Of course, I had no idea what they thought about any of these topics! Some favored charter schools on grounds of parental and educational freedom of choice, and others opposed them on grounds of democratic control and equality. Meira: When I started teaching at Harvard Graduate School of Education, students would troop through my office and say, “Professor Levinson, I’m so glad you’re here, because I believe in educating for social justice,” and they would think they had told me what their views were about charter schools, or high-stakes tests, or the Common Core, or teacher certification. I could imagine that being a challenge when trying to help your students wrestle with complexities of grading or school discipline. Rick: I’ve always felt like there’s a widespread habit in education of imagining that our views are not only sensible but morally absolute. None of what I could find would help me figure out whether it was ethical to relax my grading or disciplinary standards for a kid whose parents were going through a nasty divorce, or how often I could ask a student who was far ahead of their peers to tutor during class without being in dereliction of my duty to her as her teacher. But the philosophy I read was about things like utilitarianism versus rights-based reasoning or what the basic structure of justice looked like, and the ethics books for teachers were telling us not to steal the copy paper or ever give a kid a hug, and the education for social-justice literature was all about overturning the system and starting totally afresh. in philosophy from Yale and I got my doctorate in political theory from Oxford before I became a middle school teacher, so if anyone should have been able to find answers or reason their way through these dilemmas, it should have been me. This isn’t because I didn’t know where to look. It felt shameful to bring them up with colleagues: “Hey, do you feel like sometimes that you find yourself not living up to your values and being unfair to kids, or is it just me?” And then when I turned to the ethics literature, I couldn’t find anything helpful, either. Meira: As a middle school teacher, I faced ethical dilemmas on a regular basis and I never really knew what to do with them. Rick: What got you interested in this work? Like bioethics, educational ethics provides theoretical, pedagogical, and policy-oriented tools to help practitioners and policymakers identify, analyze, discuss, and enact the ethical dimensions of their work in more complex ways. Meira: Think about educational ethics as a field that is analogous to bioethics but focused on ethical questions that arise in educational policy and practice rather than on ethical questions that arise in medicine, public health, and biomedical science. So, let’s start with the basics: What exactly is educational ethics? Rick: Meira, you’ve been working to build out the field of educational ethics for a while, but it’s probably new to a lot of readers. In recent years, she’s been working to develop the field of “education ethics.” It’s an intriguing endeavor, which raises all kinds of questions about what that even means, if it has any practical value, and whether it can be in a way that isn’t political? The summer seemed like a good time to sit down and chat with Meira about all this. Since that time, she’s become one of the nation’s most influential education philosophers. We first met maybe 20 years ago, when she had only recently left teaching middle schoolers in Atlanta and Boston. While we disagree on much, I’ve always found her provocative, insightful, and wonderful company. and William Foss Thompson Professor of Education and Society at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
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