Education Shortform
Justice in Education
Not quite ‘in a nutshell’, but as close as I can…
In these short articles I have been trying to provide a brief insight into an A–Z of education topics.
Justice is an especially challenging one, because it is so fundamental and important.
In fact, although I am a strong advocate for evidence-based education, I don’t think that evidence should ever be applied in the absence ethics. These two things — evidence and ethics — are fundamental pillars on which the edifice of education should rest.
What exactly do we mean by justice in education?
Justice is a partial-synonym of fairness, and a broad trend in education over recent decades has been to tackle discrimination and unfairness. This includes age-old problems such as racism, but has expanded in recent years: now more educators and students are calling for the decolonisation of education and for greater awareness of the fluidity of gender identities, among other changes.
While this is political, fundamentally advocates of these changes are trying to tackle longstanding unfairness and disadvantage, rather than to advantage particular groups.
Materials given to early learners are being scrutinised too. All too often, books lack representation of minorities, including minority family types and roles (for example by always portraying families with two parents, and/or with mothers in a caring role) and in general have tended to be biased towards the perspective of dominant social groups.
Some books, including textbooks, are outright racist in their portrayal of people of colour.
School subjects are being challenged over a lack of gender equality, with efforts being made to increase the representation of women in science, for example (psychology is something of an exception here, as a scientific subject with a majority of female students).
This is important, because we can’t have fairness in society if we restrict girls to studying for lower-status careers, as has been in the case in the past.
Finally, the concept of social justice as it relates to poverty is another important cause, with inequalities in outcomes being tackled in various ways, such as through additional funding to those schools that serve students from the poorest families (e.g. the ‘Pupil Premium’ in England).
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This is one of a series of shortform education articles. You can download a simplified summary of my ‘A–Z of Educational concepts’ here.
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