First, we shall examine teaching and education in relation to the general criteria of profession explored in the previous chapter, with particular regard to how they score (so to speak) on this familiar scale of professional measurement. (ed. But, as already noted, schools are not just concerned with the promotion of education; they are also complex economic institutions accountable to larger sociocultural and economic aims. (ed. Methods: Residents from six psychiatric residencies provided views on professionalism and ethics education on a survey en-compassing 10 domains of professionalism. However, in an enterprise such as education or teaching in which the personal touch, human relationships and the cultivation of personal values are not just instrumental to achieving certain ends, but more or less constitutive of themsocial work, nursing and religious ministry may well represent other instances of such enterprisesgeneral professional rules, principles and strategies will be liable to diverse context-sensitive evaluation, negotiation and compromise. Also available in this series : ETHICAL ISSUES IN JOURNALISM AND THE MEDIA Edited by Andrew Belsey and Ruth Chadwick GENETIC COUNSELLING Edited by Angus Clarke ETHICAL ISSUES IN NURSING Edited by Geoffrey Hunt THE GROUND OF PROFESSIONAL ETHICS Daryl Koehn ETHICAL ISSUES IN SOCIAL WORK Edited by Richard Hugman and David Smith ETHICS AND COMMUNITY IN THE HEALTH CARE PROFESSIONS Edited by Michael Parker FOOD ETHICS Edited by Ben Mepham CURRENT ISSUES IN BUSINESS ETHICS Edited by Peter W.F.Davies THE ETHICS OF BANKRUPTCY Jukka Kilpi ETHICAL ISSUES IN ACCOUNTING Edited by Catherine Gowthorpe and John Blake ETHICS AND VALUES IN HEALTH CARE MANAGEMENT Edited by Souzy Dracopoulou PROFESSIONALISM AND ETHICS IN TEACHING David Carr London and New York First published 2000 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. See Bennett, N., Teaching Styles and Pupil Progress, London: Open Books, 1976. role teachers' perception of their code of professional ethics in their professionalism, linear regressions was used. Disagreements in scientific and historical enquiry are rife, but they are often resolved when one theory or hypothesis appears to be the clear best option, or its rivals turn out to be no options at all. Moreover, though it is tempting to assume that these two rather different accounts represent more and less up-to-date or enlightened conceptions of moral education, both have considerable contemporary philosophical currency, and one may readily encounter either of the educational approaches which they entrain (or a confused mixture of both) in contemporary contexts of schooling. With the wisdom of hindsight, of course, I can seriously question whether it was better for me to have undergone that disciplined upbringing which issued in a life of ruthless and punishing ambition, than to have been reared in a less driven climate of warm affection which would have yielded less achievement but more personal contentment and fuller relationships. See, for example, Peters, R.S., The Concept of Motivation, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958; Taylor, C., The Explanation of Behaviour, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964; and the remarks on psychology at the end of Part 1 of Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell, 1953. Certainly, they are not bound to be conscious of the rules they are following in plying their trade any more than one may need to be conscious of grammatical rules in speaking grammatically. Whatever the appeal of such crude instrumental or technicist conceptions of moral enquiry as a rational procedure apt for the solution of moral problems, however, they should be resisted. Moreover, despite some room for professional disagreement about the proper processes of medicine and law, there would also seem to be reasonably objective criteria for determining the extent to which these aims are being met: if the health of patients deteriorates or they die, or innocent people are gaoled on false evidence, while the guilty are set free, there is something clearly awry in the states of medicine and law. Indeed, in meaning to speak of the second of these functions we all too often get no further than speaking of the first. The apparent frequency with which we can recall the personalities and characters of our teachers long after we have forgotten what they actually taught us, greatly reinforces the suspicion that teachers have, by personal example, something of a modelling effect on the ETHICAL ISSUES AND THE TEACHER 215 development of young people. On the face of it, criterion (i) abovethat professions provide an important public serviceseems trivial to the point of vacuity. 81101. All the same, if the present argument is on the right lines, it would appear that these problems are not helpfully characterised as problems about the relationship of theory to practice; they are simply the problems which arise in any profession, trade or craft with respect to how we might teach trainees to utilise or exploit professional wisdom and insight to best effect in actual practical contexts. Is such a teacher, we might ask, the kind of person who should be in charge of children? Indeed, it is noteworthy here that any sexual prohibition would appear to be derivative of considerations concerning the intimate personal association with their patients into which psychiatrists are required to enter in order to be of significant therapeutic benefit to them. 124 Nieman, A. Be that as it may, the idea that some teachers will be Roman Catholic and others will be secular-liberal seems no more preclusive of a common conception of educational professionalism than the notion that some doctors are Muslims and others secular humanists precludes a general account of medical professionalism. And if it is now protested that one of the main aims of a professional ethics course should be to encourage the principled fidelity of students to one particular conception of moral problem solvingKantian deontology, utilitarianism, virtue theory or whateverrather than the adoption of a promiscuous pick-and-mix approach for reasons of personal convenience, one may reply that it is nothing short of bizarre to suppose that it might be a reasonable goal of any such course to produce professionals whose ethical reasoning was moulded in such an inflexible way. Indeed, this point is worth emphasising in the light of contemporary pressure to technicise professional expertise. This is why, on the virtue-ethical perspective adopted by many communitarians, the moral universals of political liberalism, no matter how successful they may be in policing border clashes between diverse cultural constituencies and interests, seem impotent to provide any substantial account of moral formation, commitment or even argument and dispute. 