Education, Impartiality, and the Right to an Open Future

The right to an open future is a common term for the rights belonging to children as potential autonomous agents. The rights that have this particular form are parallel to the rights attributed to adults as actual autonomous agents. Although children may not be capable of exercising rights related to future autonomy until they develop the capacities necessary for their use, these rights nevertheless could be infringed upon in advance by significantly influencing during childhood the choices that the agent will make as an adult. The prevention of infringement on the right to an open future is seen by theorists of personal autonomy in the impartiality of compulsory education. It is necessary for students to acquire knowledge and skills that will maximize their choice of vocation and lifestyle in the future. Moreover, the maximization of choice should not be understood solely in quantitative terms as increasing the number of available alternatives. Adequate maximization of choice also has a qualitative dimension that includes the improvement of the diversity and significance of available alternatives. However, the qualitative and quantitative dimensions of freedom of choice often happen to be in conflict, as in cases where the introduction of a more significant alternative entails the loss of several less significant alternatives or vice versa. The topic of this paper is the conflict between the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of freedom of lifestyle choice in an educational context. The main question I will attempt to answer is: how do we resolve the tension between breadth and depth in situations where any assumption about the attribution of objective significance to educational content is excluded by the ideal of impartiality? I will consider to what extent the out-of-school context can serve as a guide in formulating a value-neutral solution to this problem. I will try to show that understanding the school as a counterbalance to dominant social processes can be fruitful in achieving greater impartiality, both in terms of the selection of educational content and in terms of deciding about the optimal depth of familiarization with it.