This chapter takes up the ethics of how educators are educated with special attention to in-service teachers who spend a career being “developed.” First, the authors clarify how the ends and means of professional development are wrapped up in dreams of the “good life” in a marketplace that replicates and sells cruel optimisms to educators and school leaders. Next, they situate the historical realities that led to the proliferation of professional development crisis narratives in education since the National Defense Education Act of 1958 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Then, they critically discern what happens when educators’ attachments interact with crisis narratives through a neoliberal, for-profit professional development (PD) industry. Finally, the authors outline a path forward for educators to recognize the crisis narratives of PD as attachments, to resist such a PD industry by theorizing an anarchic professional development for educators emerging from what Berlant calls the “impasse” – PD that is local, situational, and supportive of teachers’ learning. The chapter concludes by arguing that educators should work collaboratively, intellectualize teaching, focus on classroom inquiry, foster networks of practice, and reclaim the moral dimension of their practice.

Antiracist moral and civic education should educate about both interpersonal racism (racism toward other individuals) and institutional racism (systemic racial injustices). Both areas involve both avoiding racial wrongs (stereotyping, antipathy, demeaning the other) and promoting positive racial goods (respecting racial others as equals, recognizing positive racial difference). Institutional racism requires civic education, to recognize patterns of injustice, to analyze their causes, and to be able to measure them against both morally sound and nationally salient ideals (such as equality, liberty, and justice). Antiracist education must be sensitive to students’ particular racial identities and to asymmetries between the way white and nonwhite identities function morally and civically. It must teach positive racial ideals of racial justice, understanding, and harmony.

This chapter examines how ethical frameworks for education have been displaced through processes of standardization both historically and contemporarily. Before turning to current examples, the chapter begins with an analysis of twentieth-century movements in philosophy of education and curriculum to illustrate how processes of standardization and educational “narrowing” emerged as the dominant educational vision for American schooling, corresponding with the push for accountability and neoliberal reform in the last few decades of the twentieth century. How this narrowing exists in today’s K-12 and higher education environment, as well as its impact on historically marginalized groups, is then explored. The chapter then turns to how the contemporary emphasis on educational technology, datafication, and digitalization reinforces educational standardization to the detriment of ethical educational possibilities. The chapter concludes with considerations of how ethical educational visions might be revived in our current era.

Once again, teachers are being made into political pawns, where K-12 schools are sites of various culture wars. This chapter frames the contemporary politics of teaching as grappling with the pluralism represented in demographically diverse classrooms. Through historicizing this quest in Gunnar Myrdal’s analysis of the “American dilemma” and unifying creed as panacea, it is possible to identify the enduring social, public, and psychodynamic dimensions of an inclusive ideal. Teachers should be prepared to cultivate deep commitment to republican virtues, in principle, while destigmatizing the identity and ontology of the “other.” A credal deep pluralism can ground classroom praxis for the relational and ethical tensions that forms of difference engender in a democracy.

This part of the handbook takes up the role of ethics and education in practice and the perennial problems associated with the nonideal, often messy, circumstances of power and (in)equality associated with institutions of education. Although not all applications of ethics in education are rooted in the dilemmas of institutions, a great many result from clashing values that occur between the private individual and institutions of modern schooling. Perennial questions taken up in this part include: What happens when ethics become institutionalized? What are the aims and purposes of school? What knowledge is of most worth? How should we treat students? How do diverse populations experience schooling? How should teachers be educated, trained, and/or developed? What is the role of private interests in public schooling? How can liberal commitments to schooling foster a more humane and just future?

The aim of this chapter is to show how the relationship between education and freedom is informed by the ethics of authority. Freedom is a central human value. Education contributes to our humanity. If human freedom is something valuable for all, and education is necessary for the promotion of this value, then we need an agent – an authority – that can direct our efforts in support of this educational goal. The chapter describes two different justifications of political authority over education that are (plausibly) compatible with an education for human freedom. Each offers a different view on the necessity of educational institutions – and institutional authority more generally – in realizing worthwhile educational goals.

This chapter is inspired by Greta Thunberg’s challenge to global education that does not have the power to challenge twenty-first-century existential crises. Its curriculum proposals emerge from Evelyn Briggle’s, Robert Frodeman’s, and Adam Brister’s research on what they call field philosophy. The model joins philosophers with researchers in other fields to create solutions to environmental problems that require what Nietzsche calls a “mountain-top” vision. The chapter applies field philosophy’s methodology to address a fundamental philosophical question: How do we ensure life’s future and the planet’s health? Education grounded in field philosophy will promote the creation of knowledge rather than its assimilation at all levels of education. And that creation will be a collaboration between student and teacher.

This chapter explores the intersection of normative theory, pragmatism, and education. Philosophers have long argued that ethics and moral development are the central aims of good education. But this vision has been eclipsed by economic instrumentalism and workforce demands. Ethics education provides a potent reason-based alternative, one that promises to promote pluralism through the application of universal principles, foster democratic processes, and advance the common good. But if we hope to realize the moral purposes of education, we must begin by offering courses in normative ethics for educators in education programs and schools. And in doing so, we will promote the moral growth of individual educators, their students, and the institutions and communities in which they live, work, and study.

