The education system is vital because it shapes the future of our society. Education should be a vehicle for equality that allows people to achieve success. However, the prevalence of social injustice in the education system not only downplays its objective but also perpetuates inequality (DeBoer, 2020). Social injustice in education encompasses specific disadvantaged or marginalized groups of people in the education system. Notably, social injustice goes beyond individual unfairness to embody a systemic issue deeply embedded in our society. Multiple variables contribute to unequal educational outcomes globally.
Family background of Latino immigrants significantly contributes to educational inequality in the United States of America. Students from such families do not speak English and thus struggle to overcome language barrier during learning. According to Baker et al. (2022), the legacy of discriminatory policies, segregation, and unequal resources still significantly affect educational outcomes in the United States of America to date.
Educational achievement varies by gender globally with significant differences across cultural as well as national contexts. Psaki et al. (2022) argue that, in sub-Saharan Africa, obstacles like early marriages, gender roles, gender-based violence, geographical isolation, poverty, and pregnancy prevent females from receiving quality education.
In China, citizens are divided into urban and rural residences due to household registration system. Rural schools are underfunded, and the government efforts to provide financial support for children in rural areas are limited, causing a huge educational divide between the rural and urban areas (Yang, 2022). A critical analysis of the case studies help better understand how social injustice in education affects people in real life and initiate efforts to address its root causes and strive to create more equitable and inclusive education systems that accommodate all students.
Health Inequality
Health disparities are increasingly identified among the critical global challenges in the 21st century society. Some of the disparities are attributed to economics where nations and communities with low economic power receive lower quality care. However, discrimination also contributes to health disparities, a phenomenon that was particularly evident during the COVID-19 pandemic. In China, the COVID-19 pandemic was successfully controlled and managed, showing how health is highly prioritized when responding to the consequences of serious disease outbreaks than economic implications like GDP growth rate (Shadmi et al., 2020). While nearly all Chinese citizens are covered by medical insurance scheme or the rural cooperative medical scheme, significant differences in terms of benefit coverage show that equity remains a challenge.
In Brazil, there is a universal health system that promoted universal right of citizens during the COVID-19 and led the response to pandemic. However, the distribution of ICU beds between the public and private systems showed significant social inequalities (Shadmi et al., 2020). In that context, the Brazilian government was expected to ask or mobilize the private sector to collaborate and coordinate with the public services to contain the situation. Surprisingly, the government did not want the private sector to participate in the process. Racial inequality also presented significant challenges in dealing with the pandemic in the country since most of the poor Brazilians are black, and thus experienced high cases of fatality rates (Shadmi et al., 2020). As a result, racial, regional, and social inequalities found in Brazil were evident in terms of rates of infections, and access to intensive health care services.
The Unfairness in Labor Rights
The broad scope of social injustice seeps into various aspects of society, including labor practices. Social injustice is not only experienced through individual acts of discrimination. Instead, it is also deeply embedded in social structures as well as institutions that promote inequality. Gender pay gap is a perfect example of social structures that perpetuate inequality because it encourages paying women less than men for the same job. Gender pay gap is thus a systemic social injustice that affects women’s economic empowerment, including their overall well-being. According to Aragão (2023), the gender pay gap remains a social injustice in the United States of America even after efforts to eradicate it over the last two decades. Nevertheless, the gap is narrower among younger employees.
Youth unemployment is another labor practice that shows social injustice in terms of labor rights. Most young people below 25 years old are without an occupation in many countries globally. In China, most youth are unemployed because their expectations do not match the reality (Naafs and Skelton, 2020). For instance, my cousin who completed college education two years ago once told me that what he strived for is unattainable at the moment. As a result, he decided to find satisfaction elsewhere. I somewhat agree with him because the Chinese government that should create jobs for the youth stopped reporting the unemployment rate around June last year.
Cheap labor markets, including using child labor are a glaring social injustice in many Asian countries. For instance, textile factories in Southeast Asia subject employees to low wages, poor working conditions, and children work for long hours without social protection (Momen, 2021). The physical and psychological well-being of the employees is adversely affected. The conditions depict how labor exploitation leads to economic inequality in global production systems.
Urban and Rural Economic Divide
Developing economies experience rapid growth in the urban areas at the expense of the rural areas. Therefore, such countries deal with issues like lack of adequate employment opportunities. Economics and governments fail to create enough jobs to satisfy the needs of the fast-growing population in such countries. For instance, some remote rural areas in the United States of America do not have access to high-quality medical care as well as educational resources due to poverty (Graves et al., 2021). There are complex and multidimensional causes of poverty, such as climate, culture, gender, markets, and public policy. The rural poor in China face various problems that require the government to invest in physical and social infrastructure to achieve sustainable economic growth and reduce poverty in rural areas (Xiao et al., 2022). However, it is noteworthy that rural decline affects even powerful economies like China.
References
Aragão, C. (2023) Gender pay gap in U.S. hasn’t changed much in two decades, Pew Research Center. Available at: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/03/01/gender-pay-gap-facts/ (Accessed: 17 February 2024).
Baker, B.D., Di Carlo, M. and Green III, P.C. (2022) Segregation and School Funding: How Housing Discrimination Reproduces Unequal Opportunity. Albert Shanker Institute.
DeBoer, F. (2020) The cult of smart: How our broken education system perpetuates social injustice. All Points Books.
Graves, J.M., Abshire, D.A., Amiri, S. and Mackelprang, J.L. (2021) Disparities in technology and broadband internet access across rurality: implications for health and education. Family & community health, 44(4), p.257.
Momen, M.N. (2021) Child Labor: History, Process, and Consequences. In No Poverty (pp. 80-87). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Naafs, S. and Skelton, T. (2020) Introduction:‘Youthful futures? Aspirations, education and employment in Asia’. In Realities and Aspirations for Asian Youth (pp. 1-14). Routledge.
Psaki, S., Haberland, N., Mensch, B., Woyczynski, L. and Chuang, E. (2022) Policies and interventions to remove gender‐related barriers to girls' school participation and learning in low‐and middle‐income countries: A systematic review of the evidence. Campbell Systematic Reviews, 18(1), p.e1207.
Shadmi, E., Chen, Y., Dourado, I., Faran-Perach, I., Furler, J., Hangoma, P., Hanvoravongchai, P., Obando, C., Petrosyan, V., Rao, K.D. and Ruano, A.L. (2020) Health equity and COVID-19: global perspectives. International journal for equity in health, 19(1), pp.1-16.
Xiao, H., Zheng, X. and Xie, L. (2022) Promoting pro-poor growth through infrastructure investment: Evidence from the Targeted Poverty Alleviation program in China. China Economic Review, 71, p.101729.
Yang, X. (2022, December) Difficulties in the Development of Local Education in Rural China. In 2022 6th International Seminar on Education, Management and Social Sciences (ISEMSS 2022) (pp. 2664-2672). Atlantis Press.
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