48. See also value tensions in
and, 60, 68, 71, 86–​87. See also inclusion in education/​SEN
culturally responsive pedagogy; teacher educational disparities, 1–​2, 70–​71;
education for SEN educational decision-​making and,
74–​76
decolonization in higher education: England, 1; ESN (Educationally
critique of binary thinking/​DEI Subnormal) schools in, 1; teacher
in postcolonialism and, 109–​110, activists in, 129
114–​115, 118–​119, 126–​129; DEI equal representation, 41, 75
and antisemitism in and, 109–​110, equality in classical liberalism, 2, 115
114–​118; postcolonial theory and, equality of opportunity/​outcome, 17,
110–​113; as value tension in higher 131; for autistic students, 71, 109;
education, 109, 118–​121, 126–​127 vs. excellence, 52; redistribution of
deficit thinking, 49 resources/​resource allocation and,
democracy and inclusion, 15–​16; civics 16–​17, 26–​28, 44, 132; value tensions
curriculum for democratic engagement between, 75
skills, 35 evidence-​informed practices, 60, 68, 71,
diagnostic labels, 69; potential stigma 86–​87
of, 10 excellence as value, 44, 52, 60, 93–​94
differentiated instruction, 6, 13, 40–​41, externalities/​neighbourhood effects in
43, 77 education, 33–​35, 46
“Dilemma of Difference” framework, 10,
12–​13; curriculum as site of tension faith traditions, 36, 99, 119–​120, 125;
in, 11–​13; legal process of as masking FoK model and, 100–​101, 103.
values/​political values and, 12–​14; See also Judaism and Jewish identity
placement as site of tension in, 10–​11, families, parent-​child relationship and,
13 38–​39, 101. See also children and
Dirlik, A., 117–​120 children with SEN
disciplinary knowledge, 68–​70, 99. Fanon, F., 111–​112, 117, 119, 127–​128.
See also knowledge See also postcolonial theory
“Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI), feminism, 39, 65; as “voice discourse,”
114; antisemitism in higher education 61
and, 109–​110, 114–​121; critique of in fixed ability, 10–​11
higher education and, 126–​128 Foucault, M., 2, 5–​6, 70, 112–​113;
Durkheim, E., social realist base of critique of Marxism of, 7; on what
knowledge and, 63–​64, 66, 68–​70, replaces the system/​social change,
90, 92, 94, 98, 102, 119 7–​8
140 Index

Friedman, M., 31; externalities/​ inclusion and inclusion approaches:

neighbourhood effects and, 33; state critique of inclusion as term lacking
involvement in education, 33–​34 clarity/​specificity, 3, 6, 8–​9, 46;
Funds of Knowledge (FoK) approach, democracy and inclusion and, 15–​16;
97–​104, 132 idealism and conceptual elisions in
current debates on, 8–​10; international
good life in liberalism, 8, 25, 29, 31, 36, inclusion movement,
47, 94, 129 2–​3, 8; need for international
Gove, M., 69–​70 movement of, 2; tensions between
perspectives on, 3, 6, 8–​12. See also
Hamas’s terrorist atrocities of October 7, curriculum; inclusion in educational
academic /​international reaction to, settings/​SEN; inclusion policies; value
2–​3, 67. See also antisemitism; October tensions in inclusion in education/​
7, 2023 terrorist attacks SEN
Hayek, F., 31, 127; critique of, 131; on inclusion in educational settings/​SEN:
state involvement in education, 34; “conception of the good” and, 8, 25,
theory of social knowledge of, 29, 31, 36, 47, 94, 129; activism as
32–​33 unopen to critique in, 125–​126, 129;
hegemony, 14–​16; Berlin critique of, 29; autonomy and agency issues in,
hegemonic concept growth, 14–​15, 41–​44; capability approach and,
17; Marxism and, 14 40–​41; critique of “Diversity, Equity,
higher education: activism as unopen and Inclusion” (DEI) and, 109–​110,
to critique in, 125–​126, 129, 132; 114–​115, 118–​119, 126–​129;
autistic students in, 109; DEI/​ critique of inclusion as term lacking
decolonization and rise in antisemitism clarity/​specificity, 46; cultural norms
in post-​Oct. 7, 109–​110, 114–​121, and, 84–​85, 93–​94; education as
126–​127, 130; inclusion as enactment of public policy and, 23;
negotiation in, 132; maintaining equal representation and protections
liberal values and, 128–​129; mission and, 41, 75; idealizing tendencies in
statements on inclusion and, 129. inclusion movement and, 8–​9, 35,
See also decolonization in higher 45–​48, 126–​127, 130–​131; limits of
education liberalism/​society and, 85–​86, 133;
Historical Inevitability (Berlin), 29, 49, models of based on postmodernist
67 perspectives, 70; need to reframe as
Hong Kong, study of kindergartners negotiation, 132–​134; neoliberalism
with SEN in, 74, 76 and, 40; neoliberalism and the welfare
state and, 17, 22, 31–​33, 45, 78;
idealism in inclusion movement, 5, normativity and normative values, 40,
7–​9, 133; critique of DEI and 49–​52, 68, 70, 86, 91; normativity
decolonization in higher education and normative values and, 40, 49–​52,
and, 119, 126–​127; critique of 68, 70, 84–​86, 91, 93–​94; pedagogy/​
idealist universality, 22, 24, 29, 47; pedagogical decisions for SEN, 59,
in educational settings/​SEN, 8–​9, 35, 70–​71; problem-​based approach
45–​48, 126–​127, 130–​131 to, 133; professional judgement
identity: “voice discourses” and, 61; in the classroom and, 47–​48; state
autistic identity, 50, 82–​83, 93; Black involvement in education and, 33–​35,
Caribbean identity in England, 1; 46, 126; study of kindergartner’s
disability as, 50; identity formation, with SEN in Hong Kong, 74–​76;
30; nationality in postcolonialism and, teacher differentiation of ability vs.
117–​120, 128; oppositional culture/​ effort and, 41, 43–​44, 70; teacher
identities, 93–​94, 117, 120; as value time and energy considerations and,
tension, 93. See also Judaism and 75, 131; underplaying of negative
Jewish identity liberty (freedom) in, 22; underplaying
 Index 141

