The limits of civic education: The divergent implications of political and comprehensive liberalism

Education has become one of the foremost arenas in which political liberals attempt to differentiate their account from that of comprehensive liberals. Rawls posits that the requirements of his theory, as laid out in Political Liberalism, will be far less stringent than those of liberals such as Kant, Mill or Joseph Raz. However, a number of influential theorists, most notably Amy Gutmann and Eamonn Callan, have argued that this divergence occurs only at the level of theoretical justification, and does not imply that the two varieties of liberalism will prescribe significantly different educational policies. This article refutes this argument and shows that a more detailed focus on the civic aims of political liberals will reveal significant differences in their position on educational questions from those of their comprehensive rivals.