The label 'progressive' generally appears in educational contexts when orthodoxies are interrogated. In this sense, it is generally associated to emergent thinking in relation to specific tensions in debates located in specific social, cultural and historical contexts. If we forget the debate within which 'progressive educations' are embedded, we run the risk of losing perspective of what is at stake and what is being interrogated – as different types of 'progressive education' might propose completely different things. This forgetting of the wider social 'conversations' (or the contexts where different approaches emerged) has led many well meaning initiatives, especially in the area of social/global justice, to embark on crusades of conversion where the most important thing is to increase numbers behind a cause. When this happens, the ethics in the relationship with the learner disappears or becomes secondary to 'the cause'. This paper affirms the need for critical literacy and independent thinking in education for social justice in order to reiterate the responsibility of educators towards learners. It presents two stimuli for discussion. The first stimulus proposes a distinction between lobbying, awareness raising and education and presents a case study of a fair trade organisation which has constructed its own distinctions. The second stimulus invites educators to trace seven educational discourses and their potential different conceptualisations of critical thinking.