The ethical orientations of education as a practice in its own right

Abstract

This article is the second of a two-part investigation, the first part of which was published in Ethics and Education, vol. 5, issue 2, 2010, under the title ‘Preface to an ethics of education as a practice in its own right’. Although it builds on the arguments of that ‘preface’, this second part of the investigation can be read as a stand-alone essay. It begins with a brief review of a new subordination of educational practice achieved by a neo-liberal tenor in international educational reforms in recent decades in Western societies. The practical context for the essay however is that failure of many of these reforms, like the failure of neo-liberal dominance in socio-economic policy, has given rise to emergent opportunities where inspirations for educational debate and policy-making are concerned. Arguing for the uptake of such opportunity, the ethical tenor of education as a practice in its own right is explored under four headings: (1) review and clarification of the inherent purposes of education as a practice; (2) investigation of educationally productive pathways that are characteristic of education as a practice in its own right; (3) elucidation of a recognisable family of virtues that arise from that practice itself; (4) exploration of the kinds of relationships through which these virtues, and their educational fruits, are nourished.

Keywords:

• educational practice
• inherent purposes
• virtues of teaching
• virtues of learning
• educational ethics
• relationships of learning

Notes

1. Examples of this critical research literature include Schooling in Capitalist America by Bowles and Gintis (1976), and their joint article written 25 years later ‘Schooling in Capitalist America Revisited’ (2001) available at www.umass.edu/preferen/gintis/soced.pdf; also Bourdieu and Passeron (1977).

2. See Woodhead's (2008) article, titled ‘Chris Woodhead's part in a doomed act of education reform’.

3. Two illustrative examples are: A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (1983, Washington, National Commission for Excellence in Education); Total Quality Management and the School by S. Murgatroyd and C. Morgan (1992, Buckingham Open University Press).

4. OECD (2009) gives a good overview of the OECD's work in shaping the discourse of educational policymaking, and includes an extensive bibliography of OECD publications on education from 2000 onwards.

5. An instance of the latter is the EU-funded project ‘European Educational Research Quality Indicators – a cooperative research project in the 7th Framework Programme of the EU’. Details of this were made available at an invited presentation to the European Conference on Educational Research, Vienna, September 2009. See http://www.eera-ecer.eu/ecer-programmes-and-presentations/conference/ecer-2009/network/invited_speakers/?no_cache=1&cHash=e699b50018.

6. See for instance the EU document ‘Joint progress report of the Council and the Commission on the implementation of the Education and Training 2010 work programme’ available at http://register.consilium.europa.eu/pdf/en/10/st05/st05394.en10.pdf. See also the European Youth Forum's response to that report, available at http://www.esn.org/content/youth-and-meps-change-direction-eu-education-policy-making.

7. Plato (2007, Republic Bk 7, 518d). Whether Plato meant his observations on these points to be taken literally, or as utopian kind of satire, still remains open to debate. For instance, Karl Popper takes a literal view while Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that the ethical significance of the Republic is quite lost if the text is taken literally.

8. Both lists produced here are amended versions of material that I have been developing on for many years in work with teachers – both student teachers and experienced teachers. The first version of the lists appeared in a book of mine titled The Custody and Courtship of Experience: Western Education in Philosophical Perspective (1995).

9. This four-fold characterisation is explored in more detail in Chap. 4 of The New Significance of Learning: Imagination's Heartwork (Hogan 2009, 197).

10. Oakeshott (1962/1981) goes on to add: ‘Education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation’ (199).

11. Bourdieu's and Passeron's (1977) Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture provides a good example of the first of these characterisations. Rogers’ (1970) Freedom to Learn provides an influential example of the second.

12. On ‘contrived collegiality’ see Chap. 9 of Hargreaves’ (1994) Changing Teachers, Changing Times: teachers’ work and culture in the postmodern age.