INDISPOSED. The idea that people who seek to work with other people have the proper set of dispositions has mutated into a potential ideological litmus test that is now limiting the supply of social workers. St. Cloud's King Banaian links to a request by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education that the national government stop enabling the potential ideological screening in schools of social work.

“By requiring that its social workers come from CSWE-accredited schools, HHS is tacitly approving viewpoint discrimination,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. “HHS should take steps to ensure that CSWE eliminates the ideological requirements it currently places on universities and students.”

CSWE maintains a set of official standards on the basis of which it decides whether or not to accredit a social work program. The standards require that CSWE-accredited programs “integrate social and economic justice content grounded in an understanding of distributive justice, human and civil rights, and the global interconnections of oppression.” They also require that graduates of CSWE-accredited programs “demonstrate the ability to…understand the forms and mechanisms of oppression and discrimination and apply strategies of advocacy and social change that advance social and economic justice.”

“‘Social justice’ and ‘economic justice’ are vague and politically loaded terms that mean different things to different people, yet CSWE’s standards force schools to evaluate prospective social workers based on their commitment to these ideals,” Lukianoff said. “It’s an invitation for schools to discriminate against students with dissenting views, as FIRE has seen happen many times before.”

I have difficulty conceiving of any system of justice that is not a social institution, which leaves a "disposition" to social justice empirically empty. Presumably a hermit can opt out of any system of justice, but anyone who wishes to live by interacting with others is subject to some social system, including some notion of justice. "Economic" justice is an even more challenging topic. It's not even on the course of study in most graduate programs (although one can get at the idea indirectly using such tools as game theory, fairness theory, and law and economics.) Even there, the notion of justice is slippery. Suppose a vendor decides that offering consumers stuff cheaply is "just." Accordingly, it compels its own suppliers to compete with each other to develop the least-costly supply chain. Economic justice, or not? Suppose the suppliers define "economic justice" as obtaining the largest possible return on their efforts, and they cooperate to that end. Is the outcome more just or less? Now consider a system of economic exchange in which there are benefits from exchanging that are almost everywhere shared between the seller and the buyer, but the buyers and sellers whose exchanges determine the prices are indifferent between exchanging or not exchanging. Just, or not.

The Foundation has been busy pursuing dispositions criteria. Earlier this month, their staff asked Columbia Teachers College to remove the implicit loyalty oath in their criteria for the proper dispositions.

Teachers College’s requirement that students demonstrate a “commitment” to “social justice” crosses a line from suggesting values to which educators believe students might wish to aspire, to saying, flat out, that students will be judged on their personal political beliefs.

A followup post is more specific.

Teachers College therefore advocates a transformative vision of social justice in the classroom:

To change the system and make schools and societies more equitable, educators must recognize ways in which taken-for-granted notions regarding the legitimacy of the social order are flawed, see change agency as a moral imperative, and have skills to act as agents of change (Villegas & Lucas, 2002). [Emphasis added]

So must all students really come to these same conclusions? What about all the criticisms of this approach to teaching? Will students be penalized for not adopting this theoretical and political posture?

A successful "transformative vision" ought to improve on the existing order. As a number of observers are suggesting, the fruits by which we know this vision are poisoned. Start with Sol Stern in City Journal:

Throughout most of the twentieth century, the bad and oppressive “banking” approach that the city’s public schools used somehow managed to lift millions of children out of poverty—something the social justice schools of today seem unlikely to do.

"Banking" refers to teacher-as-authority placing information into youngsters' heads as coins into a bank. Although one might quibble about post-hoc inferences, graduates of those old-style schools had better basic skills than their contemporary counterparts. He goes on to suggest that the new curriculum is crowding out more useful lessons.

Social justice teaching is a frivolous waste of precious school hours, grievously harmful to poor children, who start out with a disadvantage. School is the only place where they are likely to obtain the academic knowledge that could make up for the educational deprivation they suffer in their homes. The last thing they need is a wild-eyed experiment in education through social action.

I'd add to that: and develop their non-cognitive skills, such as recognizing that highly effective people have habits that contribute to their effectiveness, and bad habits have bad consequences. Too often, the lessons being learned are different. A retired New York City teacher offers one such lament about the attempt to correct for "disparate impacts" in punishment in Opinion Journal.

During the principal's hearing, as I sat across the table from the boy and his father, I recalled a classic essay that I had often taught my senior English classes. It was by George Orwell, and it recalled an unpleasant incident during his service as a policeman in Burma. Knowing that he was doing wrong, Orwell shot an elephant to save face before a mocking crowd of natives. No one suggested that we had acted incorrectly. Kids in our charge had to learn right from wrong, we told ourselves. But, more than two decades later, I still can't escape the nagging thought that, though we had other choices, better suited for the boy's welfare, at bottom all of us just wanted to get our numbers right.

Here, the numbers are suspensions and expulsions, which, as is true of anything involving "disparate impact" must be in proportion to the demographics of the school population.

Unfortunately, my invocation of "habits of highly effective people" has crossed the line into an incorrect disposition according to a longer New York Post column (via Joanne Jacobs (the link may not work)).

Teachers College gets more specific: Students are also expected to recognize that "social inequalities are often produced and perpetuated through systematic discrimination and justified by societal ideology of merit, social mobility and individual responsibility."

Does anyone outside of academia really think that "individual responsibility" is a scourge upon our society? Is such an attitude really required in order to be a good teacher?

I suppose if nobody knows the habits of highly effective people, by construction nobody will be highly effective, and there will be neither merit nor mobility. In such a world, what value is there to being a teacher? I could be more generous. Try "Social inequalities are often produced and perpetuated by systematic exclusion of the habits of highly effective people from the curriculum and justified by faddish ideology of relativism and multiculturalism." Would anyone inside the teachers' colleges be willing to debate that?