of resource allocation/​economics knowledge: “knowledge turn” in

in, 31–​32, 44–​45; unsettledness of curriculum, 60, 69, 86; about special
inclusion as term, 3; value tensions in, educational needs children and,
23, 26, 39, 45–​46; value tensions in 70–​71, 86–​87; bias and, 63–​65,
higher education, 129. See also autism 68–​70, 86–​87; in classical liberalism,
and autism education; curriculum; 52, 59; common-​sense view of
curriculum for teacher education of knowledge, 61, 67–​69; critique of
SEN; inclusion policies; knowledge; realist positions of, 60–​67, 113;
placement; resource allocations; curriculum for teacher education and,
teacher education for SEN; teacher 60, 68–​70, 86; debates on sociology
expectations; value tensions in of, 60; disciplinary knowledge/​
inclusion in education/​SEN psychology for SEN children and,
inclusion policies, 5; “reasonable 68–​70, 99; Funds of Knowledge
accommodations” and, 8, 28, (FoK) approach, 97–​104; language
44, 79–​80, 85; disagreement in and, 66; liberal values of as embedded
political debates on public policy, in education, 126; moral agency and,
22; education as enactment of 61, 67–​68; need for understanding
public policy and, 23; issues in social/​cultural contexts of, 63,
liberalism and, 33; multicultural 69–​70, 126; normative assumptions
education policy, 90, 93; need to about, 51–​52; in postcolonial theory,
reframe inclusion as negotiation 112–​113, 126; postmodern critique of
in educational settings and, 133; (straw man argument), 62–​63; realist
neoliberalism and, 31; Salamanca positions on the knowing subject,
Statement, 5, 8, 79; teachers and, 9; 59; realist vs. postmodernist positions
unaddressed complexity and value on, 59, 70–​71; realism and bias in
tensions in higher education and, 129; knowledge in postcolonial theory, 120;
underplaying of resource allocation/​ social realist perspective on, 63–​66,
economics in, 31–​32, 44; value 68–​70, 86–​87, 92, 97; values and, 68;
pluralism and, 47. See also political voice-​based discourse on knowledge
value positions and public and, 61, 68, 86, 102, 104, 110,
policy 113
indigenous practices and knowledge,
112. See also postcolonial theory language: knowledge and, 66; language
IQ tests, 1, 49, 62 markers of disability, 50; social
communication development, 71,
Judaism and Jewish identity, 39; of 82–​86
author, 3; cultural/​religious/​national liberalism. See classical liberalism;
identity and, 115–​116, 118; Jewish neoliberalism
education, 36–​37; national identity liberty: as liberal democratic value, 98,
and nationhood and, 115–​119; rise 115, 119, 125–​126, 129. See also
in antisemitism in higher ed post-​ negative liberty
October 7th and, 113–​117. See also
antisemitism marginalized groups, 1–​2, 70–​71, 92,
justice, 41; Berlin on, 26; Rawls on, 94; “Community Cultural Wealth”
24–​26, 28, 50, 59, 75; social justice, model, 98; FoK approach and, 97–​98;
3, 14, 46, 70, 98, 110, 129 marginalized antisemitism, 114–​116;
redistribution of resources/​resource
Kant, I., 24–​26, 30, 36, 42, 64–​66; allocation and, 16–​17, 26–​28, 44,
critiques of, 66–​67, 70. See also 131–​132; Spanish speakers in US as,
scientific realism 99–​100. See also culturally responsive
Keats, J., 1, 3 pedagogy
Kekes, J., 39, 45, 47–​48 market economy. See neoliberalism;
Klein, M., 128 resource allocations
142 Index