238 Pendlebury, S. 244 Perry, L. 243 Peters, R.S. Thus, in the interests of a better understanding of the way in which the professional knowledge and reasoning of teachers impacts upon their professional practice, it is crucial to grasp not only the way in which they exercise moral wisdom in their actual practical dealings with children, but also the way in which their moral and evaluative deliberations are informed by a wider understanding of the world, human nature and society. Generally, the notion of the theory dependence of observation is a philosophical descendant, via German Idealism and North American pragmatism, of Kants crucial point against his empiricist contemporaries that there can be no such thing as unconceptualised experienceon the grounds, in Kants own words, that intuitions without concepts are blind.5 This idea is nothing less than fatal to any unreconstructed empiricist attempt to found knowledge on brute data of experienceunconceptualised phenomenological givens, at once basic to but also uncoloured by the received categories of human thought. 81101. For the idea of a positional good in relation to education, see Hollis, M., Education as a positional good, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 16, 1982, pp. For another, however, there are substantial sociological reasons why it is difficult, if not impossible, to sustain even the non-radical cultural custodian conception of education and teaching in the culturally pluralist conditions of modern liberal-democratic polity. 14969. The idea of education as culture transmissivein either the descriptive or evaluative senses of this labelis associated with what we might broadly term educational traditionalism. To the extent that this is so, however, it is arguable that even wicked agents could not rationally exempt their actions from the demands of wider ethical accountability. Much ink was therefore spilt by teachers of practical subjects, concerned to salvage the curricular value of their area of expertise, in desperate efforts to show how home economics, physical education, AIMS OF EDUCATION, SCHOOLING & TEACHING 171 technical education, or whatever, might be said to promote intrinsically worthwhile knowledge. Such critiques, then, reject lock, stock and barrel any notion that occupations might be improved or made more effective via professional establishment, and they invite radical reappraisal of popular associations of hospitals with health, schools with education, law courts with justice. The country's views on healthcare policy, counsel on how to deal with patients, and what constitutes good behavior within the profession stem from ancient outlines for medical practice. We should at least be clear that any question about the morality of corporal punishment could hardly be resolved by empirical study of the effects of corporal punishment or its absence on the orderly conduct of school business, for it clearly makes perfectly good sense to argue that no school order secured by such means can be worth the price which has to be paid for it. It is presumably in the spirit of some such consensus that Aristotle4 maintained we deliberate in practical matters about the means rather than the ends of action; thus, in principle at least, the physician deliberates not about whether but how he should heal, the lawyer not about whether but about how he should promote justice, and so on. In this connection, it hardly needs saying that moral error may follow as easily from uncritical subscription to 180 ETHICS & EDUCATION, MORALITY & THE TEACHER the faith of ones fathers as from rigid adherence to the rule of moral law. At all events, it is clear that an ethical dimension of professional practice features quite explicitly in the third criterionas well as implicitly in others; moreover, once we begin to explore conceptual connections between the criteria, it should become clear that all are implicated in the ethical in ways which serve to lend a distinct character to professional as opposed to other occupational concerns. Indeed, skills of teaching and discipline appear to be context-dependent to the extent that what counts as such a skill on one educational conception might not so count on another. A crucial problem in relation to this, however, is that professional responses to the difficulties of clients, patients and students are not anyway well conceived in terms of scrupulously equal distribution of time, attention and resources. ), The SemiProfessions and their Organization: Teachers, Nurses and Social Workers , London: Collier-Macmillan, 1969. The basic idea of this version of educational traditionalism is that the growth of human culture is measurable by reference to discernible progress in a range of fields of civilised enquiry and endeavour. In short, the applied theory view of professional preparation appears to regard theoryat first sight plausibly enoughas necessary but not sufficient for effective professional practice; theory is to be regarded as integral to professional teacher training in so far as it can be shown to have real relevance to classroom practice. However, this charge would appear vulnerable to immediate conceptual difficulties, not only in the present instance, but generally. Here again, moreover, the services provided by the traditional professions appear to be in a somewhat different case from those provided elsewhere; by and large 28 EDUCATION, TEACHING AND PROFESSIONALISM whereas the basic ends and goals of plumbing, joinery, catering and hairdressing are fixed and the main questions are technical ones about the effective achievement of these fixed ends, the basic nature, ends and goals of good medicine, law and (arguably) education are deeply contested and matters for serious public debate. It is this problem which leads to those invariably artificial strategies designed precisely to reintroduce the contexts of understanding needed to give sense or content to dispositional competencies including the fabrication of other dispositions concerned with the mastery of professional knowledge. Although Aristotle does distinguish within the idea of practical enquiry between two different forms of practical deliberationthe first (techne) concerned primarily with the promotion of technical success, the second (phronesis) concerned with evaluative choice and moral conducthe leaves us in little doubt that the former has generally to be subordinated to the latter in any serious contexts of moral, social or political activity. In this light, the dangers of adverse influence are perhaps more to be feared from pupil attachment to people who are, in the general human run of things, neither especially virtuous nor particularly vicious and, from this point of view, there may be nothing too far-fetched about the above example. He then identifies and examines some central ethical and moral issues in education and teaching. 