Digital educational platforms and formative justice

Abstract

This paper reflects on the possibilities offered by digital educational platforms, which are accompanied by instructional designs linked to the student-centered educational paradigm with an apparent great potential to advance towards social justice, equity and equal opportunities. Digital technologies are presented as a new actor in educational situations, with the potential to define more flexible and customizable educational scenarios, which seem to facilitate universal access and the differential treatment that equity and equal opportunities demand. However, the idea of “equity” places us in a plane of reflection circumscribed to distributive justice that implies a conception of education as a “good to be distributed” that can lead to instrumentalizing educational-pedagogical relations, subsuming them to economic or political interests, perverting them. In this sense, it is convenient to recover the idea of education as a requirement of justice, already present in Plato, linked to the idea of the ethical development of the learner, and of the so-called “care of oneself” developed by Foucault. In short, in order to unfold the promising educational potential of the new educational scenarios, based on digital platforms, these must not only guarantee distributive justice (equity) but, above all, formative justice.