Social Justice, Education, and Inequality: A Critical Analysis
Equality and Social Justice
Working people fight for social justice and equality. University seems an ideal place to develop equality opportunities. University is a new generation of market-led professionals with postmodernism and the rise of neo-liberal politics. Some authors argue that university and higher education has a special mission to fight against injustice. Equality studies experiences some difficulties that women’s studies do. Social justice defends the creation of society and its institutions based on the principles of equality and solidarity. It focuses mainly on economic equality. These principles are based on the recognition of all human rights and the dignity of all human beings.
Sociology, Social Class and Education
Schools create inequalities and are implicated in the reproduction of inequalities. Sociology helps understand the complexities of social class inequalities in education. There are 3 main approaches:
Internal school factors
Bernstein: schools have a limited capacity to compensate for economic and social inequalities.
External factors
Gamoran: differences in school performance are due to inequalities that lie outside the school. Public image of the working class: cultural deficits are reasons for achievement (Jean Anyon 1981). Both arguments shift from individual reasoning to school, parents, and children.
Educational policy
To remediate social class inequalities. Currently, we are all classless, burying class as a marker of educational inequalities. Marketization and selection policies have polarized educational policies. Louis Weiss (1990) found positive attitudes to schools in response to the lack of working-class male jobs. Working-class students have few opportunities to succeed. All parents want their children to be educational winners, but not all can be winners, while children learn school failure is intolerable.
Skeggs: formations of class and gender, becoming respectable. Imposition of middle-class values in school, working-class, incapable of having a self with value. Aspects of identity: class, gender, and ethnicity always interact.
Spatiality
Place and space play a role too. Middle-class strategy: private schools. Spatiality shows differences between and within social classes. Therefore, education has been about the working of another.
Critical Race Theory
CRT, scholars of color in the 70-80s, was introduced to education in the mid-90s. Derrick Bells: Racial realism shows how the world really works. Roots of CRT: Race is always mixed with social class. Radical diasporic writings and resistances of previous centuries, including slavery. Principles of CRT: a dual concern to understand and oppose race and inequality. White supremacy. The term commonly refers to individuals and groups who engage in extreme racism. CRT refers to everyday actions and policies that shape the world in the interest of white people. The centrality of racism requires understanding racism within social, economic, and historical contexts. Differential racialization: changing stereotypes (class, gender..). A critique of liberalism: Racism is figured in the distribution of material and educational resources and teachers’ notions of ability and motivation. Color-blind approaches. Minoritized students attend poor schools.
Context Experimental Knowledge: Counter-storytelling (el negro es visto siempre como pobre, un esclavo, siempre en la clase baja). Experimental knowledge of people of color. A revisionist critique of civil rights. Contradiction: the liberal rhetoric of equal opportunities versus the reality of racism. Nothing has really changed. CRT assumes that race is the only thing that matters (not true: intersectionality of gender). CRT sees all white people as a homogeneous mass of privileged racists, promoting hopelessness and despair by saying that things can never change. CRT isn’t a simplistic divide between whites and a minority racist other. The need to combine CT and applied practical strategies of resistance, at the group level, identification national linguistic religious. Intersection of race with class, gender, disability, and sexuality.
Education and Family
Social factors influencing the family as a fundamental social institution: close relationship between sexuality, kinship, and social regulation of the family. Marriage as an economic alliance, the myth of romantic love, stereotypes and gender roles, differential sexual taboos, and affectivity.
The Structural Family
Family institutions for the regulation of relationships between the sexes with heterosexual marriage as a prerequisite for the upkeep of order and system equilibrium (Ritzer 1996).
Feminist Demands for Transformations in Society
Beck and Beck-Gersheim (2001) Risk Society paradigm – reflexive modernity:”individualization means that human beings are released from internalized gender roles” Strong opposition to family, love, and freedom. Extended family (Roma, gypsies), nuclear family, and negotiated family (los Serrano). A failure happens because women start working, causing difficulties, recognition, increased divorce rates, more single people, and the stable relationship is the ideal from a young age.
Microsociological Levels
Giddens: romantic love is incompatible with attractions; relationships are selected voluntarily. Bourdieu: male domination is manifested by both forms of symbolic violence, psychological and physical. Bauman: relationships are closed with a lack of roots and stability. Children are an object of emotional consumption.
Family and School
Before, families were not implicated in school, but today there is higher education and a triangular relationship between family, school, and the local community. A. Bolivar said that there are six types of implication between family and community, like acting as fathers and mothers (communication, volunteering, learning at home, community, collaboration, and decision-making). There are some barriers, such as linguistic, socio-economic, cultural, or institutional, and there is also a “fight” between the school culture and the family culture. Family involvement in their children’s formal education styles: conversational, authoritarian, and overwhelmed.