How to be just in the face of differences?

Abstract

This commentary examines Eugene Matusov’s editorial “Against Equity: Toward a Uniqueness Model of Educational Justice” (2026), which challenges the dominance of equity as the primary framework for social justice in education. The editorial argues that, despite its compensatory intent, equity often becomes anti-educational by enforcing standardized curricula and outcomes that diminish students’ authorial agency. Drawing on the “Animal School” fable, the editorial illustrates how uniform expectations can harm learners by disregarding singular abilities. It then contrasts the equality, equal-opportunity, and equity models and advances a “uniqueness model” grounded in sociocultural theory and democratic schooling, emphasizing rights to self-education, self-governance, and freedom from paternalistic schooling. The commentary seeks and articulates points of contact between Matusov’s proposal and our ongoing work on alteritary dialogic education and “alteritary listening,” which frame education as an ethical encounter with the Other and as responsibility enacted in speech and listening. Core principles highlighted include the primacy of alterity, dialogic responsibility, and pedagogical practices that cultivate relational competencies. The commentary concludes that educational justice should be conceived less as distributing resources toward the same endpoint and more as supporting each learner’s singular trajectory within ethically interdependent relations.