245, 247 Bailey, C. 243, 254 Barrow, R. 251, 255 Bastiani, J. 119. [A borderline clich or, in any case, a more or less inevitable reference.] Indeed, since, given the range of individual client needs, there are no general distributive rules of professional attention, it must always be a problem for the compromised lawyer, teacher or doctor to know whether the extra attention he or she is giving in this instance is due to proper personal regard for the exceptional case or improper favouritism. Hence, in his own classic rejection of the empiricist distinction of truths of experience from truths of logic and, by implication, observation from theorythe high priest of modern pragmatism, W.V.O.Quine, famously observes that theories face the test of experience not singly, but as a body.7 Like post-Kantian Idealists, then, Quine and other modern pragmatists reject the classical empiricist notion that there are any brute unconceptualised data upon which scientific theory construction might go to work, and they subscribe to a general (now widely conceded) fallibilism concerning PROFESSIONAL VALUES AND OBJECTIVITY OF VALUE 115 scientific and other human knowledge, which insists that it is a mistake to think of knowledge as fixed, final or immune to critique or overturn. On the other hand, however, there also seems to be a case for some redefinition of what is meant by professional autonomy in the case of education and teachingon the grounds that, given certain reasonable considerations regarding the contribution of public education (or at any rate schooling) to civil flourishing, there are bound to be constraints on teacher freedom of a kind that may not similarly apply in other professional spheres. In turn, via a more general consideration of the wrongs of unprofessional professional-client liaison, we were led to broader reflection upon the nature of professional justice, which it was argued is less a function of the application of general ethical rules, or calculation of particular moral consequences, and more a matter of the cultivation of professional virtues apt for the maintenance of proper personally engaged, yet properly detached, relations with clients. From this viewpoint, it is striking that although the academic faculty-based view of professional teacher education which underpinned post-war development of professional teaching degrees in the UK and elsewherequalifications which sought to root the professional preparation of teachers in a systematic initiation into the disciplines of . Moreover, even if it is possible to achieve some kind of general reconciliation of the vocationalism of cultural custodians with more recent conceptions of professionalism, there would still clearly be differences over matters of professional and other authority between any such position and that of educational radicals and progressives, for whom the very language of professionalism seems anathema. Indeed, in so far as values may plausibly be distinguished from mere likings or tastes by their relationship to reasons or grounds, we have suggested that there is a case for regarding any exclusively subjectivist account of values as little more than a contradiction in terms. There is no need, of course, to deny that such creativity and imagination can be taught or learned, and it may not be inappropriate to regard what is here taught and learned as skillsjust so long as it is appreciated that one does not teach or learn imaginative teaching as one teaches or learns an organisational 8 EDUCATION, TEACHING AND PROFESSIONALISM strategy of one kind or another. 1928. For example, although a surgeon may not be consciously applying a theory when he excises a tumour, he is nevertheless utilising a technique which presupposes a good deal of scientific knowledge of the human body; in short, the practical skills of a competent surgeon are by no means independent of theory since they represent the essentially technological application EDUCATIONAL THEORY MISAPPLIED? Disabling professions, in I. Illich, Disabling Professions, London: Marion Boyars, 1977. Most students embarked upon professional courses will be prepared to abide by some not too stringent dress code and, in the absence of such a code, it seems reasonable to advise trainees seeking to know how they should dress to conform to what is acceptable to the headteacher of any school to which they have been posted for placement. Whereas it so happens that certain occupational groups doctors, lawyers, or whateverhave managed generally to corner the lions share of authority, prestige or wealth in our society, this is a contingent social fact which might well have been otherwise; in some other society (perhaps one in which wood and water were in short supply) it might have been the hewers of wood and the carriers of water who were accorded higher status than the members of contemporary professions. 