On the Educational Ethics of Outmigration: Liberal Legitimacy, Personal Autonomy, and Rural Education

The promise of a liberal democracy is to provide each citizen a fair and equal chance at a good life (I do not mean “liberal” in the sense of a political party [The Liberal Party of Canada] or in the popular sense [the set of cultural/economic preferences often associated with so-called “left-learning” citizens in the United States]. I mean a political and intellectual tradition that sees the relationship between citizen and government founded on a basic moral respect for the equal value of all persons and the associated rights and liberties granted by virtue of that respect). Education plays a key role in realizing this promise. To what extent, however, should educational institutions be responsive to differences in the demographics, composition, density, and mobility of different segments of a liberal citizenry? In this chapter, I will argue that a liberal conception of public education should attend to the meaning and significance of a citizen’s community of origin in the pursuit of a good life, and that this warrants a special consideration for rural educators. By a “liberal conception of public education” I mean an education that takes the promotion of citizen’s capacity for individual freedom in the pursuit of a good life as a key educational aim supported by public institutions such as the school. In Sect. 1, I set out the basic features of a public education as envisaged by liberal political theory, focusing on the conditions that such an education would need to fulfill in order to be legitimate in the eyes of citizens. In Sect. 2, I outline the various critiques levelled at contemporary public education advanced by rural education theorists. In Sect. 3, I explain why these critiques represent a genuine challenge to the justice and legitimacy of liberal public education. Finally, in Sect. 4, I defend an approach to liberal public education that can address this challenge, and I identify the ways in which rural educators can work to realize this approach.