The concept of privilege is widely used in social justice education to denote unearned advantages accrued by members of dominant groups through the oppression of subordinate groups. In this conceptual essay, Nicolas Tanchuk, Tomas Rocha, and Marc Kruse argue that an atomistic conception of advantage implicit in the discourse of privilege supports persistent inequity between groups contrary to the intentions of social justice educators. To solve this “problem of privilege,” the authors draw on themes in Black feminist and Indigenous thought to advance a reframing of the way educators teach advantage that is based in foundational relational responsibilities. This new frame, social justice education as mutual aid, retains the power to describe oppressive relations between groups while portraying oppression as disadvantageous to all.

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In Canada, several universities have recently implemented course requirements in Indigenous studies as a condition of graduation, while others are considering following suit. Policies making Indigenous course requirements (hereafter ICRs) compulsory have caused considerable controversy. According to proponents, a main purpose of ICRs is to address historical wrongs and to foster a more complete understanding of the ongoing relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous citizens. According to critics, making such courses compulsory effectively imposes illiberal restrictions on university students and faculty by limiting the epistemic aim of free inquiry, while wrongly prioritizing concern for the welfare of one social group over others. In this essay, we propose a liberal-democratic justification for ICRs that addresses these two worries about the ideals that may underwrite these courses. We argue that ICRs can be justified in liberal democratic terms insofar as they foster knowledge of what John Rawls refers to as ‘the constitutional essentials’ and remediate civic forms of what Miranda Fricker refers to as ‘epistemic injustices’. Universities, we claim have highly plausible role responsibilities to promote the civic epistemic aims identified by Rawls and Fricker, which are especially weighty due to the power university degrees confer, as part of the formation of a “democratic elite”. We then defend this line of argument against objections on the basis of academic freedom, by arguing that universities have reasons, internal to the search for truth to champion the political aims we identify.

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argue that an array of inquiry-based pedagogies widely promoted in teacher preparation programmes are out of step with current cognitive science and should be eliminated for novice learners. According to these cognitive load theorists, inquiry-based pedagogies are likely to increase achievement gaps between the lowest and highest achieving students while reducing total learning. On almost any theory of justice in educational provision, an educational practice that results in the acquisition of fewer total educational goods by students and greater inequality in the distribution of goods will be considered unjust. I argue that inquiry-based pedagogies can be defended, even for novice learners, not as means to other goods but as embodiments of the least controversial liberal-democratic educational ends. I claim that once understood as part of the ends of liberal democratic education, inquiry-based pedagogies cannot be rightly eliminated from educational pathways. In addition, I argue that by interpreting cognitive load theory in light of uncontroversial liberal democratic educational ends, central claims about instructional design that are advanced by both cognitive load theorists and their opponents are either moderated or overturned. Most notably, the claim that there are no domain-general inquiry skills which need to be taught, which is advanced by cognitive load theorists against inquiry theorists, is revealed to be self-refuting. Integrating cognitive load theory into processes of liberal democratic problem-solving turns out to be a biologically secondary domain-general inquiry skill of just the sort cognitive load theorists deny exists.