244, 246 White, J.P. 251 Wiggins, D. 245 Wilkin, M. 243, 247 Williams, B. However, the trouble with this line of argumentprecisely the trouble which attracts centralised top-down approaches to professional regulationis that it seems to generate paradoxes. It is therefore of the utmost educational importance to observe a proper, albeit unfashionable, distinction between education and training in science, dance and other activities. Schools Curriculum and Assessment Authority (SCAA), Spiritual and Moral Development, Schools Curriculum and Assessment Authority, UK, Discussion Paper No. One feature, of course, by which adulterous liaisons stand to be distinguished from other non-marital affairs and involvements is that they explicitly involve betrayal (of promises as well as people) and injury to a third party or parties, and it is surely upon this that any clear adverse moral implications will turn. Thus, if we ask politicians, employers or the public at large what they want from education, understood broadly as schooling, they will rightly say that they want well-trained and informed young people capable of getting on with others and of shouldering the burdens of adult responsibility. What is rather needed for the promotion of healthy moral life is the replacement of such simple conceptions by something more finely nuanced which more accurately charts the creative interplay between authority and freedom, knowledge and criticism, in moral enquiry and conduct. We will mostly be ready to admit, if pressed, that verbal bullying and humiliation are not very nice. 315. ; and (ii) is education a profession? The distinction between restricted and extended professionalism seems first to have been made by Eric Hoyle. Indeed, with the wisdom of hindsight, it seems little surprising that the post-war educational reforms of a notoriously class-ridden Britain seemed to have no difficulty endorsing an essentially Platonic conception of education for an inherently caste-based social and economic system. By the same token, of course, it is open to them to choose good or ill, or to be morally good or bad agents: to be sure, being able to choose well and to assume responsibility for worse choices is largely what we mean by mature moral agency. Indeed, it is not just that such terms as teaching and learning are learned at our mothers knees, but that there is a real enough sense in which anyone, even quite small children, both can and do teach.4 The degree to which any kind of research-based know-how is actually necessary for effective teaching, then, is at least questionable, although there is no doubt something to be said for systematic attempts to improve our pretheoretical pedagogical knowledge. But there are also different ways in which teaching has been regarded as a vocation or, to put it another way, teaching has been liable to diverse vocational comparisons. KSDE Kansas Educator Code of Conduct brochure (PDF) Professional educators shall work in the best interest of their students and honor their responsibilities to their students, school, district, community, state, and profession as evidenced by: Responsibilities to Student Responsibilities to District Responsibilities to the Profession Young, M.F.D. Neill, A.S., Summerhill, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968, pp. To a considerable extent, the difficulty here recapitulates earlier explored issues about whether education is a matter of initiation into universal rules or rules of club membership. 7180. However, there is also another fairly loose sense in which the term is used to indicate any job well done; thus, the plumber, joiner or electrician has done a professional job if it is efficiently executed or well finished, an unprofessional one if it is not though it is important to note that any such evaluation of a plumbers or joiners achievement does not in the least commit us to regarding him or her as a member of a profession as such. 68 EDUCATIONAL THEORY AND PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE Hence, it has become fashionable of late to try to understand problems of professional educational knowledge and reflective practiceand, indeed, of the actual procedural thinking of teachersin terms of a distinctively practical mode of rationality.16 At first sight it might well seem that the idea of practical rationality offers us a very neat and conceptually economic way of understanding the difference between proficient and incompetent professional practice, which to a large degree by-passes the theory-practice problem. The proper way to proceed seems rather to ask whether a given occupation exhibits the general features of professional engagementwhich is more a matter of greater clarity about the kinds of issues and problems it raises, the qualities of reflection and judgement required for dealing with such problems, and the sort of education and/or training practitioners would need to address these issues effectively. It is argued that it is crucial to the clarification of many contemporary confusions about educational aims that we observe a distinction between education and schooling. Indeed, it seems to have been in just this spirit that Paul Hirst many years ago argued for a conception of education based on the nature and significance of knowledge itself, and not on the predilections of pupils, the demands of 236 PARTICULAR ISSUES society, or the whims of politicians.14 Thus, what should we say to someone who protested that currently fashionable commitment to wider public accountability was undermining the very possibility of education? N. Kemp Smith, London: Macmillan, 1968, p. 93. Parsons, T., The Structure of Social Action, London: The Free Press, 1949. Indeed, to the extent that much of this machinery is now a feature of trade and commerce, it could hardly be sufficient to distinguish profession from trade. Popular wisdom offers identikit pictures of educational traditionalism and progressivism as variously structured configurations of more or less coherent educational trends and proclivities, which are, all the same, doubtfully faithful to any actual historical educational initiatives or proposals. Ethics also will play a role in how a teacher interacts with students, with colleagues, with administrators and with the community at large. Hence, in relation to the sorts of example paraded in rival traditions accounts of education, I may prefer to rear my child as a Catholic, Muslim or secular-liberal, either because I believe that my preferred life is right for everyone, or because I believe that such a life is right for me or people like us. Indeed, if my kitchen is flooded because of a burst water pipe, it is likely to be a more urgent matter that there is a plumber near to hand than that there is a doctor or lawyer in the vicinity. But the notion of competence seems nevertheless to be a complex family resemblance6 concept in which rather diverse dimensions of evaluation are interwoven in intricate waysin