Formative Justice

What drives human beings to educate themselves? In Formative Justice, Robbie McClintock advances an answer. At a time when public discourse about education concentrates on curriculum, instruction, and assessment strategies, he wants to transform public expectations about education and to help people of all ages achieve greater fulfillment as they construct educational experiences out of the unpredictable circumstances of their public and private lives.

With personal examples (walking, playing an instrument, choosing a career), the opening sections show how we continually use formative justice to judge how to make of ourselves what we can and should become. Concern then shifts from introducing the concept of formative justice to exploring how it applies in the conduct of life. Towards the end, McClintock calls for a pedagogical reformation, which can emerge if people consciously share in pursuing formative justice through their inward experience.

McClintock addresses both current members of the teaching profession and its critics and comprehensively the general public, especially the young. Public education today has come to resemble The Great Didactic as imagined by the 17th-century theologian, Johann Comenius. Formative Justice concentrates on an alternative to didacticism, on study rather than instruction, on personal experience rather than the institutional sources of learning.

Formative Justice revives the concept of self-formation by exploring it within the context of American debates about educational equity, agency, and the new information technologies. As a concept, justice concerns not institutions, but the way we live our lives -- fairly, equitably, wisely. In striving to live justly in all we do, we form and perfect our capacities for living well throughout our human experience. We