In the realm of education, broadly conceived, meta-ethical theories and normative ethical frameworks can draw on a variety of understandings and analyses of the human condition or aims of schooling. Engaging with pressing ethical issues and arising dilemmas, the contributors in this part are in discourse with ethical traditions and their forms of application to create alternate expositions of morality and universal standards for evaluating educational practice and theory. In doing so, they take up R. S. Peters’ charge in innovative ways that reaffirm the salience of philosophy to education’s formative role in society.

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?

This part invites the reader to survey a variety of ethical traditions that have historically informed, and still inform, our educational thought and practice. Dedicating a section to ethical traditions in education comes with obvious challenges. Not only is there an almost infinite number of traditions one could justifiably consider; it is also unclear what traditions rooted in the past can contribute to the complex and ever-changing concerns of the present age. Some of our readers no doubt share Hannah Arendt’s view that the dismantling of metaphysics has also meant that “the thread of tradition is broken and that we shall not be able to renew it,” leaving us with little more than “a fragmented past, which has lost its certainty of evaluation.”

African American teachers are in high demand in urban schools. Presupposing these spaces as operating within a matrix of domination for African Americans in the United States, in this chapter, two African American scholars of differing genders model womanist thinking as politic educational ethics and praxis. hooks, Fanon, and Lorde elucidate the Black subject’s ontological condition as a problem of spectatorship. Womanist theory responds to sociopolitical forces devaluing the self as minoritized subject. Through critical self-reflexivity that acknowledges the debilitating white normative gaze and the inner turmoil of its subjugation, womanist thinking offers a normative syntax of freedom. A womanist praxis of radical subjectivity and a pedagogy of love excavates one’s inner visions for oneself and for one’s students that engenders self-authorship.