consequence of which the term is liable to have variable implications for different contexts of professional discourse and concern. BIBLIOGRAPHY 259 Carter, R., The Doctor Business, New York: Doubleday, 1958. ), Knowledge and Control, London: CollierMacmillan, 1971. Indeed, Aristotle regards reasoning about actions which is mainly focused upon establishing effective means to chosen goals (techne) as technical or productive reasoning, but refers to reasoning which is primarily directed towards the discernment of right endswhat to value as suchas moral wisdom (phronesis).3 Aristotle would also appear to have held that moral or evaluative reasoning is logically presupposed to technical or productive reasoning or, at any rate, that there can be no reasoning about means to ends except in the light of certain assumptions about what is or is not 76 EDUCATIONAL THEORY AND PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE humanly worth pursuing. In one famous version of such a story, these formsthe scientific, the mathematical and logical, the interpersonal, the artistic and aesthetic, the moral, the religious and the philosophical (or some variant of these)were alleged to number seven or eight.18 Moreover, the emphasis on cultivation of modes of rationality, rather than specific socio-cultural achievements, seems to have been at least partly intended to forestall complaints to the effect that liberal traditionalism was tantamount to rationalisation of a particular ideological agenda. Elliott, J., Educational theory, practical philosophy and action research, British Journal of Educational Studies, 35, 1987, pp. It is as though teachers are saying to their college tutors of theoryas surgeons would not have to say to their EDUCATIONAL THEORY MISAPPLIED? At the same time, it would be foolish to insist that all value differences are reconcilable after this fashion, or to ignore the existence of very real value disagreements on the proper course of human development and flourishing. Certainly, it is neither moral betrayal of our ethical inheritance to recognise that the way in which the civil codes of another culture treat certain racial minorities, women, the elderly, the criminal or the insane, are actually considerably more enlightened or humane than our own, nor ethnocentric cultural imperialism to insist that the persistent acquiescence of another social order in slavery, child exploitation or ritual mutilation of women requires condemnation as unethical or barbaric (though this may not give us the right to impose our views upon them economically or by force of arms). Celebration of Awareness, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973b. . Hence, if it is proper to characterise professions, in the spirit of the last chapter, in terms of a root concern with the promotion of such higher social goals as health, learning and justiceand a corresponding reduction of disease, ignorance and injusticethen the last of these purposes seems not to be especially well served by an adversarial system of civil and criminal law which enables highly paid lawyers to get known miscreants off the hook and TEACHING AND PROFESSIONALISM 51 to blacken the characters of innocent witnesses. However, educational institutions are not industries but cultures, and harmonisation, arbitration or negotiation of differences of perspective, personality and value are not merely incidental to, but of the very essence of, cultural growth. 17786; Carr, W., What is an educational practice?, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 21, 1987, pp. Download book. Thus, on the most basic construal of teaching, it is arguable that there are normative or evaluative constraints on teaching, which are less technical and aesthetic, more moral or ethical. Thus, if doctors or teachers could arrange things so that the patients or students with whom they are compromised are not either unfairly favoured or discriminated against (they are subject to the same rules as others and others are 162 ETHICS & EDUCATION, MORALITY & THE TEACHER subject to the same rules as they) then there might be nothing wrong with professional-client fraternisation. On a more pessimistic view, it would seem to preclude any possibility of moral education (as distinct from moral socialisation) at all. For the influence on Neill of psychoanalytic thought in general and Freud in particular, see Carr, D., The free child and the spoiled child: anatomy of a progressive distinction, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 19, 1985, pp. ; the secular-liberal values of many if not most people living in Britain? Even in such cases, of course, one need not despair of rational ethical arbitration of these opposed perspectives. (This argument was more fully explored in my essay The dichotomy of liberal versus vocational education, in the American Philosophy of Education Society Yearbook of 1995.) If it should be that the way I dress or my sartorial attitudes have adverse implications for my character or personality, then there might be some basis for saying that I ought not to dress as I do, even if I so desire. Indeed, such older pupils may know very well what they are doing, and it might well be more apt in some such cases to regard pupils as predators or exploiters, and to count their erring teachers or professors among the vulnerable exploited. The difficulties with this suggestion are, however, quite fatal to the idea of generic dispositions. This document was uploaded by user and they confirmed that they have the permission to share it. But the proper response here, none the worse for being obvious, is that there is normally nothing to fear from friendly banter between teachers and pupils who have established a nonthreatening climate of mutual respect and trust. It encompasses all other values that guide the public service such as loyalty, neutrality, transparency, diligence, punctuality, effectiveness, impartiality, and other Moreover, there is much to be said for the view that schools do need to be more mindful than they may formerly have been of the best hopes and aspirations of parents for their children, and to be appropriately accountable to the practical needs and interests of the wider community and economy. Moreover, although it is possible to go to over-zealous conservative extremes about usage, teacher educators seem on safe enough ground in insisting that professional