Social Justice Education (SJE) has become the defining orientation of many educators and educational researchers, but is not without its detractors. Because of its overt political investments, SJE has been accused of brainwashing students and violating the terms of democratic legitimacy. In this chapter, I offer a philosophical defense of some SJE. Using Canada as an example and comprehensive liberalism as a framework, I argue that many practices that we wish to protect under the banner of SJE can be defended by appeal to the foundational values that are common to liberal democracies and find expression in contemporary legislation. I suggest five criteria for distinguishing between defensible and indefensible forms of political education, allowing that not all self-proclaimed SJE will be defensible, and some less progressive education will be. I conclude by anticipating two objections to this strategy.

When teachers address controversial issues with their students in class, parents, society, and the teaching profession often expect them to adopt a neutral or impartial pedagogical stance. However, scholars have expressed doubts about whether this duty of impartiality is realistic and questioned whether it is educationally desirable. This chapter defends the duty of impartiality by arguing that the key reservations voiced against it in the academic literature are based on different misconceptions about impartial teaching and teacher neutrality: about the meaning of “controversial issue,” about the educational value of being flexible about neutrality in teaching situations, and about what constitutes a reasonable standard of impartiality. Drawing on the legal concept of evenhandedness, the chapter concludes by putting forward an alternative standard of teacher impartiality that walks the line between the inevitably value-laden nature of teaching and the expectation that teachers exercise their authority in a reasonable and responsible way.

This chapter revisits the important role of affect in pedagogical efforts to engage students with complicity in democratic education. Recent theoretical shifts on affect and complicity enable education scholars and practitioners to move the focus away from what we do not want (i.e. more complicity) toward anti-complicity. The new openings emerging from these theoretical shifts create pedagogical spaces to inspire anti-complicity praxes— that is, actions that actively resist social harm in everyday life. It is argued that for this to happen, it is necessary that educators navigate students through the affective and political dynamics of complicity in both critical and strategic ways. The chapter concludes by discussing how an anti-complicity pedagogy may be ‘translated’ into strategic moves in democratic education.