Cultivating an Ethical School

Robert J. Starratt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415887397
• eBook ISBN: 9781136842030
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Often the school is left as an institution seemingly ethically neutral, leaving untouched questions about whether the school itself is a site of injustice toward both educators and children. Springing from his well-known Building an Ethical School, Robert J. Starratt now looks more closely at the educational leader's responsibility to ensure that the whole fabric of the educational process reflects an ethical philosophy of education.

Starratt argues that the work of educating young people is by its very nature an ethical work as well as an intellectual work, and that this work inescapably engages educators and their pupils with an academic curriculum, a social curriculum, and a civic curriculum. Cultivating an Ethical School lays a foundation for educators seeking to cultivate a comprehensive ethical educating environment. The second half of the book then takes up the more specific perspectives on teaching and learning that constitute the heart of cultivating an ethical school. Starratt provides examples of how an ethical school can expose students to a variety of perspectives on the challenges they will be called upon to face in the worlds of culture, nature, and society. This valuable book shows leaders and educators the importance of organizing a curriculum and a pedagogy that simultaneously respect and cultivate the intellectual, personal, and social qualities of being human.

PART I

Foundations for Cultivating

an Ethical School

CHAPTER 1

Cultivating an Ethical School in a Changing Context

The cultivation of an ethical school does not involve superimposing a set of demands on an already overburdened educating work. Rather it involves educators practicing their profession with an integrity that goes right to the core of their work. In other words, the work of educating young people is by its very nature as a profession an ethical work as well as an intellectual work. That does not mean that in practice it cannot degenerate into unethical and irrational or mindless work. However, when one considers the intrinsic good that the work of education intends, it has to do with the inquiry into and contact with the intelligibility of the world as well as the learners’ inquiry into a responsible participation in that world thus understood as intelligible. The work conducted in what we recognize as schools inescapably engages educators and their pupils with an academic curriculum, a social curriculum, and a civic curriculum. The work concerns the personal as well as the communal learning of how the world works and of one’s actual and potential membership in that world.

Schools introduce young people into the intelligibility of the world of nature through the academic study of the natural sciences and mathematics; to the intelligibility of the social world through the academic curriculum of history and the social sciences; and to the cultural world through the academic curriculum of language arts and the humanities, of literature, music, drama, design, and the visual arts. While the academic treatment of those worlds separates them into differentiated worlds in the abstract, the experience of those worlds by human beings is much more an integrated experience within settings that are simultaneously biophysical, cultural, and social; simultaneously a passive and active process, in which the world is experienced as already there in its particularity and dynamic reality, as well as not there until the person attends to it and by that attention begins to interpret it both perceptually and rationally and emotionally. In school, teachers and learners intentionally set out to explore the intelligibility of the world, and to do that they treat the world as understandable through different clusters of abstractions or “schemas” (Fiske & Taylor, 1991) that compose the academic curriculum. That curriculum parses the world as a biophysical and biochemical world often understood in its mathematical patterns; as a social world of human societies with past and present histories of both rationality and irrationality, and as a cultural world made up of languages, literatures, mores, traditions, life styles, artistic and aesthetic ways of expression, and ideal types of human living. This introduction through the academic curriculum helps to situate learners as members of the natural, social, and cultural worlds, both as individuals and as a whole generation of members.

Schools also engage young people in a school’s pragmatic social curriculum of learning to live and work with others, including those who differ from them racially, religiously, ethnically, sexually, and ideologically. That learning involves, through the daily mixing with other students, overcoming learned stereotypes that demean or diminish others who are “different.” It also involves sharing social spaces (e.g., sitting with different others in the cafeteria); sharing the teacher’s attention (e.g., raising one’s hand and being called on after others have tried their responses to the teacher’s questions); sharing one’s ideas in group discussions in classes. It involves learning to be a part of a team whether in sporting events, playing the flute in the school band, or working on the student newspaper. It involves the risky business of making friends, of losing friends, of arguing for one’s perspective in a dispute with others.

