Hilariously.

This new trend of hating on the phrase 'social justice' is getting to be just as bad as demonizing the word feminism. How can people have so much contempt for positive ideas?

It's when people hijack positive ideas for their own ends.

Which is a shame. However, the response should be to demonize the hijackers, not the ideas. Social justice is a great idea(l), and one I think is deserving of promotion. That doesn't mean forcing a certain point of view on students; it means educating them on what social justice is, and letting them explore ways to pursue it. The lecturing teachers you apparently had did this extremely poorly, and that sucks, but it doesn't invalidate the whole idea.

In otherwords, when people attempt to put positive ideas like 'social justice' into practice, right Ben? After all, there's no room for it in the Darwinist vision of capitalism you seem to support, where 'economic mobility' reigns supreme above all else.

I will concur with MonkWren that if you were able to correct your teachers on the presentation of such, they did an exceptionally poor job of relaying it to you.

It means a lot of things to a lot of different people. Some of those things are good, some not so much. When Stalin executed "anti-soviet elements" in his purges by the hundreds of thousands (millions?) he'd have labeled it Social Justice but so would Mother Teresa taking care of people with Leprosy. The words have lost any consistent meaning in their applications.

My "teacher" in that class is about two years older than me and I still see him at the Pub on Fridays playing his sitar for tips. He was just pushing his own political agenda and had little interest in anything else. It was his first year teaching, hopefully he's better by now.

Stalin may have labelled it 'social justice', but he completely understood that designation to be propagandist tripe; he was a very self-aware totalitarian with few delusions about the base nature of his power mongering.

Social justice in the sense of equality of opportunity, rights, and minimization of gross economic/quality of life disparities is about pretty universally understood, and only tends to be given creative, wildly divergent definitions/conceptions by political extremes and the lunatic fringe.

Again, blame the hijackers of the meaning, rather than the words themselves. Social justice may have a very "fluffy" or "loose" definition; there are some things that it is also clearly not (like killing others - for any reason). I can see that you had a really bad experience with someone trying to teach social justice, but try not to let your personal experience prevent others from learning to be better people.

Schools do and to an extent must teach some social skills, such as the ability to cooperate with other to get things done and the ability to listen to the ideas of others. I don't think that a school should be demanding that it is wrong for the rich to use their wealth and power to live an amenity filled life, or that it is the role of the government to solve all of the world's problems or things like this. There are times and places where killing others is the morally correct thing to do (generally to prevent them from doing more evil). Maybe 'don't kill anyone ever' is one of those little lies that it is appropriate to tell small children though?

I am a little old-fashioned; so be it. I'm in favor of many new teaching methods, though. Not this one. There has to be time for a child to grow; to enjoy a simple paddle attached to a rubber band and a rubber ball; the fun of catching a slippery fish on a hook and bringing it into your half of the world; the neat sound of playing cards in the spokes of your bike. To what end would it be to interject social justice on a child, when they have yet to experience their first kiss, the death of their first dog (or the birth of a new one), any of a hundred delicate moments that requires their parents to break a bubble, such as Santa Claus? No, this isn't for the child; something in me says it's barely for the adult.

I feel that there are both a means and a level of social justice which can be properly taught to even young children. Don't take things that don't belong to you. Don't be rude, violent, or mean to others. Help out those who need it if you can. Ect.

There are ways in which it is inappropriate to teach these things, but I do feel that schools should consciously work towards them rather than rely on the increasingly unreliable culture at large to do it instead.