ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the hypothesis that younger social workers and students struggle to critically understand the hegemonic neoliberal political context. Neoliberal ‘common-sense’ hegemonic views such as ‘work is the way out of poverty’ could be discussed and challenged with statistics and facts about people who are working and are benefit/poor. Social justice values in social work are congruent with a radical, progressive definition of social justice, concerned, not just with equality of opportunity, but with redistribution of resources and, therefore, equality of condition. The chapter discusses a case for an explicitly radical form of social work education with essential elements of critical thinking, social empathy or emotional engagement, knowledge of politics, sociology and economics, clearly contra-indicated neoliberal ideas and assumptions and an explicit progressive interpretation of, and alignment with, social justice values. L. Fazzi found that social work students were less imaginative and creative in their responses to service users after social work education.