Marxism, 3, 8; critique of family common schools after, 130; rise in

structures of, 39; critique of antisemitism in higher ed after,
liberalism of, 27, 29; critique of 113–​117, 119, 128, 130, 133
neoliberalism, 32; Foucault critique Olssen, M., 7, 15, 23, 29, 45, 96, 126;
of, 7; hegemony/​material and critique of Berlin’s relativism, 47–​48
cultural historical factors and, 14, 27; oppositional culture/​identities, 93–​94,
postcolonial theory and, 112, 117; vs. 117, 120
postcolonialist perspectives, 112, 117; oppression, 50, 117; need to challenge,
sociological critique of difference and, 131; postcolonialist binary thinking as,
2, 8 117–​119, 126, 132–​133; revolutions
McQueen, S., 1 and, 115–​116. See also antisemitism
Memmi, A., 117–​119
mission statements on inclusion, 129 parent-​child relationship, 38–​39, 50–​51,
Moore, R., 61–​62, 68, 110 101
moral agency, 61, 67–​68 participation, critiques of, 41
Muller, J., 61–​62, 68, 110 pedagogy/​pedagogical decisions for
multiculturalism, 115–​116; multicultural SEN, 59, 70–​71, 77. See also culturally
education policy, 90, 93. See also responsive pedagogy; curriculum;
cultural diversity; culturally responsive curriculum for teacher education
pedagogy of SEN; inclusion in educational
settings/​SEN; knowledge
nationality in postcolonialism, 117–​120, phronesis, 47–​48, 76
128 placement: curriculum and, 11; as site
natural law arguments for children/​ of tension in dilemma of difference,
families, 37, 39, 48, 64, 66 10–​11, 13
negative liberty, 3, 15–​16, 22–​24, 29, Pogge, TW and Pogge, TC, 41, 44
31, 36, 39, 46, 119, 126; as value policies of inclusion. See inclusion
tension, 93. See also Berlin, I policies; political value positions and
negotiation in value conflicts, 12, 103, public policy
120–​121; for avoiding binary thinking, political value positions and public
120; need to reframe inclusion as in policy, 3–​4, 60; curriculum and public
educational settings, 132–​134 vs. private values, 28–​29; democracy
neo-​conservatism, 37; as underplayed in and inclusion and, 15–​16, 35;
inclusion literature, 9 disagreement on position/​perspective,
neoliberalism, 30–​32, 40; assessments 22; as embedded within educational
and achievement in education and, practices, 3; neoliberalism/​welfare
52; curriculum policy and, 69; state and education and, 17, 22,
multiculturalism and, 115–​116; as 31–​33, 45, 78; parent-​child
non-​solution to value tensions, relationship and, 38–​39, 101;
130–​131; scientific realism and, 49, resource allocations and, 12–​16;
59, 65–​67; as underplayed in inclusion state involvement in education
literature, 9; welfare state and and education policy, 33–​35; value
education and, 17, 22, 31–​33, 45, 78 pluralism and incommensurability
normativity and normative values, 40, and, 45–​47; value tensions in dilemma
49–​52, 68, 70, 86, 91; cultural norms, of difference framework and, 12–​14.
84–​85, 93–​94 See also inclusion policies
Norwich, B., 6, 10, 12, 59, 133 postcolonialist perspectives, 2, 101, 104;
Nozick, 24, 26, 31, 70; critique of, 118, as “voice discourse,” 61; antisemitism
131–​132 in higher education and, 109–​110,
Nussbaum, M., 8, 19, 24, 27, 40–​41 113–​121, 126–​127; bias in knowledge
in postcolonial theory and, 120;
October 7, 2023 terrorist attacks, binary thinking in as oversimplistic and
2–​3, 67, 109; rise in antisemitism in oppressive, 117–​119, 126, 132–​133;
 Index 143

critique of realism and, 61–​62; on 79–​80, 85; questions on extent, 50;

equality of opportunity/​outcome and, value tensions and, 85
75; Fanon and, 111–​112, 117, 119, “reflective equilibrium”, justice and, 24,
127–​128; as form of activism, 110, 28
112, 126; identitarian position in, 63; relativism, 47, 68, 113; critique of
indigenous practices and knowledge Berlin’s, 47–​48; straw man argument
and, 112; vs. Marxism and critical and, 62–​63
theory, 112, 117; moral relativism religious freedom, 36–​37
of, 113; nation in, 117; Said and, representation: disability as identity
112–​113, 119–​120, 128; value tension and, 50; equal representation and
between nationality and identity in, protections for children and, 41,
117–​120, 128; violence in, 111, 75; as value tension, 93; voice-​based
117. See also decolonization in higher discourse on knowledge and, 61,
education 67–​68, 86, 102, 104, 110, 113
postmodernist perspectives: as “voice resource allocations, 12–​17, 31–​32,
discourse,” 61; critique of knowledge 42–​44, 75; in “Dilemma of
by (Kant and scientific realism), Difference” framework, 10, 12–​13;
65–​66; critique of knowledge by “reasonable accommodations” impact
(straw man argument), 62–​63; on teachers/​value tensions and,
education and inclusion models based 79–​80, 84–​85; capability approach
on, 70; on equality of opportunity/​ and, 40–​41; critique of additional
outcome and, 75; language in, 66; teacher training for management
realist vs. postmodernist positions on of, 75; critique of liberal views on,
knowledge and, 59, 70–​71 50, 131; marginalized groups and,
problem-​based approach to inclusion, 131; redistribution of and equality
133 of opportunity/​outcome, 16–​17,
professional judgement in the classroom, 26–​28, 44, 75, 85, 132; resource
47–​48 limitations and, 12–​13, 74, 79,
protectionist views of the state, 84–​85, 127–​128, 131–​133; in social
33–​34 liberalism, 24; underplaying of in
public vs. private spheres, liberal values inclusion in education debates, 31–​32,
and, 28–​29, 35–​36 44–​45, 131–​132; value tensions for
teachers and, 12–​13, 17, 74, 76–​79,
Ramaekers, S., 38–​39, 101 84–​85, 127–​128, 131–​133. See also
Rata, E., 68–​71, 90 neoliberalism
Rawls, J., 22; communitarian critique of, revolutions, oppression and, 115–​116
30; critique/​defense of disability in
works of, 27–​28; on justice, 24–​26, Said, E., 112–​113, 119–​120, 128.
28, 31, 50, 59, 75; particularist See also postcolonial theory
liberalism of, 27; social liberalism of, Salamanca Statement, 5, 8, 79
24–​27, 31 scientific realism, 49–​50, 59, 66;
Raz, J., 28–​29, 36 common-​sense view of knowledge
realism, 6, 59; bias in knowledge and, 61, 67–​68; underdetermination
in postcolonial theory and, 120; critique, 67
common-​sense view of knowledge in, Sen, A., 40–​41
61, 67–​68; critique of realist positions Shakespeare, T., 44, 83
of knowledge/​knowing subject, social communication development, 71,
60–​62, 113; realist vs. postmodernist 82–​86
positions on knowledge and, 59, social justice, 3, 14, 46, 110, 129;
70–​71. See also scientific realism; social redistribution and, 70; social realist
realist perspective perspective on, 98
“reasonable accommodations”, 8, 28, 44; social liberalism, 24; of Rawls,
impact on teachers/​value tensions and, 24–​27
144 Index

