The Political Morality of School Composition: The Case of Religious Selection

We present a normative framework for the assessment of education policies and apply it to the issue of policies that allow schools to select their students on the basis of religious criteria. Such policies can be justified, and challenged, on many different grounds; public debate is not conducted in terms adequate to the task. Our main theoretical aim is to complement with non-consequentialist considerations those existing approaches that focus on consequentialist ones, and to apply the proposed framework to issues of school composition and selection. We argue, further, that current policies that allow schools to select all their students on the basis of their parents' religious affiliation cannot be justified.