Schools also introduce youngsters into the initial skills and understandings of civic life, as they learn how to govern themselves within an institution that engages in the larger project of community self-governance with its own institutional agenda of being a school. That introduction means understanding and exercising their rights and responsibilities as citizens of the school community, and of the larger civic community. It means learning the hard lessons of incurring sanctions for violating school rules. It means learning how to manage disagreements with classmates in the schoolyard without getting into name-calling and other inappropriate responses to not getting one’s way. It may mean standing up for a classmate who is being bullied by another. It may involve working with classmates under the direction of the teacher at the beginning of the school year to come up with a set of agreements by which the class will govern its conduct.

The learnings of the three curricula—academic, social, and civic—is about learning the meaning, the intelligibility of membership in the world. Membership involves relationships of mutuality, relationships of mutual dependence and mutual rights and responsibilities. As such, those learnings involve both understanding of and being responsible to the implied relationships of the self to the world. In other words, the work of school learning is both intellectual and moral in a very foundational sense.

The Changing Context of Education

The work of educating does not take place in a vacuum. Rather, it is influenced by the social, cultural, and historical world in which the school is embedded, both globally and locally. Even were that context relatively stable, it would influence many, if not most, of the definitions of ethical challenges educators, their pupils, and families face within the educating agenda. The present political and economic, social, and cultural contexts of nations and states around the globe, however, are far from stable. Rather, one can point to major trends on a global scale that are affecting and will continue to impact the process of education and the way ethical concerns may shape that process and be shaped in that process. At least five major trends will affect the education of the young around the globe.¹ The trends identified below will not play out uniformly across every country due to cultural, religious, political, and economic conditions in each locale. Neither will they play out in any simultaneous temporal sequence, again due to various conditions in each country. However, they will all, individually and cumulatively, influence every country’s educational process and how ethical issues are defined or ignored in that process. These trends, furthermore, tend to influence one another and thereby feed the sense of urgency in the way governments, intellectuals, cultural leaders, and educators respond to them.

Educators, as most people, do not often step back from the immediacy of their lives, their work, their daily preoccupations with getting through the demands and minor crises of their day, in order to read and reflect upon these large historical trends. Nonetheless, human history does not stand still, especially in this era of instantaneous global communication. The cumulative decisions of individuals, institutions, governments, inventors, explorers, scholars, mothers and fathers, and madmen on a daily basis gradually coalesce into major influences on the patterns of human experience and subsequent human decisions.

Educators are among the most important actors on the world stage, for they prepare (or fail to prepare) the succeeding generations of humans for responsibly engaging the world that is being influenced by these trends. It is not unimportant, then, for educators to attempt to discern the large challenges emerging in the historical moment and to integrate explorations of these challenges into the existing curricula of the school.

Globalization

A major trend that will continue to influence the social and cultural context in which education is carried out is the trend toward globalization. The human world is being reconstructed into a global village, with the networking of nations into regional cooperatives, integrating their economies, their national politics and policies, their laws, their educational systems, their cross border initiatives. The notion of one nation going its independent way without regard for its neighbors is becoming unacceptable. Even in seeking its own national interests and viability, cooperation and collaboration with regional and global partners is increasingly required of all nations (Beck, 2006).

Moreover, in many industrialized nations one sees the rapid increase of immigrants seeking work and a better way of life. For schools in those countries and their municipalities, this has resulted in what some have termed “glocalization” (Mawhinney, 2004), which refers to the ethnic, religious, and racial neighborhoods of recent immigrants who are changing the local, more homogeneous politics of the city or region. The children of these immigrant families arrive at local schools, some with no facility in the national language and others with a comparatively poor educational background. The schools have to make rapid accommodations for them. School policies will vary in the respect or disrespect they ascribe to the culture and language of the new arrivals. In any event, the level of accommodation the schools provide to these students carries clear ethical implications, for these youngsters have both human and civil rights that countries need to respect.

