Elizabeth Garber argues that it’s the teachers’ jobs to promote social change by empowering students with democracy. This idea is crucial, she claims since its important to represent underrepresented minorities from a variety of social groups. This can have a lot of great benefits, such as students understanding of how power and social control works and the ability to question authority figures. However, social justice education can create the same problem that it is fighting in the first place. By teaching this concept, it often riddled with strong left-wing narratives on how society works and ideological ideas of how it ought to be. Garber addresses this herself when she explains that a problem exists when we present students with the purpose of social justice without acknowledging the limits of formal democracy. How can we teach social justice without proselytizing our beliefs, similar to that of a religion laden with misinformation? It’s as if teachers are preparing students to be social activists the same way religious institutions prepare missionaries to spread the gospel. Wouldn’t it be better if we present students with objective facts and let students make their own decisions of what is right and wrong? The author has already decided, for example, that we need to teach the importance of diversity amongst people. But this message implies that diversity is always good, and that no problems occur when multiple different groups that exist near each other can often cause conflict. Is diversity something we can teach, or is it human nature that we tend to segregate ourselves from different peoples even without being forced to?
Another problem with social justice in education is that the meaning of social justice has changed from open critique to self-righteousness. Garber shares an example of how a feminist teacher tested students’ personal “biases” by having them try to predict which artworks were made by female artitists and which one by male artists. However, could the differences of male and female artwork have something to do with their innate biology, rather than simply the proliferation of societal ideals? Contradicting the purpose of bringing people together, it shames people who don’t follow their worldview for even minor things like accidently using the wrong pronoun for someone. This fight against “hate” often breeds more hate, because social justice advocates have a very simplistic binary view of right versus wrong, you are either on their side or a racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, terrible human being. When does feminism and social justice turn from equality of genders to vilifying white straight men? When does trying to protect against discrimination turn to silencing students with different opinions than the teacher?
Pamela G. Taylor comes from a contextualist background when she argues that art education should exist beyond the classroom. She explains how postmodern art isn’t necessarily about the art itself, but rather the social influences it has. These two ideas go hand in hand with each other, since service learning in art education is all about working with people and communities. The author talks about how it’s important for students to engage in civic activities without the need for financial on monetary benefit. A problem with this however is that at the end of the day people are innately selfish. Even without a material benefit, the personal satisfaction one gets from doing a service could be argued as a self-serving benefit. If students in an art classroom are tasked with doing a certain amount of community hours for example, it’s likely because they are just doing it because they have to, not necessarily that they want to. Taylor explains this herself, citing an editorial that explains that mandatory volunteerism isn’t really volunteering. A way to counteract a little this might be to give students a choice in which outside activities they participate in, so that they feel that they are making their own decisions. There can be something powerful about students coming together and figuring out what to make for a mural, or making art for free for people in nursing homes. Maybe like Taylor explains, these experiences can help students see a part of themselves that they hadn’t before. On the other hand, this idea can be overly romantic since the impacts might not be as big as one might think. However, the idea of thinking beyond oneself is an idea that has got me thinking. There could be many ways to teach students how art affects the world around them. While discussion can be great in a classroom, actively doing something in the world is much more tangible.
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