teacher trainees uphold and observe, at least in their work with pupils, the standard conventions of received grammar and orthography. In this respect it is important to recognise that a general medical practitioner is not to be regarded as someone of professional standing and expertise solely in virtue of the possession of a body of theoretical knowledge, for the possession by laypersons of such knowledge would not in and of itself equip them for professional medical practice. But although I can now also see that the wrongness of this decision was not in the least due to my lack or otherwise of principlefor observance of this or that principle need not be what is at stake here its wrongness need not be related either to any compromise of culturally inherited values. More particularly, however, it is likely that there will also be occasions when service and profit motives pull in markedly different directions: when, for example, a doctor might be tempted by kickbacks from a drug company to prescribe what is either inappropriate or surplus to his patients medical need. Annually, more than one million children attend public school pre-k programs overseen by elementary school principals who, although veteran educational leaders, were not trained to oversee these programs. Professionalism And Ethics In Teaching. In short, the professional word does not seem as final in the case of education and teaching, as it clearly can be in matters of medical or legal practicealthough again the line here is, as I shall also argue, by no means hard and fast. 38 3 TEACHING AND PROFESSIONALISM Professional status and the elitist objection The main concern of this chapter is to consider the appropriateness or otherwise of regarding teaching and education as professional enterprises in the sense highlighted in Chapter 2a sense which does give grounds for distinguishing occupations such as medicine or law as professions from trades, manufacturing industries, mercantile enterprises, at least some kinds of vocation, and so on. In another gear, however, it may only be an extreme instance of a more general idea that professional expertise is little more than the acquisition of practical skillswhich also includes the applied science view of professionality. Clearly also, natural temperament, personality and disposition will influence the kind of life I find fulfillingwhether it is solitary, scholarly and ascetic, or social, sporting and aesthetic. As naturalist critics of prescriptivism argued many years ago,11 whatever is good is not so because I am disposed to commend iton the contrary, I am disposed to commend it because it is good; going to the dentist in the event of tooth decay is not to be considered good because it expresses an interest of minethere is clearly a real enough sense of interest here in which it may do no such thingit is good because there are painful facts about tooth decay which would give any sentient human a reason for seeking treatment. Chapter 6, indeed, is effectively a revised version of a paper entitled Questions of competence, published in the British Journal of Educational Studies in 1993. Hence, in this chapter, we shall attempt to sketch a rough-and-ready account of what it might mean for an occupation to qualify for the status of professionan account which, moreover, emphasises the centrality of ethical or moral concerns and considerations. Much of its recent development has resulted from rethinking traditional medical ethics in the light of new moral problems arising out of advances in medical science and technology. Title: Microsoft Word . 256 Bennett, N. 246, 250 Bines, H. 244, 246 Black, H. 247 Black Papers 244 Bloom, B. At all events, this is something that we cannot know in advance of further anthropological enquiries of both conceptual and empirical kinds. 22137. 14 By existentialist theology, I refer to that post-Kantian project of separating faith from reason, begun by Kierkegaard and continued in various ways by such modern (notably) Protestant theologians as Karl Barth and Rudolph Bultmann. At worst, it may sometimes have been mistakenly inferred that because human agents are entitled to authentic moral choice, no one has any right to pass moral judgement on the choices of others, so that any one personal choice is as morally valid, and deserving of the same respect, as any other. It is worth some re-emphasis, by way of conclusion, that although there may indeed be very real problems about how to design courses in which these different aspects of professionalism come together most effectively, these are not problems about the relationship of theory to practice in the sense of understanding the relevance of professional discourse to professional practice (for what could be clearer than that?). 3 See Carr, D., Education, learning and understanding: the process and the product, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 26, 1992, pp. In this respect, it is clear that the separate protagonists of debates over the respective merits of traditionalism or progressivism do seem to agree that this is a question which needs resolving in the interests of child development as such; it is not that they believe, as one might hold in relation to Catholic education, that although a given education is suitable for this child (in virtue, say, of its cultural heritage) it is not in the same way suitable for that. By the same token, however, our account of educational professionalism to date now urgently requires some general idea of what substantial endsbeyond avoiding the psychological, physical or sexual brutalisation or degradation of pupilsteachers are in business to serve. The precise trouble with the notion of a generic competence is that it confuses the idea of a capacity with that of a disposition; it mistakes a condition whose normativity is a complex practical expression of sophisticated forms or knowledge, understanding and value, for one whose normativity is a function of its place within a framework of (essentially causal) regularity. Part I: the role of the teacher, Journal of Beliefs and Values, 19, 1998, pp. Ethics matters because (1) it is part of how many groups define themselves and thus part of the identity of their individual members, (2) other-regarding values in most ethical systems both reflect and foster close human relationships and mutual respect and trust, and (3) it could be "rational" for a self-interested person to be moral, because his or her self-interest is arguably best . 