How Strategic Ignorance Contributes to Missed Opportunities to Enhance Social Justice

Abstract

The heart can care but be misled by fine sounding words that obscure harms. Discovering harms is often hard work, for example determining exactly what outcomes clients experience in agencies and how to improve these, what avoidable errors social work educators and practitioners make and how to minimize these, what students actually learn and use in their social work programs, what percentage of clients are involved as informed participants, what avoidable miseries exist in an area such as landlords who persistently violate the law to the disadvantage of the poor and governmental agencies in cahoots with others to rip off clients as in the commodification of clients, what dental and medical care is unavailable and how to mount effective advocacy to obtain this, to name but a few sources of avoidable ignorance that affect client welfare. It is so much easier to proclaim grandiose political goals. But does this help clients? And, the persistent division of people into groups obscures our shared humanness. Indeed I suggest that related miseducation of students is a key source of injustice to students and clients.

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