is teaching an essentially moral enterprise

is teaching an essentially moral enterprise 文库 手机文库 Is teaching an essentially moral enterprise Teaching & Teacher Educarion, Vol. 8, No. 1. pp. 105-108, 1992 Printed in Great Britain 0742-051X192 $5.00+0.00 Pergamon Press plc IS TEACHING AN ESSENTIALLY MORAL ENTERPRISE? ROBIN BARROW Simon Fraser University, Canada AN ESSAY-REVIEW OF THE MORAL DIMENSIONS OF TEACHING John I. Goodlad, Roger Soder, and Kenneth A. Sirotnik, Eds. (1990). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass (ISBN l-55542-199-7) The contributors to this book write with a fluency and ss that invites respect. They also touch upon a number of legitimate theoretical reasonablene issues. Yet, unusually in such a case, I cannot say that I feel that overall it is a parti- cularly illuminating or useful volume. The problem lies in the framework of the book, which is grounded in the belief that teaching is essentially a moral enterprise. That, of course, is a widely held belief, but it seems to me highly questionable. Certainly, teachers have various moral responsibilities, face various moral dilemmas, and may be thought to have some role to play in the moral development of indi- viduals. But that is no less true of poets, industrialists, and hotel managers. Granted there is a moral component to teaching, none- theless it is essentially about contributing to the education of individuals, and neither good teachers nor educated people are necessarily particularly moral. The title of the book is not, perhaps, very informative. The first four chapters, at any rate, which form Part One, under the heading “On the Nature and Commitments of Teaching as a Profession,” and to some extent chapter five, are contributions to the question of whether teaching can and should be classified as a pro- fession. Clearly written, they tend towards the historical and sociological, and to summary of past and contemporary understanding rather than striking or original argument. As such (assuming either that we are American or that we discount the explicit American focus) they make interesting reading, and offer a number of insights. So much so, that a reviewer is naturally drawn into the debate, for the articles do not succeed (nor do they claim to) in wrap- ping it up or presenting a tidy solution. There is limited value, I think, in dwelling for long on the abstract question, “What is a profession?” And it is questionable whether trying to determine what we need to do to become a profession, or arguing about whether we need to, is a profitable pursuit. Most of us acknowledge, however unhappily, and these papers clearly articulate the view, that teaching is not widely thought of as a profession, but that it would like to be; it is also widely assumed that it would benefit from so being. Teachers want to be members of a profession, because profes- sions are respected. But there is a danger in this approach, in that it readily leads people to focus on some other, acknowledged, profession and to assume that teaching can without difficulty adopt the same criteria of professionalism. Thus, medicine is a profession and therefore we should try to emulate medicine. But Soder and other contributors make a good case of arguing that we cannot successfully emulate the medical model. Whether entitled to be regarded as a profession or not, teaching is too different from medical practice to allow of the idea that both are professions in virtue of exactly the same criteria. I would prefer to address what is surely the real issue in plain terms. Never mind what a profession is strictly speaking, and never mind whether we are regarded as one (after all it is not only professions that are respected and accorded high status, and some professions, such as the 文库 手机文库 文库 手机文库 legal profession, are from time to 105 106 ROBIN BARROW time widely disparaged). The question is, given that teachers are in low repute, what do they need to do to gain repute? Obviously, there is a distinction between gaining repute and gaining deserved repute, and presumably it will be agreed that the latter is what we should be pursuing. The question thus becomes: What can teachers legitimately emphasize as their parti- cular province or expertise that is also worthy of respect? One common answer to that question is that teachers are distinctive in having a mastery of generic principles of teaching. But as Goodlad points out, such principles are in fact few in number, only a small part of a teacher’s reper- toire, and rather uninspiring. Another response emphasizes the subject knowledge base of the teacher, the mastery of what is being taught, and this I want to suggest has been too easily dismissed. Goodlad makes the point that thousands of people with degrees have the same subject knowledge base as teachers and expect no particular credit for it. But perhaps some- thing is being missed here: The teacher ought not to be simply a person with a knowledge base as evinced in a degree; he or she ought to be somebody with a rather special grasp of that knowledge. Of course this is not necessarily in fact the case. But imagine for a moment that the history teacher was notable for having a superior understanding of history (superior to many of his fellow undergraduates, not to mention the majority of other people). Why should that not in itself be thought to be a necessary qualification for teaching, and some- thing estimable and worthy of respect of tially how university professors the sort accorded to doctors and lawyers? That is essen- get their status (rather than from the ridiculous trappings of publication, etc., that we emphasize for pur- poses of tenure and promotion), and also how at certain periods some teachers, such as grammar school teachers, in fact did. Now, of course, we cannot leave it at that. If, for example, we believed that, whether it earned respect or not, being a good scholar was not important for a teacher, we should not advocate emphasis on