A Step Closer to Perfection: Is There a Kantian Duty to Promote Education?

Abstract

It is a common assumption that everybody has a right to education, and the state seems to be in a privileged position to educate its citizens. But the extent to which the state has a right or a duty to educate its citizens depends on our conception of the state and the distinct purposes of education. Kantian responses to this question differ according to their understanding of the legitimate authority of the state and the primary purpose they grant education. In the first section of the paper, our speaker, Feroz Mehmood Shah of the University of Oslo, will discuss the different purposes Kant grants education, with the goal of singling out what he takes to be a distinct form of moral purpose with education, namely that which promotes the perfection of mankind according to the idea of education. This purpose of education, Feroz argues, should be distinguished from what is typically understood as moral education, both in the form criticized by Kant and the form promoted by Kant. The kind of education that aims at striving for the perfection of mankind will be called ideal education. In the second section of the paper, Feroz will then argue that the different accounts of a state right and duty to educate that we find in Kantian scholarship do not cover this distinct moral purpose of education. He will discuss three kinds of justification for state-financed education: minimalist arguments for the preservation of the state, welfare arguments that respond to the needs of the people, and arguments that address the wrong of democracy and the good of democratic participation. None of these, Feroz argues, gives a justification for an ideal education. In the third and final section of the paper, Feroz presents a different justification of the state’s right and duty to educate its citizens according to ideal education, grounding it on the individual moral duty to perfect oneself.