Here's irony for you. Many who claim moral superiority for themselves are guilty of aiding and abetting educational inferiority for everyone else.
When they assign themselves a fancy title—Social Justice Warrior, no less--are they then excused from further concern for fairness and justice?
The far-left is always posturing as morally superior, as better than everybody else, but in fact they focus on policies that narrowly advance their ideological goals. What happens to ordinary people along the way doesn't seem to be a big concern.
Let's consider education. Do Social Justice Warriors make any special contribution in that area? Seemingly not. Social Justice Warriors, so-called, show little apparent concern about the dumbing-down of schoolchildren.
Can Social Justice Warriors be taken seriously if they're not helping children to read and learn more about the world. What sort of social justice is there for the ignorant and illiterate?
Progressives, instead of improving society in concrete ways, tend to preen and posture. They are the elite people.
That attitude is a problem. We need people humble enough to see a failure in front of them. The government's own statistics show that two-thirds of American fourth-graders and two-thirds of eighth-graders are "below proficient." Those statistics are a problem. Everybody should be screaming, especially Social Justice Warriors.
Where would we find a lot of Social Justice Warriors? University campuses. Liberal neighborhoods in Manhattan and San Francisco. Okay, let's go to such places and ask people why we have so much illiteracy, and what are they doing about it? Safe prediction: we'll get blank expressions. Odds are, they don't know why; and they're not doing anything.
What about an aggressively PC organization such as PEN (Poets, Essayists, and Novelists)? Years ago they were gung-ho about the Right to Read and the Right to Learn to Read. Now they rarely mention these essential goals. What, is Justice just a slogan?
How do Social Justice Warriors pick their special causes?
Similarly, we could look at other liberal organizations and the most liberal universities. Are any of them speaking out on behalf of the illiterate, the non-readers, the poorly-educated, the victims generally of an incompetent or misguided Education Establishment?
Another curious organization is Education Writers of America These people are "politically correct" and surely sympathetic to social justice causes but they take little notice of the rampant illiteracy in our culture. That should be their number one topic, especially if one's title includes the word "education."
And how, by the way, do Social Justice Warriors pick their special causes? Is there some Progressive calculus that only they can figure? Or is this whole schtick driven secretly by George Soros? Is talk about social justice a way to promote Soros' imperious outreach where he tries to impose Socialism on the whole country? (In that case, these "warriors" are merely enforcers or useful idiots. They focus on the standard PC attitudes: racism, sexism, homophobia, and the rest. If someone is not sufficiently PC, the Social Justice Warrior will get in your face.)
Education is a central problem affecting nearly everyone. It offers a good way to judge whether Social Justice Warriors are serious people. And within education, reading is the fundamental issue, the decline we need to fix immediately. If Social Justice Warriors are not concerned about reading, then they are not serious.
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In 1955, Rudolf Flesch wrote a book explaining Why Johnny Can't Read. It's a fact of our history that reading has been badly taught in almost every school for the last 75 years. Starting in the first grade, most children have to survive a vast illiteracy apparatus that uses only the worst method, i.e. Whole Word. When kids can't read, they are put in remediation (to fix a problem that should not exist). They're tested, tutored, and given drugs. Title I sends a lot of money to schools with kids who can't read. That's a perverse incentive to do a bad job.
This illiteracy apparatus is what everyone should fight against. This machine overwhelms the Right to Read and the Right to Learn to Read. It looms there like a vast Tower of Babel. Instead of literacy, the country gets more functional illiteracy. Somehow the country's leaders tolerate and excuse this failure. Social Justice Warriors have hardly a word to say in protest.
What conception of social justice would permit millions of Americans to remain illiterate?
Consider how empty and cynical it is to talk about Social Justice when you're depriving people of basic skills, the most important of which is being able to read.