the criterion. And some such thinking seems implicit in these contribu- tions: They emphasize knowledge of the “essential nature of children and the teacher- child-parent relationship” (Soder, p. 73). But this, I believe, is misleading, if not incorrect. At the end of the day our business is education; education is about developing the mind; developing the mind is about developing under- standing; understanding is embedded in various traditions of thought and inquiry. Certainly a teacher has to be able to get this across-that is indeed what distinguishes the teacher from the pure scholar-but nonetheless it is getting it across that matters. The tragedy of much con- temporary educational discourse is that it divorces technique from content to the point of marginalizing the latter. If our teacher training concentrated on enabling a specific person to teach, say, history or physics, as opposed to the alleged generic skills of teaching, we would be making some progress. Someone might question whether there are not some general educational skills that a teacher ought to have. Well, perhaps there are, but again it might be suggested that even then our emphasis is wrong: That emphasis is on alleged rules of procedure, that are presented in a way, and based upon research, that largely ignores the question of understanding the nature of education. Doctors have respect insofar as they do, not simply because they do “health- making” things, but because they are presumed to understand what lies behind their not very amazing skills. Teachers who are not articulate about the nature of their enterprise do not inspire respect. And why should I take my hat off to an individual who, while “wonderful with kids,” cannot talk 文库 手机文库 文库 手机文库 articulately about what it is to be educated, cannot provide coherent educational justification, and cannot communi- cate any worthwhile understanding? The pro- blem with education is that by and large the philosophical groundwork is not taken seriously enough. So who should control teaching and deter- mine the value judgements that shape our ends, and hence validate our practice? Is it, as Chester Finn is quoted as saying, a blunder to hope that “the lay policy makers should butt out” (Fenstermacher, p. 130). I do not think so. It has been argued that in the end, in a pluralistic society, even if teaching and curriculum deci- sions should be left to teachers, ultimate value judgements should be made by the people. But, in the first place, one cannot divorce questions of means and ends in this way: As we all know, Is Teaching an Essentially Moral Enterprise? 107 a curriculum decision can effectively change the nature of what is taught. In the second place, the aims of education should be framed by educators, partly because that is implied by the previous point to some extent, and partly because we are not concerned simply with value judgements (still less with moral judgements- contributors to this book do tend to treat all value judgements as indistinguishable), but with educational value judgements. That is to say, with judgements that have to be made in the light of an understanding of what education, as opposed to medicine, social justice, or anything else, is. Once again, therefore, we see the crucial need for an understanding of the field per se. Control should go to those with a sophisticated and developed understanding of the educational enterprise, which, in order to allow for a measure of honorable disagreement, can be rephrased as those who are immersed in the tradition of thought and inquiry focussed on education. It is arguable that as things stand this tends to characterize a few philosophers of education rather than professors of education en masse, but in principle it ought to refer to the latter, essentially because of the points made above. As Fenstermacher writes: “Very little is heard [in the debate on teaching as a profes- sion] about the fundamental purposes [my italics] of teaching” (p. 131), though, alas, even he then proceeds to equate these principles with an understanding of “the moral nature of teaching. ’ ’ But while it is true that there are moral dimensions to much of what a teacher is concerned with (compare Fenstermacher’s assumption that “every response . . . every assignment . . . every discussion, ’ ’ etc., “carries with it the moral character of the teacher, ” p. 134), the fact remains that educa- tion is no more about morality than many other human activities; it is about developing minds. Fenstermacher goes on to suggest that medicine, unlike education, mystifies its knowledge base, creates social distance by its practice, and does not involve a reciprocity that is essential to teaching. But educationists can (and in fact often do) mystify their knowledge; equally, they could, from time to time have, and, it might conceivably be argued, should create social distance between themselves and their clients. Nor is it entirely clear in what sense reciprocity of what sort is necessarily demanded in teaching. In short, it is surely not by these or such-like criteria that we are to distinguish the ideal physician from the ideal teacher. Fenstermacher is one who believes that teachers may lay claim to some sort of pro- cedural knowledge base that is peculiar to them. This refers to the knowledge we lay claim to arising out of research into questions of method and process. As I and many others have argued elsewhere, there is reason to doubt how much genuine knowledge we have in this area. But, anyway, it is not this sort of knowledge, at any rate not alone, that would entitle the educa- tionist to respect. 