SPRINGFIELD, Mass. – A Massachusetts middle school is being remade into a “social justice” magnet school, and that should have parents and taxpayers wondering if the school’s students will soon be learning “the four Rs” – reading, writing, arithmetic and radicalism.

MassLive.com reports John J. Duggan Middle School will re-open on Aug. 25 as Expeditionary Learning Magnet School, a Grade 6 -12 school that will emphasize “social justice” issues.

By integrating “social justice” issues into the curriculum, students will learn about fairness and how to advocate for themselves and for others, Principal Michael Calvanese said.

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The school’s website notes that students will “explore connections to community issues, environmental stewardship, global knowledge and understandings and equity,” MassLive.com reports.

Calvanese said that science class, for instance, could focus on energy conservation.

“The possibilities are endless,” he said.

That’s exactly why parents and taxpayers should be worried.

“Social justice” is a favorite topic of left-wing activist teachers who use the innocent-sounding term to preach the evils of capitalism and trumpet the virtues of socialism. (Activist educators who are especially bold use social justice as a gateway to promote communism to youngsters.)

For example, TeachingForChange.org is encouraging educators to “debunk” the “myths” surrounding the ongoing illegal immigration crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. Since most of the immigrants are from Central American, the TeachingForChange.org tells teachers to focus on the reasons why children are fleeing their homeland:

Textbooks, if they mention the region at all, exclude any mention of the United States’ and other world powers’ involvement in the region’s governments, agricultural systems, and trade policies. Thus, the causes of Central America’s “underdeveloped” status and high rates of poverty are reduced to poor climate and the shortcomings of its people, rather than products of global economic and political systems, originating from centuries of colonization.

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In other words, the U.S.’s free market economy is to blame for the crisis, and Americans are reaping the results of their greedy policies.

David Bacon, a writer for the site, makes this argument:

The failure of Central America’s economies is largely due to the North American and Central American Free Trade Agreements … and their accompanying economic changes, including privatization of businesses, the displacement of communities by foreign mining projects and cuts in the social budget.

The treaties allowed huge U.S. corporations to dump corn and other agricultural products in Mexico and Central America, forcing rural families off their lands when they could not compete.

Bacon also claims “the United States’ meddling foreign policy and a history of the U.S.’s own harsh immigration measures are responsible for much of the pressure causing this flow of people from Central America.”

Those are the kinds of ideas that pass for “social justice” thought in many American K-12 classrooms.

To be fair, this does not necessarily mean that Expeditionary Learning Magnet School students will be fed a steady diet of anti-American lessons.

But given the school’s stated mission of teaching “equity” and the fact that many teachers have been trained in college to bring anti-capitalist and pro-socialist ideas into the classroom, nobody should be surprised if this new school soon becomes a hotbed of left-wing radicalism.