What is Social Justice? Why is it important for our classrooms?

Social Justice n.

Justice in terms of the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society.

If you think about it (especially if you’re a student in a country where education has been a constant throughout your life, readily accessible, and thus prone to being taken for granted), education is wealth, opportunity, and privilege.

1.)    Wealth? – In the most literal sense, education is the means to gain skills that will aid in job performance, of which will most likely be compensated monetarily (a salary). Education can be used as a tool to gain a whole range of skill-sets that offer multiple positions within a career field; these positions usually belong to a hierarchy. Going up in the hierarchy can lead to steeper benefits and salaries.

2.)    Opportunity? – While learning the skills that education offers, an individual may find mental/emotional (even in some cases spiritual) wealth in the pleasure that learning can impart. With this pleasure, students may forge interpersonal relationships with their peers and instructors about their shared, educational experience. Through this system of networking, students and teachers may find each other avenues that lead to college placements and job positions.

3.)    Privilege? – Education can access wealth and opportunity, of which both can lead to more of the other. The problem? Not everyone can afford it, understand the system in which it lives, or can manage the time for it. Easy to forget if you have the resources to invest in an education (as well as a support system- usually one’s family) without a truly mind-boggling level of sacrifice.

To provide education to every student possible, both internationally and nationally, is a means of social justice as it leads to the other benefits of social justice: income, food, shelter, peace-of-mind, physical and emotional wellness, etc. It’s important that students understand that education-as-social justice is a means of begetting social justice, as a way for wealth, opportunity, and privilege to be distributed all over the world. 

- Angela H.