Encouraging moral outrage in education: a pedagogical goal for social justice or not?

ABSTRACT

Should educators encourage students to learn moral outrage in teaching about social (in)justice? If moral outrage is a catalyst for social change, to what extent can educators nurture this moral and political emotion in the classroom? These questions are at the heart of this essay. The aim is not to take sides for or against using moral outrage in education to motivate students towards change for the better, but rather to engage in an analysis and sorting through of various discourses about moral outrage as a moral and political emotion, and to figure out how those discourses operate to create particular meanings for moral outrage that are circulated through educational research and practice. The author argues for a broader theorization of the relationship between moral outrage, political emotion, and education, tentatively suggesting a renewed attention to the productive possibilities as well as risks of encouraging moral outrage in education.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral outrage
• political emotion
• social justice
• pedagogy
• ethics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Although moral outrage and anger are often used interchangeably, as they may be overlapping, there is an important conceptual distinction between them: whereas anger is considered more impulsive and short-lived, outrage is extremely strong anger arising when a transgression against a moral standard concerns a larger social group’s reaction rather than a more ‘personal’ feeling (Goodwin, Jasper, and Poletta 2001). Referring to the relational aspect of moral outrage, anthropologist Ward Goodenough (1997) emphasizes how moral outrage is a response that creates a ‘we’ against the violation of a moral standard by a third party (‘them’).

2. See https://www.oxfam.org.uk/education/who-we-are/what-is-global-citizenship/#:~:text=A%20global%20citizen%20is%20someone,and%20their%20place%20in%20it.&text=For%20Oxfam%2C%20global%20citizenship%20is,to%20engage%20with%20the%20world accessed 17 March 2021. The definition now reads: ‘A global citizen is someone who is aware of and understands the wider world – and their place in it. They take an active role in their community and work with others to make our planet more peaceful, sustainable and fairer.’