Whether or not physical crossing of borders by immigration continues to accelerate (there are clearly limits to the number of immigrants any one nation can support), the psychological or virtual border crossing through digital technology has already begun on a wide scale. Electronic news media bring almost instantaneous news of natural disasters, outbreaks of virulent diseases, televised sporting events, political uprisings, and political opinions into the homes of millions of viewers around the globe. Introduction to new cultural creations—clothing design and fashion, music, literature, theater, as well as popular culture such as movies and rap music are easily accessible. Points of view concerning human rights, the role of women in society, diverse sexual orientations, religious practices are voiced over global networks. National authorities, even in very closed societies, find it increasingly difficult to prevent or selectively censor ideas and value perspectives flowing through international channels of communication. All of this global communication supports an awareness of both our common humanity as well as the rich diversity of possible expressions of that humanity.

The globalization of information tends to shrink the psychological distance between people of the globe. Schools have to recognize their responsibility to prepare the young to participate as global citizens in responding to the challenges and possibilities presented by widespread global consciousness, global interdependence, and global diversity (Cheng, 2005). In other words, citizens in every country have to surrender their distorted attitudes and beliefs about national sovereignty, cultural superiority, political or economic privilege, historical antagonisms, and stereotypes of enemies and competitors. Instead, they will have to work together simply to survive and sustain some viable future as a global community. Globalization does not destroy national sovereignty; rather, national sovereignty will survive because of globalization (Beck, 2009). Schools have an important role to play in preparing their pupils for membership in a globalized world with all its challenges and opportunities (Cheng, 2005). One might argue that schools fail in their ethical responsibilities if they ignore the globalizing realities of risk that call for a “cosmopolitan vision” (Beck, 2006) of cooperation required by all the nations of the globe and their citizens. This reality of the context of education is connected to the next one.

Environmental Degradation

A second major trend internationally is the concern for environmental sustainability. Responding to the degradation of the environment is every country’s responsibility (Mason, 2005). Global resources of energy, arable land, potable water, clean air, species survival and financial capital for investment are shared concerns for every nation’s future. Reputable scientists worldwide agree that the planet is rapidly approaching or has already reached the irreversible limit of global warming through carbon emissions into the atmosphere (McKibben, 2010; Stern, 2007). Global warming not only affects rising sea levels due to the melting of the glacial ice cap in various parts of the globe, but causes the gradual drying up of rivers fed by the seasonal melting of those ice caps. In turn, the drying up of rivers leads to the increasing desertification of previously arable land. That, in turn, diminishes the local food resources in those parts of the globe, causing intolerable rises in food prices and potable water.

The gradual exhaustion of oil resources will cause spikes in oil prices that affect every nation’s economy. Weather patterns likewise change, bringing more severe hurricanes, storms, and tornadoes. Torrential rains cause mud slides, floods, and increasing displacement of communities and the loss of arable soil. In other words, the planet earth is undergoing severe strains due to the depletion of the resources humans rely on for their very survival. While some countries have begun to respond by mounting various conservation measures, the response so far has been nowhere near what is needed.

Schools cannot solve these environmental sustainability problems, but they have a part to play in helping this younger generation, upon whose shoulders the environmental crisis will fall most heavily in their adult years, begin to understand the depth of the crisis and to explore ways communities and regions and global networks can begin to respond to the crisis (Bowers, 2002; Mumford, 1964). Clearly, these responses will necessarily involve the global community in various forms of cooperation. Schools can help their students link up with students, research centers, and governments in other countries to share common concerns and promising responses. One might easily say that any school’s failure to intentionally address the environmental crisis within its academic, social and civic curriculum could be considered a serious moral neglect of their educating responsibilities (Andrzejewski, Boltodano, & Symcox, 2009; Mason, 2005). How that responsibility might be carried out, we hope to address in subsequent chapters of this book.

