Professional Values and Standards

Social Justice

"Social Justice is the view that everyone deserves equal economic, political and social rights and opportunities now and in the future"

This was a statement on a slide on day 2 of my teacher training.  It comes from the General Teaching Council for Scotland's statement of professional values. 

By day 4, I had heard it again in a lecture about the Scottish government's child "wellbeing" policy:  GIRFEC.  I felt the lecture was highly politicised and, for that matter I thought the term "social justice" and even more so, its definition above, was a political statement.  That statement is not one I disagree with, but still, I get uncomfortable when education becomes political.

Or is social justice a value, like honesty?  The idea that honesty is not a political statement is not controversial, in the way that "social justice" is not a political statement might be.  And I find it unsettling that these different things are being mixed up.

Trust and Respect

"Trust and respect" are expectations of positive actions that support authentic relationship building and show care for the need and feelings of the people involved and respect for our natural world and its limited resources

This is gobbledegook to me, partly because it is ungrammatical. I feel on the one hand we are supposed to just accept this meaningless attempt at a sentence while at the same time we are urged to engage critically with what we are taught, the research, the policies. So which is it? Let's look at the sentence again. It's difficult to untangle what is meant here, there are about seven different concepts crammed into this sentence, which would be less of a problem if the structures and grammar linking them were not so tenuous or downright incorrect. To point out just one: "need" should be plural. 

First, trust and respect are not at all the same. Just respecting someone is a far cry from trusting them. You can't expect trust. You earn it. Everyone though, has some entitlement, just as fellow human beings to respect. For what it's worth - which I can't say I think is much - I have tried to put this into a clear and meaningful English sentence: 

Teachers are expected to build supportive, respectful relationships with children and young people and with their colleagues. These respectful relationships also extend to our natural world and its limited resources

So far we have one political concept and two others, conroversially linked together in almost unintelligible language.  You'll excuse me if I leave the other two.