Citizenship, Social Justice and Curriculum.

Connell, R. W.

The article discusses social justice in education. Over the last 150 years or so, in Western and Western-influenced societies, questions of justice in education have mainly been about access to formal schooling and certification. The 150 years is, roughly, the life-span of state-funded, bureaucratically controlled mass elementary school systems. Mass elementary schooling has everywhere coexisted with a much more selective provision of secondary and higher education. Justice cannot be achieved by distributing the same amount of a standard good to children of all social classes. Education is a process operating through relationships that cannot be neutralized or obliterated to allow equal distribution of the social good at their core. That good means different things to ruling-class and working-class children, and will do different things for them. First, Social justice is not satisfied by curriculum ghettos. Separate-and-different curricula have some attractions, but leave the currently hegemonic curriculum in place. Second, social justice is not satisfied with one counter-hegemonic project. Contemporary social science recognizes, as contemporary social practice does, a number of major patterns of inequality: gender, class, race, ethnicity, and region and nationality.

EDUCATIONAL sociology; SOCIAL justice; CURRICULUM; ELEMENTARY schools; HIGHER education; EDUCATIONAL cooperation

International Studies in Sociology of Education, 1992, Vol 2, Issue 2, p133

0962-0214

Academic Journal

10.1080/0962021920020202