Check Your Privilege: The Dangers of Teaching a Critical Social Justice Understanding of Society in UK Social Work Education

This paper uses a modest finding from a research study as a window into the world of social work education in Scotland. The study demonstrated that students believed by their classmates to be most dominant (white, straight men) were in fact the most reluctant to speak out. This finding is woven into an examination of a social work pedagogy underpinned by a critical social justice (CJS) understanding of society. The social work regulator in Scotland, the UK professional association of social workers and the wider UK university sector form a context which is dominated by CSJ ideology. We see the consequences of this in the students’ internalization of the CSJ “power and privilege hierarchy” as above, as well as in the evidence of student self-censorship, student belief that words and ideas cause harm to minorities, and fear of the opprobrium of classmates should they say the “wrong” thing. The above phenomenon is analyzed with reference to power/privilege, epistemology and the UK university context. The dominance of identity-based CSJ over the fundamental issue of material poverty is explored, and it is suggested that this contributes to a lack of ethical clarity in social work education and practice.