Social Justice - Not Just for the Cool Kids

"What is Social Justice?"

I think it's fair to assume that we live in a society, and within that society we expect each other to follow certain rules. Not necessarily laws, because laws are not necessarily just simply for being laws. It's more like an unspoken shared morality based on the society and its interactions with the individual. In many cases it exerts itself through laws, chief example being the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which abolished segregation, banned employment discrimination on the basis of personal, uncontrollable traits such as race, gender, nationality, et cetera. So when we talk about Social Justice, we're talking about the defense of those who are not being adequately given the equity or equality they deserve in our collective communities. Social Justice isn't a recent notion - The Black Panthers of the Nixon era, the women's suffrage movement, and plenty of others. These days it shows up as Black Lives Matter and as opposition to the white supremacists who were emboldened after the inauguration of President Donald Trump.

Now as to why it is important to our classrooms, how a child is educated is indicative of how they will engage with and think about the world around them. If education's goal is to shape the methods in which students think, then it stands to reason that certain conclusions can be arrived at when valid models of thought are entertained. For example, if in a classroom (now or elsewhen if that's a word) a teacher doesn't build up a student's ability to empathize with their neighbor and reinforces that with an idea that some people are inherently "superior" to others, then it's not a far jump to arrive at the notion that this student may have some morally flawed ideas about the people around them.
The easiest way to combat this sort of wayward breach of cognition is to stress equality, equity, and empathy, and that someone shouldn't be forced into unpleasant situations because of their race, economic class, religion, nationality, first language, gender identity, sexual preference, and so on. We owe our students the ability to live full lives, and that comes from education.


EDIT AFTER THE FACT: The initial blog post I'm responding to didn't mention finding sources. I thought this was about personal opinion on the matter.