14551. Now since competence is a matter of conduct in accordance with established occupational standards, and conduct appropriate to professional and other occupational practices is publicly observable and accountable, it ought to be possible, in both principle and practice, to specify in detail what counts as competent conduct for purposes of objective professional prescription. Why, however, would this rule out our calling them, for example, moral theories? Dress and speech ETHICAL ISSUES AND THE TEACHER 211 are bound to be educationally contentious, however, given the influential traditional view that it is the main duty of education to ensure a measure of cultural continuity via transmission of yesterdays wisdom to tomorrows generations. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available! Neither of these paperswith the exception of a paragraph or so from the second onesurvives in original form here, but both were directly ancestral to the first two sections of this book. Moreover, the confusion in question is the already familiar one between education and schooling. ), Practical Reason, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Whether or not such disagreements are fatally damaging to professional debate about the role of education in human development, moreover, may turn ultimately upon the extent to which subscription to traditionalism or progressivism, or to a given religious faith, is fairly construable in terms of club membership. Moreover, the pupils are now observed to be using this kind of verbal harassment among themselves. However, if we bear in mind that morality is more a practical than a theoretical sphere of human activity, there is at least one important source of experience: precisely that practical experience of rule-following acquired from childhood via various forms of early socialisation. ABSTRACT Professionalism and Ethics in Teaching presents a thought-provoking and stimulating study of the moral dimensions of the teaching professions. The qualification for one reason or another is of some moment here, however, since there are surely very different kinds of conflict which might be said to resist such resolution. (This is not to deny the truth that potential fathers need parenting skills, only to recognise the fact that fathers cannot be mothers.) Basically, these are: (i) that teaching is a professional activity; (ii) that any professional enterprise is deeply implicated in ethical concerns and considerations; and (iii) (therefore) that teaching is also an enterprise which is deeply and significantly implicated in ethical concerns and considerations. Thus, teachers are to be mindful of the way they dress and speak, to exemplify industry and diligence and to set the right tone, presumably of proper respect for persons, in their dealings with colleagues and pupils. Thus, television soaps have accustomed us to think of hospitals as combat zones in which bighearted doctors and nurses struggle vainly to uphold basic human values against a faceless bureaucracy of soulless administrators intent only on sacrificing patients on the altar of Mammon. Williams, B., Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, London: Fontana Press/ Collins, 1985. professionalism is a fundamental aspect of the process of socialization, during which individuals acquire the values, attitudes, interests, skills, and knowledge-the culture-of the groups they seek to join. Moreover, one presently relevant point of labouring these somewhat formal considerations concerning the logic of moral and evaluative reasoning is that it seems reasonable to distinguish certain complex practical occupations on the grounds that they are primarily focused on moral rather than technical deliberation. 245, 247 Hare, W. vii Hargreaves, D. 246 Hartley, D. 256 Haydon, G. 243, 248 INDEX 267 Hegelianism (and neo-Hegelianism) 33, 72, 112, 117, 126 Hippocratic oath 24, 51, 151, 160 Hirst, P.H. In this connection, indeed, one may observe a marked shift in attitudes to professional dress in British teacher training institutions in the four decades or so since the end of the Second World War, perhaps reflecting Britains general progress (some might say decline) from a colonial power, secure in the culturally superior ethnocentric knowledge and values of its ruling order, to a more liberal, egalitarian 212 PARTICULAR ISSUES and pluralistic society in which it is less easy to impose received customs and conventions upon teacher trainees. But this, too, seems less than coherent. In the event, however, I suspect that any such conclusion reflects a tangle of conceptual mistakes about the nature of ethical generality, RIVAL CONCEPTIONS OF EDUCATION 143 the normative character of human development and the evidential basis of values, which educational philosophy might have done more over the years to sort out. In the more specific domain of moral education this is likely to mean, first and foremost, general conformity to the commonly accepted values of society. Goodman, P., Growing Up Absurd, London: Gollancz, 1960. Indeed, the perennial error of the relativist is to suppose that intimate connections between social-cultural and moral norms, the liability of moral responses to local cultural expression, mean that it is impossible to separate the two, ignoring the extent to which moral values are responses to general considerations of harm and flourishing to which we are all heir by virtue of a common human inheritance. It might be thought an initial problem here that in the case of moral learningunlike cases of learning in such theoretical disciplines as nature study or geographythere does not seem to be much in the way of experiential moral data or information upon which moral reasoning might go to work. The key players in major moral debates over such crucial questions of individual and social human well-being as abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia and divorce are not deontologists, utilitarians or other professional ethicists but the advocates of often fine-grained competing systems of evaluative priority such as Catholic Christians, Fabian socialists, liberal humanists, free-marketers and Darwinian evolutionistsand, of course, ordinary pre-theoretical moral agents. On the other hand, however, it has been a central claim of the liberal traditional orthodoxy of post-war educational philosophy that any proper development of those qualities of rational self-direction also valued by progressives actually presupposes a fair measure of coercion or compulsion.8 For many traditionalists, the qualities most needed for responsible democratic citizenship are those of personal discipline, and schools can be thought to play a major part in shaping such qualities in at least two major respects. 