The International Information Speedway

A third trend that will affect how educators cultivate an ethical school has already been alluded to, namely the rapid emergence of digital technology and its shaping of an international information highway and a knowledge economy, and, more recently, an international form of political activism. First, we can see how this technology assists the globalizing consciousness of students, bringing stories of their peers and their cultures, their challenges, their dreams into the immediate awareness of students who are attending a school, some of whose teachers are ignorant of, or simply inattentive to the drama being played out across the oceans and continents of the world. It is not difficult to perceive an increasing disconnect between students’ global awareness and their teachers’ relatively circumscribed and parochial attention to their immediate culture and environment. Beyond contact with an international community of peers, local students may be considerably more facile in surfing the web for information and perspectives on topics that interest them, only some of which might connect with one or more academic subjects they might be studying at the time. Nonetheless, by grades six or seven students may have acquired a larger mental encyclopedia of information than some of their teachers who find themselves too busy correcting homework or grading quizzes to surf the web for anything remotely connected to what they are teaching.

Schools and school systems might begin to conduct workshops for teachers on promising digitized programs that could be used to provide differentiated instruction to their students, programs that better reflect advances in the content knowledge of some academic disciplines and its applications to various real life problems, and that might be more culturally responsive to culturally diverse classrooms. Schools or school systems could also provide for their teachers digitized lecture series or professional development units that delve into recent advances in teaching their curriculum (Cheng, 2005).

One may raise the question of the ethical responsibility of all teachers to stay at least as current as their students are on what is available on the internet, both to connect their classes with that material as well as to provide a critique of the value or information bias in that material.

In the not too distant future, school and government officials will wake up to the economies in the schooling effort that can be realized by providing some academic instruction through distance learning programs that can be easily accessed at home or in the local library at a third or less of the cost of a teacher’s salary. This could lead to a weekly schedule where students and teachers processed what was being learned at home and in the community via various types of technology and or quasi apprenticeships during two or three days at the school. Obviously, such an arrangement would not be appropriate for the beginning years of schooling that require a more structured and secure environment. Even in the early years, however, such distant or virtual packaging of some instruction accessed at the school site might well serve certain efficiencies in the instructional budget, and might more effectively correspond to the school’s ethical responsibility to provide the most effective and up to date instruction that their resources can afford.

To get back to the middle and secondary school years, the opportunities to connect the teaching of academics to real world issues and to student interests and experiences through digital resource is growing by leaps and bounds. This availability of knowledge resources will have enormous potential to diversify the various ways students learn, to provide in-depth research of important issues in both the academic and civic curriculum, through connecting to research resources available on the internet. The resulting teaching–learning process could be enormously enriched, could save the school or school district money, and change the students’ engagement in the learning process from a passive to an active frame of mind, with a payoff in student motivation, student intellectual and moral growth, and enhanced student autonomy as a self-activated learner (Cheng, 2005).

One might legitimately ask whether it is more professionally ethical for teachers to hold on to a traditional approach to teaching and learning that is based on a one-size-fits-all textbook, class length, assessment protocol, grading system, and a curriculum that does not represent the way the world really works, instead of teachers engaging with a technology that empowers students to more realistically organize information into meaningful wholes and thereby connect knowledge and understanding to the real world? Obviously, I have created a false dichotomy to construct a rhetorical argument. Nevertheless, between these extremes, where would one take an ethical stance consistent with the professional responsibilities of educators?

The Shift to Relationality

A forth transition involves a deep philosophical shift stimulated, ironically enough, by insights and theories emanating from the natural sciences. It is a shift from a Newtonian view of the basic stuff of all material reality as composed of isolated atoms whose activity causes reactions in other isolated atoms. This atomized view of reality (what Whitehead (1957) argued was “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness”) held sway during the emergent European Enlightenment and provided the foundation for viewing individual human beings as likewise isolated from one another and from their natural environment.

Unfortunately, the Newtonian notion of atomic physics carried over to a view of human society proposed by Hume as an artificially constructed community of self-interested persons whose living together was made possible by a “social contract” in which individuals would curb their self-interest from interfering with the “right” of every other person to pursue their self-inter...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• I Foundations for Cultivating an Ethical School
• II Essentials for Cultivating an Ethical School
• Notes
• References
• Index