@circuitrider, when I’m writing posts on CC, I don’t pick my words as carefully as I do for professional stuff. What I mean is that some schools pride themselves on training social justice warriors. Training SJWs can be different than educating them – it prompts them to be angry and to go out to change the world but not necessarily to critically examine or understand the deeper political, social and economic mechanisms that are at work.
I’d prefer that the schools actually educate their SJWs (and other students as well), with a grounding in economics and political economy, probably picking up some historical perspective. When I talk to some of the kids who have attended some of these school and see themselves as social justice warriors, I am impressed by their passion, their extreme naivete, and their sloppy thinking. A friend’s daughter, who graduated from a very high-end school and prides herself as an anti-capitalist, who was holding out for a year (while living on Daddy’s money, earned as a grubby capitalist) trying to get a job with an NGO dedicated to the total elimination of prisons in the US. I’m not in favor of prisons and back in the dark ages actually spent a bit of time studying aspects of the criminal justice system and I would have hoped that she would have a clearer view of the societal problems that have led us to have prisons, even though I agree with her that the US chooses incarceration at a much higher rate than other countries. In many cases, the US opts for incarceration where a) the problem was preventable; or b) other alternatives would be superior.
More generally, I’d be delighted if they had read The Economist for a year to get another perspective on the problems that concern them. When I finished my STEM PhD, I was 26 and felt I did not have a sophisticated understanding of world events aside from the episodic news I would get from the NYT. So, I asked professors at Harvard, executives studying at Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School of Government (HKS) and a bunch of folks from a number of countries including France, Germany, Singapore, can’t remember the others) what two publications I could read to expand my world view and make sense of newpapers’ otherwise episodic reporting of events. Every person I asked had The Economist as one of the two. I read it religiously for years and still read it, though not so religiously as I can often predict what they would say.
To me, the ignorance and naïveté of these very committed stuents is pretty remarkable. Take Israel-Hamas as an example. I’d love for future SJWs to know that Hamas’s charter explicitly calls for killing all Jews and to know what many Palestinians mean when they say “From the river to the sea, Palestine should be free” before naively parroting the phrase. (Yes I know that for many people it does not mean kill or throw out the Jews, but for many people it does). The aforementioned young woman didn’t know about the 1947 UN declaration calling for the establishment of a Jewish state of Israel, that five Arab nations attacked when Israel declared its independence, or much about the Holocaust. But, in her ignorance, she had been happy to protest. (This is not to say that she wouldn’t protest now that she is less ignorant. But her protest would have to be more nuanced.). I’ve heard other kids say, when asked what will happen to the Israelis, say, “they can go back to the countries they came from,” not realizing, for example, that 65% of Israelis originally came from Muslim countries in the Middle East and Africa that drove them out with pogroms and restrictions and b) would probably kill them if they were to try to return. One can no doubt find the same naivete on the part of some pro-Israeli college students.
I’m all for helping the world. I devote a substantial amount of my time to pro bono projects, although my focus is on the problem (e.g., ending a civil war, helping countries transition more quickly away from fossil fuels) and less on the social or environmental justice issues. But, I find understanding something of the complexity of the world can help a lot. I wish for all an education in which they pick it up.