Epistemic Justice and Children's Knowledge

Sor Juana insisted on the value of her intellectual contributions in a world that dismissed women's thinking. Epistemic justice extends this to children: recognizing that children possess legitimate knowledge based on their lived experience, observations, and reasoning. Adults systematically commit epistemic injustice against children by dismissing their perceptions as unreliable, their concerns as trivial, or their knowledge as incomplete. A child who observes unfairness in their classroom, who understands their own body, who recognizes patterns in their community—these represent genuine knowledge. This concept challenges adult authority to monopolize truth-telling about children's realities. In child protection, epistemic justice means believing children when they report abuse, treating their descriptions of events as credible data, and resisting the impulse to interpret their experiences through adult assumptions. It means valuing children's folk knowledge, emotional intelligence, and practical wisdom. Schools should teach children that their observations and reasoning matter, creating epistemically just environments where diverse ways of knowing are honored.