social realist perspective: bias in understanding social/​cultural contexts

knowledge producers and, 63–​65, of knowledge and, 63, 70–​71; need
68–​70, 86–​87; on knowledge, 63–​66, to reframe inclusion as negotiation in
87, 92, 97; on social justice, 98 educational settings and, 133–​134;
sociological critique of difference: problem-​based approach to inclusion
activism of equality of, 2; activism and, 133. See also curriculum for
values/​political values and, 2–​4; teacher education of SEN
classical liberalist perspective on, 2; teacher expectations, 49, 68; deficit
Foucault and, 2, 6–​7; idealism in, 8–​9; thinking and, 49; disciplinary
Marxism and, 8 knowledge and, 70; inclusion values
sociology of childhood, student voice and, 17; stigma and, 10–​11; teacher
movement and, 51 differentiation of ability vs. effort and,
Spanish speakers in US, 99–​100 41, 43–​44, 70
special educational needs (SEN), teachers as activists: in England, 129; as
5; acceptance and tensions in, 8; unopen to critique, 125–​126, 133
curriculum and, 11–​12; inclusion teaching assistants, 11–​12, 87
policies and, 5; psychological vs. team teaching, 80, 86
sociological position on, 6; SEN toleration, paradox of, 129
schools in England, 1–​2; social model traditional values/​duty, 36–​37; vs.
of, 5–​7; study of kindergartners with autonomy as liberal state value,
SEN in Hong Kong, 74–​76; teacher 36–​37, 39, 93; faith traditions
education and, 70–​71. See also autism and FoK model, 100–​101, 103; in
and autism education; curriculum for liberalism, 27; natural law arguments
teacher education of SEN; inclusion for children/​families, 37, 39, 48, 64,
in educational settings/​SEN; teacher 66; parent-​child relationship and, 39,
education for SEN; value tensions in 50; as value tension, 93
inclusion in education/​SEN Tse R., 74–​76
splitting, in object relations theory, 128 Two Concepts of Liberty (Berlin), 29,
state involvement in education: 130
autonomy as liberal state value, 35–​37,
41–​42, 115; autonomy as liberal state underdetermination, 67
value vs. duty and tradition, 36–​37, Universal Design for Learning (UDL),
39, 93; children/​parents and, 33–​34, 12, 43, 75
46; inclusion in educational settings/​ utopian movements, 8
SEN and, 33–​35, 46, 126; limits
of liberalism/​society and, 85–​86; value incommensurability, 45–​47, 79,
unaddressed complexity and value 131; assessment and inclusion, 49–​50;
tensions in, 129 deficit thinking and, 49; scientific
stigma, teacher expectations and, 10–​11 realism and, 49, 59, 65–​67
straw man argument, 62–​63 value pluralism, 39, 131; complexity of
student voice movement, 51 in practice, 85; compromise in decision
Suissa, J., 38–​39, 101 making and, 47; critique of Berlin’s,
Summerhill School (alternative school), 47–​48; inclusion policy and, 47; as
35, 42 liberal value, 126; need for awareness
of in teacher education, 133; parent-​
teacher attention, 75 child bond and, 39; tensions in
teacher education for SEN, 74–​76; inclusion approaches and, 3, 130
critique of additional for resource value tensions in inclusion in education/​
allocation, 75; disciplinary SEN, 12–​13, 23, 26, 39, 45–​47,
knowledge/​psychology for SEN 93, 94; in “Dilemma of Difference”
children and, 68–​70, 99; knowledge framework, 10, 12–​14; “reasonable
about special educational needs accommodations” and, 79–​80, 85;
children and, 70–​71, 86–​87; need for antisemitism rise and, 114–​115;
 Index 145

