A non-ideal aim of redressing epistemic injustices in corruptive educational environments: Toward restorative epistemic justice

Abstract

The most important and general aim of the education system is to edify students, epistemically speaking. However, it is a sad reality that the education system is sometimes a corruptive epistemic environment in which a variety of epistemic injustices occur. In this article, I first argue that the special character of educational institutions means that children sometimes suffer testimonial, participant, and hermeneutical betrayals as specifically educational variants of epistemic injustices. Next, I ask what our response should be to such epistemic injustices. I draw a distinction between an ‘ideal’ and a ‘non-ideal’ solution to these problems. I hold that consideration of (a) environmental bad luck and (b) children’s lack of control over their epistemic environments should lead us to favor a non-ideal solution to the problem of epistemic injustice in education. I propose that the non-ideal approach to epistemic injustice in education should focus not on the reduction or neutralization of our implicit prejudices, as has commonly been proposed in the literature, but on providing for the epistemic needs of those who suffer epistemic injustices in corruptive environments in two ways. First, we should aim to care for children who are afflicted by injustice by having their epistemic needs legitimately recognized by caring educators. Second, we should aim systemically to offer an educational curriculum for any child and teacher to develop critical imagination to care about the epistemic needs of those who are vulnerable to epistemic injustices. I conclude by explaining the acts of epistemic caring and critical imagining as parts of restorative epistemic justice that affords vulnerable children due recognition of their epistemic needs beyond merely knowing the mechanisms of implicit prejudices and the epistemic injustices associated with them.