Social Justice

The Constitution establishes as a right people’s access to adequate housing, health-care services, sufficient food and water, social security, and a basic education.

• The Constitution  (Links to an external site.)establishes as a right people’s access to adequate housing, health-care services, sufficient food and water, social security, and a basic education.

• Children, specifically, enjoy the inalienable right ‘to basic nutrition, shelter, basic health-care services and social service (Links to an external site.)’, and ‘to be protected from maltreatment (Links to an external site.), neglect, abuse or degradation’. However, without the implementation of social justice to correct the injustices of the past, reconciliation will be impossible to achieve.

• The social justice (Links to an external site.) clauses in the Constitution have profound implications for education, because they commit the state to ensuring that all South Africans have equal access to schooling – and that they have access to such schooling in their mother tongue (Links to an external site.) if they so desire (Department of Education 2001:14).

• The classroom should therefore be a space in which core social values (Links to an external site.) such as social justice, tolerance, concern for human dignity (Links to an external site.) and mutual respect are protected and promoted.

• When initially exposed to cooperative learning in class, educators need to plan, not only the academic activities for these groups, but also the social skills which learners need to learn and practise while working in groups in cooperative learning settings. By doing so, educators can ensure that learners begin to accept each other in class and develop mutual respect for the different strengths displayed by different learners.

• Learners with specific barriers to learning should be encouraged to participate fully in cooperative learning (Links to an external site.), while their peers should be encouraged to support and accept them as fully functioning members of their cooperative learning groups. This will help protect learners’ rights to basic education (Links to an external site.) and their dignity (Kitshoff, 2006:19).