Against Equity: Toward a Uniqueness Model of Educational Justice
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Abstract
This conceptual paper challenges the dominance of the equity model of social justice in education by arguing that it is fundamentally anti-educational, reducing students to recipients of standardized outcomes and eroding their authorial agency and ownership of learning. Instead, the author proposes a radical alternative: the uniqueness model of educational justice, which affirms learners’ rights to self-education, self-direction, and democratic self-governance. Grounded in a sociocultural approach and democratic schooling practices, this model views education as a process of personal meaning-making rather than as the standardization of learning outcomes. Through critical analysis and a richly narrated case study of the Gaga Ball Game Corporation at a democratic school, the paper illustrates how authentic education arises when students define and evaluate their own learning in dialogue with others. The uniqueness model rejects the bureaucratic, totalized educational paternalism and moral intrusiveness of equity frameworks and instead champions intrinsic motivation, learner autonomy, and diversity of educational goals. In doing so, it reframes educational justice not as sameness of outcomes but as the cultivation of human dignity through authorial learning pathways.
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