Social Justice

Social justice is about a fairer, more just distribution of social wealth and power; it is as well about full human recognition and the disruption of the structures of nonrecognition or disrespect or mar-ginalization. Its goals are equity and democracy, awareness, social literacy, agency, engagement, and activism. Teaching for social justice might be thought of as a kind of popular educationof, by, and for the peoplesomething that lies at the heart of education in a democracy, education toward a more vital, more muscular democratic society. It can propel us toward action, away from complacency, reminding us as well of the powerful commitment, persistence, bravery, and triumphs of our justice-seeking forebearswomen and men who sought to build a world that worked for all human beings. Abolitionists, suffragettes, labor organizers, civil rights and peace activists: without them, liberty would today be slighter, poorer, more anemica democracy of form and symbol over substance.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that in regard to justice, equality must not be understood to mean that degrees of power and wealth should be exactly the same, but only that with respect to power, equality renders it incapable of all violence and only exerted in the interest of a freely developed and participatory law, and that with respect to wealth, no citizen should be so opulent that he can buy another, and none so poor that he is constrained to sell himself. The quest for social justice over many centuries is worked out in the open spaces and the concrete struggles of that ideal. Nothing is settled once and for all, but a different kind of question presents itself: Who should be included? What binds us together? What is fair and unfair? And always, the enduring questions in education: Education for what? Education for whom? Education toward what kind of social order?

If society cannot be changed under any circumstances, if there is nothing to be done, not even small and humble gestures toward something better, our sense of agency shrinks, our choices diminish. But if a fairer and more just social order is both desirable and possible, if some of us can join one another to imagine and build a participatory movement for justice, a public space for the enactment of democratic dreams, our field begins to open. We would still need to find ways to stir ourselves from passivity, cynicism, and despair; to reach beyond the superficial barriers that wall us off from one another; to resist the flattening effects of consumerism and the mystifying power of the familiar social evils such as racism, sexism, and homophobia; to shake off the anesthetizing impact of most classrooms and of the authoritative, official voices that dominate the airwaves and the media; and to, as Maxine Greene says, release our imaginations in order to act upon what the known demands, linking our conduct firmly to our consciousness. We would be moving, then, without guarantees, but with purpose and hope.

Teaching for social justice begins with the idea that every human being is of equal and incalculable value, entitled to decent standards of freedom and justice, and that any violation of those standards must be acknowledged, testified to, and fought against. The challenge is to find the capacity to oppose injustice, to stand up on behalf of the dis-advantaged in a time when power is so consolidated and unfairly weighted against them. A guide and ideal is knowledge, enlightenment, and truth on one hand, and on the other, human freedom, emancipation, liberation for all, with an emphasis on the dispossessed. This is the core of justice, democracy, and humanism, unachievable in any [Page 792]final form, but nonetheless a standard and a focus for energies and efforts.

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