assessments and, 51–​52; in autism and 49–​52, 68, 70, 84–​86, 91, 93–​94;
autism education, 79–​84, 93, 109; perspectives on values, 16; professional
autonomy vs. duty and tradition and, judgement in the classroom and, 47;
36–​37; binary thinking and, 127–​128; in public vs. private spheres, 28–​29,
Booth’s list of inclusive values, 16–​17; 35–​36; realist vs. postmodernist
cultural diversity and, 95–​97; cultural positions on knowledge and, 59;
diversity and Funds of Knowledge resource allocations and resource
approach and, 97–​104, 132; culturally limitations and, 12–​13, 74, 76–​80,
responsive pedagogy and, 93–​94; 84–​85, 127–​128, 131–​133; study of
decision-​making/​educational decision-​ kindergarteners with SEN in Hong
making and, 16, 23, 26, 47, 74; Kong and, 74, 76; team teaching as
decolonization in higher education as, solution to, 80, 86; value choices case
109, 118–​121, 126–​127; disciplinary studies, 76–​86; value differentiation
knowledge and, 68–​70, 99; economic and knowledge and, 68; voice-​based
(resource allocation) vs. other, 16, discourse on knowledge and, 61,
23–​24; in educational decision-​ 68, 86, 102, 104, 110, 113. See also
making, 16, 47–​48, 74–​76; excellence autonomy; duty/​traditional values;
as value and, 44, 52, 60, 93–​94; in equality of opportunity/​outcome;
higher education, 114, 117–​120, 128; inclusion in educational settings/​SEN;
idealism and idealizing tendency and, representation
8–​9, 35, 45–​46, 126–​127, 130–​131; video modelling, 71
between liberal and communitarian violence, in postcolonial theory, 111,
perspectives, 46; limits of liberalism/​ 117
society and, 85–​86, 131–​132; local “voice discourses”, 61, 68, 86, 104;
positioning of teaching/​relativism decolonization as, 110, 113
and, 48; nationality and identity in
postcolonialism and, 117–​120, 128; welfare state, education and, 17, 22,
need for awareness of in teacher 31–​33, 45, 78
education, 133; need for teacher West Indian community (London), 1
discussion/​collaboration on, 94–​95; West, E. G., 33–​35, 131–​132
negotiation for resolving, 103,
120–​121, 132–​133; neoliberalism/​ Young, Marion, 15, 126
welfare state and education, 17, Young, Michael, 60, 62–​64, 68–​69, 86,
22, 31–​33, 45, 78; normativity 102
and normative values and, 40, Young, R., 112–​113