Social Justice Illiteracy

"Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults" w/Dr. Lyell Asher

Social Justice Illiteracy (Part 10). In 1932, an influential professor of education at Teachers College by the name of George Counts published a pamphlet whose title was a question: “Dare the School Build a New Social Order?” His answer was a resounding and confident "Yes." Counts had been so impressed by the socialist indoctrination he'd seen firsthand in Soviet schools in the late twenties that he urged American public school teachers to follow the Soviet lead—to make their students into good, collectivist progressives too.

What they should not be making students into was the non-political college professor who, and I quote, "can balance the pros against the cons with a skill of a juggler who sees all sides of every question and never commits himself to any." What George Counts assumes is that someone like Harvard Professor Sandel in his course on Justice (who doesn't broadcast his own political views) must not have any, and that students taught by such a professor won't develop any.

Both assumptions are obviously false. Such a non-committal professor like Sandel may be deeply committed to an impartial analysis of the subject because of a still deeper political commitment to the right of his students to hear all sides of a complex question so that they can form their own judgments about what justice means.

But Counts' ed school authoritarian streak is alive and well 90 years later. Consider an essay published the same year that Professor Sandel's course at Harvard was first broadcast on television, in 2009. The title of the essay is "Developing Social Justice Literacy," and was written by two ed school professors, one of whom—Robin D'Angelo—would become as famous in 2020 for her book “White Fragility,” as Michael Sandel was in 2010 for his course on Justice. D'Angelo's essay doesn't talk about disagreements or debates, but only about those who practice social justice, and those who, “resist it.”

There is, for example, and I quote, "student resistance to topics they do not fully understand, but the more awkward challenge," D'Angelo writes, "is the resistance of colleagues—resistance that often comes before a demonstration of basic social justice literacy."

So what does it mean to be "literate" in social justice? The first thing it means is becoming fluent in newly-concocted definitions of words. Racism is now "white, racial and cultural prejudice and discrimination." Black people can be prejudiced, but they lack the "institutional power" that "transforms it into racism." “Reverse racism” does not exist owing to "power relations that are historic and embedded." So if a student who's been labeled an “oppressor” based on her skin color tries to defend herself against what she calls “reverse racism,” she doesn't have to be listened to at all any more than she'd be listened to if she'd talked about unicorns in a discussion of endangered species. If she then just calls it racism, she can be ignored again because racism is something that only white people can be guilty of. Checkmate.

This so-called "literacy" is exactly what George Orwell envisioned in his novel 1984 when he described the aims of "Newspeak.” the goal is to construct a vocabulary in which, "the expression of unorthodox opinions, above a very low level, was well nigh impossible." Even raising questions is considered an offense in this brave new world of social justice as described by DiAngelo and her co-author.

Being an "ally" of oppressed groups, requires, "validating and supporting people who are socially or institutionally positioned below yourself, regardless of whether you understand or agree with where they're coming from." And a sure symptom of having "internalized" one's own sense of "dominance"? "Feeling authorized to debate or explain away the experience of target groups." It's really hard to know what's worse. Is it the condescending assumption that oppressed groups require unconditional support and validation in the way that an infant requires unconditional love? Or is it the idea that "feeling authorized to debate" is a sign of anything other than the great privilege of being a citizen in a democracy? Not to mention the thoroughly racist assumption that members of the so-called “target groups” are of the same mind, as if they were herd animals guided by hard-wired instinct.

But the most attractive thing about this social justice literacy for education in America today is that it requires no reading. In contrast to Sandel's course on justice, there's no need to read Aristotle, Locke, Mill, Kant, or John Rawls—no need to read through the arguments in American legal history about the trade-offs between individual rights and the responsibilities of the state. And there's definitely no reason to read about the genocides produced by the 20th century's most committed champions of social justice— Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, who, among them, wracked up an estimated 70 million bodies worth of social justice.

In other words, this social justice literacy that's been so successfully peddled on college campuses in the last decade especially, is really just a cleverly repackaged social justice illiteracy, which would have horrified even the most passionate defenders of progressive education in the 1930s, all of whom were in fact genuinely literate people.

George Counts himself came to regret his support for the Soviet Union even before it was revealed that in just the two years leading up to the publication of his inspirational pamphlet, 2 million Russian peasants had been exiled into the hinterlands, where half a million of them died of cold and starvation, all in the name of social justice.

On November 19th, 1930, the Russian writer and activist Maxim Gorky justified the genocide this way in the pages of Pravda and Izvestia:

"We are opposed by everything that has outlived the time set for it by history, and this gives us the right to consider ourselves again in a state of civil war. The conclusion naturally follows that if the enemy does not surrender, he must be destroyed."

I was reminded of Gorky’s cavalier remark recently when a middle school teacher in the state of Washington wrote on Facebook about the unvaccinated. She said she was "willing to let them [the unvaccinated] die," and that "if we're lucky we can cut out 30% of the population that votes the wrong way."

So what does the future hold for higher education, given this growing influence of ed schools? In the next video, I'll answer that question by looking at K through 12 education, where for more than 60 years, ed schools have been increasing the very injustices and inequities that they now claim to be experts in reducing.

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Video shot and edited by Travis Brown | The Signal Productions (Locals, Twitter, YouTube); Motion graphics by Gav Patel (Twitter, Instagram)