This chapter offers an overview of some of the more important approaches to these questions in contemporary, mostly anglophone, conceptions of educational justice in primary and secondary education. Section 16.2 starts with some provisions of some important goals of education. Section 16.3 turns to educational justice in general. Section 16.4 asks about the spheres of educational justice: is it education and socialization in general, or the school system in particular? Section 16.5 distinguishes three different levels of education: basic education for all; the cultivation of individual talents and capacities; and selection for higher education and the job market. Section 16.6 outlines the differences between five principles of justice and equality in the field of education: strict equality; a conception of fair equality of opportunity, iii) a conception of luck-egalitarian equality of opportunity; iv) a prioritarian conception of educational justice; and democratic adequacy as a conception of educational justice.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to far-reaching challenges in the field of (democratic) education. This chapter focuses on two aspects. First, as a measure to contain the spread of the coronavirus, schools in many countries were closed for extended periods of time. In this chapter, school closures are discussed as an issue of educational justice, with particular attention to the problem of an education for democratic participation. Second, the pandemic has raised questions of democratic legitimacy: The political measures taken to combat the virus were seen as illegitimate by parts of the population. In this context, there is disagreement about the basic facts regarding the virus and the response to it. The chapter discusses how teachers should deal with this kind of disagreement, in the classroom.

In this chapter, I claim that the central question of global justice in education is which – if any – educational inequalities between citizens and non-citizens in a democratic state are morally legitimate, and which inequalities between them contradict the normative foundations of democratic education. By trying to find a convincing answer to this question, I first briefly recapitulate the controversy between the cosmopolitan and the state-nationalist approaches to it. Then I elaborate on the question, whether special obligations to a privileged treatment of cocitizens over noncitizens apply to institutionalized education. I make the claim that the answer to that question depends on how we understand education – whether we spell it out as a traditionalist-authoritarian, or as democratic social practice. I argue that democratic education necessarily implies moral universalism. It requires not only the recognition of the equal moral status of all students, but also the inclusion of their individual experiences, worldviews, and ideals, regardless of their nationalities, or ethnic or cultural backgrounds, in an open and “diversity-friendly” ethical discourse that should be established in every classroom. I conclude that since democratic education is necessarily cosmopolitan in its essence, democratic educational institutions should be supranationally orientated.

The theoretical contextualization of undergraduate research is undertaken, on the one hand, within the framework of research-based learning (RBL). RBL is experiencing an enormous expansion worldwide in the context of teacher training and is, on the other hand, located within the professionalization discourse, namely that teacher education must focus on the professional activity as a teacher and help to develop it further. For example, the central aspects of teachers’ professional knowledge consist of a combination of “pedagogical content knowledge,” “general pedagogical knowledge,” “curriculum knowledge,” and “subject matter content knowledge” within the disciplines. Accordingly, university education must enable students to acquire deep and flexible knowledge in order to create the necessary basis for successful teaching/learning processes and enable students to find professional solutions to complex pedagogical problems and social challenges, such as reducing educational inequality and establishing educational justice.