242 Landon, J. x, 253 Lane, H. 1427, 2287, 250; and The Little Commonwealth 229 Larson, M.S. Indeed, given proper attention to ethical considerations, or policies for workplace democracy or employee participation, it is not obvious that rational strategies of a kind popularly associated with managerialism are at all inappropriate to a wide range of familiar human occupations. 8 See, for example, Carter, R., The Doctor Business, New York: Doubleday, 1958. 6 Platos anti-democratic sentiments are perhaps most evident in Platos Republic (for example, 558d-562a), in E.Hamilton and H.Cairns (eds), 256 NOTES 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 Plato: The Collected Dialogues, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961 For example, Dewey, J., Democracy and Education, New York: Macmillan, 1916; Neill, A.S., Summerhill, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968; Peters, R.S., Ethics and Education, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1966; Rousseau, J-J., Emile, London: Dent, 1974. In this sense, professionality and professionalism are the requirements of a particular class or category of occupation which is usually taken to include doctors and lawyers, may well embrace teachers and clergymen (and other members of socalled vocations)but traditionally excludes plumbers, joiners and other tradesmen. But, of course, in so far as the problem appears to rest on a conceptual mistake, it is difficult to see how any practical strategy could resolve it. On the other hand, however, if it is meant to show that there is a way of learning skills which focuses less on the rote learning of practical procedures and more upon the acquisition of those principles which inform their intelligent practice, this, whilst also AIMS OF EDUCATION, SCHOOLING & TEACHING 175 true, equally fails to license the substitution of such principled skilllearning for forms of educationally significant understanding. 30927. It is because this is so that it seems misguided to try to account for professional educational preparation in the technically reductive terms of competence models. Moreover, the method of self-government which Neill inherited from Lane was originally devised as a form of therapy for problem children, those whose negative experiences of (often brutal) parental and other authority had created reaction formations only susceptible to the most radical of socio-psychological remedies. Take, for example, the matter of dress and speech: A young teacher is inclined to very casual or trendy forms of personal dress and presentation (jeans, irregular hairstyle, facial jewellery) and/or speech (a tendency to vernacular, slang or street idioms) which other staff do not find acceptable. 21525. But just as educational deliberation involves highly complex interplay between the evidential and the evaluative, so it appears on closer scrutiny do forms of theoretical reflection in such areas of professional concern as medicine and law. (ed. 242 Freud, S. 231, 255 Friedson, E. 241 Froebel, F. 137 Furlong, V.J. From a given aim and the observation that ing constitutes a satisfactory means to , one can 80 EDUCATIONAL THEORY AND PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE reason, all things being equal, to ing as a prescription. 260 BIBLIOGRAPHY Gretton, J. and Jackson, M., William Tyndale: Collapse of a School or a System?, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1976. Indeed, as already noted, perhaps the best philosophical handle we are likely to secure on the righthood of health care, education and legal redress is in terms of a notion of what is necessarily or indispensably conducive to overall human flourishing; whereas it is, one might say, merely contingent to such flourishing whether one has a new car, a Swiss watch or a decent manicure, it is something close to a necessary truthsomething true, as some philosophers would say, in all possible worldsthat human life per se is bound to be impoverished in circumstances where disease, injustice and ignorance are rife and their remedies in short supply. Moreover, although such a view is by no means inconsistent with the elimination of educational weeds (crackpot views held without much rational warrant) we have repeatedly observed that there is much genuine and serious professional dispute about the ends and means of rational educational practice. and Peters, R.S., The Logic of Education, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. 242 structuralism 125; moral 126 Tate, N. 249 Taylor, C. 240, 241, 245, 249, 254 teacher: autonomy of 14, 224; craft and other knowledge of 446; as moral exemplar 150, 194, 216, 219; neutrality of 13,194 teaching: as an art 6; distinguished from education 3; moral implicatedness of 8; normativity of 149; and particularism 7; as a skill 4; versus training 89; virtues in 162 techne ix, 34, 66, 73, 99, 100; managerial 224; moral 226 Ternasky, P.L. But whilst conceding that there is some truth in this, we should be clear that this is only an argument against some forms of trainingmindless rote learning perhapsand not against training as such.8 For the point that one cannot expect to understand higher mathematical functions unless one has mastered basic arithmetical skills and operations is a purely formal one, entirely consistent with the observation that there may be better and worse modes of basic mathematical, musical or moral habituation. See, for example, Barrow, R., Plato, Utilitarianism and Education, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975. Annually, more than one million children attend public, Every school has a mission statement based on values and ethical beliefs. Bridges, D., Competence-based education and training: progress or villainy?, Journal of the Philosophy of Education, 30, 1996, pp. Neill, A.S., Summerhill, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968. 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