Walzer / Dewey / Education Michael Walzer's Essay

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Walzer / Dewey / Education

Michael Walzer's position on school busing in Spheres of Justice is rather ingenious. Before we look more closely at it, though, I'd like to recall the context for his argument in favor of what used to be called "forced busing" (a derogatory term which Walzer distances himself from). The issue of using school busing to help to remedy the effects of racial segregation was the subject of two controversial Supreme Court rulings issued during the Nixon presidency: these were Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971) and Milliken v. Bradley (1974). In Swann the Supreme Court found that it was constitutional to use busing for the purposes of overcoming the effects of poverty and housing inequality which led to racially homogenous populations within certain school disticts. The revisitation of the same topic in Milliken only three years later reflects the Supreme Court's establishment of a standard as to whether Swann would apply, i.e., busing of students across school district lines was only permissible if there was solid evidence of legally actionable racial segregation within all the contiguous school districts. Walzer begins his argument from a lofty-sounding perch but it is only because he is trying to face up to the complications involved when large-scale segregation persists as the function of numerous social and economic factors.

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For example, he notes that

I assume a pluralist society: so long as adults associate freely, they will shape diverse communities and cultures within the larger political community. They will certainly do this in a country of immigrants, but they will do it elsewhere too. So the schools, while they respect pluralism, must also work to bring children together in ways that hold open possibilities for cooperation.(Walzer 223).

In other words, Walzer recognizes that it could be increased freedom of association (rather than institutional racism) which results in the segregated communities: he is careful to invoke America's traditional role as a refuge for immigrants in order to make the point that, even among white Americans who immigrated from elsewhere, there might have been linguistic barriers which led to the effective construction of a segregated social group. Yet Walzer emphasizes that the "cooperation" fostered by schools as part of a socially reformist agenda is his way of getting beyond voluntary segregation caused by freedom of association and pluralism. But Walzer quickly comes to defend the busing policies specifically:

This is all the more important when the pluralist pattern is involuntary and distorted.….....

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