文库 手机文库 文库 手机文库 To earn respect a clear under- standing of the nature of the enterprise and the implicit aims of practice is what is needed. The second part of the book is sub-titled: “The Moral Mission of Education and Impli- cations for the Teaching Profession. ” Again one wants to ask to what extent there necessarily is a specifically moral mission, as opposed to a number of educational value judgements to be made. Even if we choose to focus on moral education, which is at best a part of education, it is arguable that we should have no particular moral mission, but merely the intention to provide some understanding of the nature of morality. Sirotnik is correct to say in his concluding and summarizing chapter that there is an issue of “simultaneously preserving the interests of individuals and those of society by grounding their interactions in fundamental, moral prin- ciples” (p. 296). This is an issue that have to face along with lawyers, policemen, social workers, parents, and businessmen. teachers But, as Sirotnik observes, concentrating on this issue in the context of K-12 public education alone limits the analysis, and hence its percipience and utility (drastically, I should say). Further- more, while the anti-relativistic tone of the book, to which he draws attention, is to be welcomed (since it is resistant to the wilder and more implausible species of relativism, rather than to all relativistic considerations), and while the commitment of the various contributors to the values of inquiry, rationality, competence, caring, and social justice is unexceptionable (to this reviewer at least), there is something odd about equating this commitment with “the moral mission of education.” The first three are 108 ROBIN BARROW not specifically moral values at all, but rather intellectual values (though, as such, indeed of educational significance), while the last two are in no way peculiar to education. Clearly teachers will gain some respect in so far as they are seen to be caring persons who serve ideals of social justice (their professionalization, if not their professionalism, to use Sockett’s handy distinction, will be enhanced), but so would doctors, lawyers, industrialists, and cab- drivers. The specifically educational questions are what form should caring take in the student -teacher relationship, what does social justice require of the teacher’s behaviour (in the classroom and outside), and what exactly does our intellectual commitment to inquiry, ration- ality, and competence imply in the context of education. In this respect, Clark’s contribution is one of the more pertinent. He looks at a number of ex- amples, or “case-descriptions” as his modest contribution to the “mystification” of know- ledge has it, to pose some questions concerning what the teacher’ s commitment to honesty, responsibility, and respect might entail in par- ticular cases. Such an approach has obvious educational significance, though, yet again, it must be noted that he takes it for granted that “really bad teaching is ‘bad’ in a moral sense” (p. 263), which, I suggest for the last time, is either plainly false or has to be understood as a tautologous statement: The mathematics teacher who utterly fails to contribute to any enthusiasm for or understanding of mathematics may be a “really bad teacher, ” no matter what his moral character, and his failure is not a moral failure. Thomas similarly considers four specific examples, and his avowed “purpose” is “to advance the fact that teaching is an inherently moral enterprise” (p. 266). But it is far from clear that the problem that teacher Isobel en- counters with “imperial” (imperious?) William is essentially moral, or that that which con- fronts Fred when he discovers that his principal is accused of sexual abuse is peculiarly educa- tional. Strike, by contrast, focusses on a specifically educational question: “What do teachers need to know about ethics?“, and offers some useful 文库 手机文库 文库 手机文库 guidance to the U.S. legal situation, though even he sees the need to avoid indoctrination as a purely moral issue. But for the educator it is something other than that: Indoctrination is anti-educational and that is why teachers should not engage in it, even if it were to be argued, as it has been, that in itself the practice may be morally justifiable. This book presents a number of distinguished contributors making a number of reasonable points in arguing for some plausible positions, but the whole amounts to something less than compelling and far from central educational significance. Sirotnik fears critics who will react by saying either, “Well, obviously teaching is a moral enterprise. So what?” or else, “Well, fair enough, but what about the practical constraints of reality?” There will be some such. But I would rather reluctantly con- clude that by trying to present the business of teaching as inherently and, by implication, exclusively moral, the shot misses any note- worthy target. Teaching is not primarily or essentially a moral activity, and it does not seem that coming at the subject from this angle is par- ticularly useful. Certainly the book does not take very far in understanding what specific conduct on the part of the teachers would, while us being morally acceptable as, of course, all human conduct ought to be, be educationally desirable in various contexts. If teachers want to earn more respect than they currently do, perhaps they should concen- trate on articulating an argument for the value of the knowledge that they impart. But that, of course, would require that we first get back to a recognition that it is a teacher’s ability to com- municate worthwhile understanding rather than his or her moral integrity or the nature of his or her personal interactions that lies at the heart of the matter. Conceivably the reader of this review may not share that view, but it can hardly be denied that whether one does or does not accept it will affect one’ s view of everything else, from the plausibility of particular research findings to the question of what would justify seeing teaching as a profession. Examination of, and a coherent argument in relation to, that and competing views remains, therefore, the first essential, and the basic reason for accord- ing an educator respect as a distinctive kind of professional. 文库 手机文库