New Library Topic: Education and Social Justice

If you want to know what is causing the dismal state of our K-12 schools, look no further than the colleges of education training our nation’s teachers. As our new library topic Education and Social Justice shows, a recent focus of Ed schools has been how to educate kids to view the world through the prism of social justice.

According to Sandra Stotsky of the National Association of Scholars, the social justice approach to teaching “assumes that motivation to learn is enhanced by developing students’ awareness of the historical and current grievances that social groups considered ‘oppressed’ should hold against those who are to be perceived as their ‘oppressors.’ According to this theory, teachers should discredit traditional curricula and choose alternative curricula. This theory is associated with a school of thought called ‘critical pedagogy.’”

Critical pedagogy is an essentially socialist creation. The movement’s leading figures include Brazilian Marxist Paolo Freire, whose dense Pedagogy of the Oppressed is considered the bible for the movement; former leftist radical and Weather Underground terrorist turned University of Illinois at Chicago education professor William Ayers; and Maxine Greene, who urged students in her education courses at Columbia University’s Teacher College “to tell children about the evils of the existing, oppressive capitalist social order.”

University of Missouri–St. Louis professor J. Martin Rochester identifies the main tenets of critical pedagogy:

“1) Critical pedagogy is very PC in that it pays homage to multiculturalism and situational learning (tied to the student’s group identity and personal experiences) as antidotes to what is portrayed as the traditional, Eurocentric education system; 2) critical pedagogy is wrapped in the rhetoric of ‘emancipation’ and ‘collaboration,’ promoting creativity as long as that does not create advantages for some students over others; 3) critical pedagogy stresses ‘higher order thinking’ while disparaging the teaching of basic skills (rules of grammar, punctuation, computation) and basic information (factual knowledge) as producing mere ‘rote memorization’; and 4) critical pedagogy opposes what it calls the ‘corporatization’ of education, represented by the testing and standards movement.”

The problems with this approach to education are two-fold. First, children do not have the reasoning capacity, the theoretical knowledge, or experience to understand the concept of social justice, or to critically evaluate the lessons into which the teacher integrates it. Most eighth-graders don’t have sufficient understanding of economics and philosophy to see why reading, social science, and even math lessons about oppression by whites, exploitation by the rich or the “unfair” income distribution in the United States are fallacious.

This leads to the second issue: Social justice pedagogy advocates that teachers turn classrooms into bully pulpits. Since kids do not have the resources or understanding to critically examine their teachers’ lessons, they become easy prey for indoctrination.

The social justice pedagogy movement seeks to prepare children to build a better world. A laudable goal indeed, yet teaching ideology at the expense of basic academic skills certainly won’t get us there.

Check out Education and Social Justice and other great topics in our library. Special thanks to our intern Annie Holmquist for creating this topic! For more information about becoming an intern with IT, go here.