The ethical foundations of educator activism have always been in flux. Teacher activism takes many forms, and addresses both educational issues and larger societal structures. Here, we are most interested in teachers’ activism as workers, including but not limited to strikes, labor actions, and labor-related protest in the United States and around the world. Such activism is particularly conflicted since most educators are public-sector employees with what is arguably an ethical imperative to teach the young people in their care. In this chapter, the authors consider the following: Do educators have an ethical imperative to act in ways that benefit the communities in which they teach? And if so and by extension, do educators have an ethical imperative to strike?

Drawing on the research of scholars from both within and outside the field of education, this chapter explores how care ethics can be conceived as permitting and even enabling white saviorism in the teaching context. The author appeals to perspectives offered by the scholarship of decolonial feminists to clarify the morally troubling nature of “care” when a teacher’s care contributes to devalorizing the cultural wealth, history, knowledge systems, and ways of being of minoritized and marginalized students. However, convinced that care ethics still confers invaluable moral worth on the teaching practice, the author highlights the effort of scholars from the traditions of critical race theory in prescribing “critical care” as a teaching praxis.

This chapter presents convivialism as a conception of the good life to inform and reshape education. Drawing from Ivan Illich’s views of a convivial society and two more recent manifestos proposing convivialism as a political philosophy for a world in crisis, the chapter discusses how convivialism offers a conception of the good life focused on living with human and nonhuman others. Convivial education relies on a conception of knowledge and skills as tools for conviviality, as well as an appreciation for the necessity to limit what can be considered legitimate individual and collective desires. Finally, the chapter argues that convivialism can inspire new educational initiatives and support existing countermovements based on principles of degrowth and decolonization.

Employing “Asia as method,” this chapter examines the twofold pedagogical practice of cultivating learners’ abilities to cognize truth and create value from it as the font of authentic happiness. The chapter first summarizes the intrinsic nature of sōka kyōikugaku, or “value-creating pedagogy,” in the work of Japanese educators Makiguchi Tsunesaburō (1871–1944), Toda Jōsei (1900–1958), and Ikeda Daisaku (b. 1928) and defines the concepts of truth, value, and happiness therein. It then considers the extrinsic relevance of these in the context of today’s politicized, semantic war on truth in the United States and the implications this has for modern notions of schooling and young people’s happiness. The chapter advances our understanding of value-creating approaches to knowledge, society, and power that increasingly inform the perspectives and practices of thousands of educators around the world and has significance for ethics in education.

This chapter tackles postmodern and poststructuralist outlooks on ethics and how these have impacted educational theory. To fulfill this task, the chapter indicates how such outlooks differ from other perspectives on the relationship of philosophy, education, and ethics. After some basic definitions, clarifications, disclaimers, and caveats that familiarize the reader with the related discourses and their challenges, the chapter shows how postmodern/poststructuralist basic assumptions beneath the corresponding ethics differ from other perspectives on (educational) normativity. Then the chapter discusses the distinction between the ethical and the moral that makes the impact of postmodern/poststructuralist ethics on educational theory most visible. It concludes with critical remarks on the current status of this impact and on the challenge of rethinking educational ethics “after post-isms”.

This chapter provides an introduction to American pragmatism as an ethical tradition with educational ramifications. The chapter first explains the origins of pragmatism and accounts for the primary features of pragmatist ethics. It then profiles the ethical views and educational bearings of two classical pragmatists: William James and John Dewey, and the most prominent neopragmatist, Richard Rorty. The chapter shows how pragmatism, from its nineteenth-century origins to its contemporary iterations, approaches education as integral to the ethical and political cultivation of a vibrant, pluralistic, democratic culture. Its philosophical orientation – away from the fixed and timeless and toward the contingent and contextualized – conceives of humans as active but fallible agents pursuing knowledge to address the concrete problems of their communities. Despite their differences, James, Dewey, and Rorty recognized the need to foster individual habits and collective sensibilities that center our moral imaginations, sympathetic attachments to others, and our situatedness in concrete social and natural environments.

This chapter explores the relationship between education and a school’s punishment and disciplinary practices. Distinct from discipline, punishment is defined partly in terms of its attempt to express moral disapproval. While there are serious criticisms of the use of punishment in educational settings, punishment is largely justified in school in terms of its ability to foster certain sorts of educative conversations. Not all punishment is justified: the particular sort of punishment, and the context that surrounds it, must match the educational nature of the school environment. The punishment must send the right educational messages and accomplish legitimate educational goals. The context of punishment that best supports these goals can be found in the restorative justice framework.

This chapter offers an overview of how indigenous Latin American ethics has centered on knowledge about the environment and earth. It proposes that although this is not a new conceptualization, it can be made more visible by examining the long process of imposition of colonial ethical values. With a focus on the centrality of the earth in indigenous ethics and education, this chapter discusses this process, from how early colonial texts like grammars and dictionaries aimed to replace indigenous ethics to bilingual language programs. In conclusion it suggests that indigenous educational practices have persisted through colonization and around the margins of top-down, state-mandated approaches, and are emerging in indigenous pedagogies that foreground the ethical dimensions of relationships with the earth.

This chapter traces the evolution of the educational concept Bildung, beginning with its roots in ancient Western thought, then to its formation in Weimar classicism and Hegel’s thought, and finally to the adoption of those German traditions in contemporary American educational thought.