cit, 1991. From this viewpoint, professional justice is compromised wherever and whenever professional character is compromised. [A borderline clich or, in any case, a more or less inevitable reference.] 242 Landon, J. x, 253 Lane, H. 1427, 2287, 250; and The Little Commonwealth 229 Larson, M.S. Should schooling ever be made subject to the kind of pressures which make accountability to such external agencies as community, economy and state the be and end all of their existence? The trouble, once again, lies in a failure to distinguish crucially different senses in which theory is involved in practice (or vice versa), or either of these notions is implicated in education. For example, while we may rightly wish to promote a certain respect for elders on the part of youth, we should also expect morally mature agents to be capable of courteous dissent from views they find prejudiced or unprincipled, to say nothing of actual non-cooperation with unjust practices, whatever the source of their authority. Hence, while there is at least a certain intelligible sense in which we might speak of someone who overcharges, cheats or sleeps with his customers as nevertheless an excellent builder or a first-rate window cleaner, there is something EDUCATIONAL RIGHTS & PROFESSIONAL WRONGS 151 more dubious about regarding sharp practising doctors or teachers who bed their sixth-form pupils as exemplars of their respective professions. Indeed, to employ such reasons to argue that we might, in the education of some less able pupils, substitute a critical appreciation of cookery or typing for a critical understanding of science or history, is clearly the royal road to elitism if not worse. On the one hand, then, if the argument is no more than the familiar point of pragmatist pedagogy that pupils may often be more effectively taught science by engaging in practical experiments, than through the taking of notes or memorisation of laws and theorems, this, whilst true, indicates only another approach to theoretical learning, and falls well short of supporting any substitution of handson practical experience for educational understanding more broadly construed. Of course, people do argue endlessly about the way children should be brought up: you accuse me of being too permissive, I accuse you of being too strict. It is therefore arguable that the rational educational discourse into which educational professionals require to be initiated in the interests of achieving full professional competence is primarily neither a form of theoretical science (though aspects of such sciences may inform it), nor a kind of practical science (though technological and other considerations of causal efficacy are also proper educational goals), but a form of ethical or moral enquiry. David Carr is Professor of Philosophy of Education in the Faculty of Education at the University of Edinburgh. This is certainly not meant to downgrade any non-educational aspects AIMS OF EDUCATION, SCHOOLING & TEACHING 181 of human development and learning, or to argue that practices and skills of a more utilitarian or vocational kind have a less secure place in the school curriculum. Most natural entities exist, move and have their being without benefit of reflectionwhich is, all the same, still needed to explain the existence and movement of non-reflective things. Honderich, T., Punishment: The Supposed Justifications, Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1971 Hostetler, K.D., Ethical Judgement in Teaching, Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1997. NOTES 243 4 See Humes, W., The Leadership Class in Scottish Education, Glasgow: Bell and Brain Ltd, 1986. Indeed, it appears to be assumed on what we might call the orthodox or conventional view of profession that professionalisation does significantly improve the quality of a given service. Such thinking was also to inform the subsequent requirement of the English Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (CATE), that lecturers in higher education responsible for the professional preparation of teachers should undergo periodical renewal and updating of their practical experience of classroom teaching in schools. Standards of Ethical Conduct for the PTA. Wilson, J., Teaching and neutrality, in M.Taylor (ed. Educational principle and anti-educational interests To end this volume on a suitably controversial note, however, should we say that a teachers stubborn allegiance to deeply held educational principles and convictions should always play second fiddle to wider considerations of public accountability? But it has also been argued that a professionally regulated medical profession is no less open to serious self-serving abuses on the part of medical practitioners who, despite Hippocratic pretensions, can often be seen to put personal career advancement or financial reward before any concern with promoting wider human health care.8 A striking example of such selfinterest relates to medical professionals in the straitened circumstances of Third World economies, whoaspiring to the power and reputation of their counterparts in more developed economies have been known to corner scarce public resources for more personal status-enhancing purposes. It was the view of Neill, largely influenced by Homer Lane, that there could be no real understanding of the social importance and significance of following rules in the absence of some understanding of the freedoms and burdens of responsible authority: the two were considered to go hand in hand. Individual volumes will consider issues relevant to particular professions, including nursing, genetic counselling, journalism, business, the food industry and law. Some of these points are captured, rather more technically, by referring to practical argumentsprimarily those of a moral or evaluative kindas defeasible;8 there can indeed be valid practical arguments to prescriptive conclusions, but, unlike theoretical arguments, the addition or suppression of extra factual or other premises can subvert or falsify an initial practical conclusion. In medical school teachers of theory and teachers of techniques can pursue their diverse enquiries with reasonable confidence that their separate contributions ultimately conduce to a common goal of health promotion; whereas the theories which trainee teachers are taught so often appear to them to be remote from, out of touch with, even irrelevant to, the real-life business of classroom teaching. In the case of the joiner the conditional premise embodies the kind of pretheoretical or experiential knowledge which requires expertise, but not sophisticated scientific understanding, to master. All Right Reserved. But whilst one should neither despise this complaint nor deny that it is vital for children to be trained in habits of self-control, courtesy and respect for others, it also needs to be appreciated that an effective moral education may well be one which actually encourages children to question certain social values and the sources of authority by which they are sustained. Just as some sort of distinction between health and disease seems presupposed to the identification of needs or deficits which medical intervention may be required to remedy, so distinctions between knowledge and ignorance, sense and nonsense, reasonable belief and superstition, maturity and immaturity, interest and obsession, may serve to identify human needs which it is the general business of education to address. Thus, just as the good teacher is one whose classroom impartiality is moderated by sensitive recognition of the different needs of individual pupils, a good school leader is one who can without fear or favour deploy staff, in the best overall interests of the institution, in the light of wise appreciation of diverse individual strengths and weaknesses. On this view, to judge that physical exercise is good or smoking bad for health could only be to express a personal predilection, with which othersin the nature of personal evaluationwould be free to disagree. Postman, N. and Weingartner, C., Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. But, in so far as it is part of routine parental experience that the diverse needs, proclivities and interests of different children call for different disciplinary, motivational and developmental approaches, we would also expect it to be a significant dimension of good professional practice for a teacher to know his or her pupils as individuals and to shape their teachingwith due respect to more general considerations of justice as fairnessto the individual requirements of children. The result has indicated that many teachers perceive that From this point of view, indeed, it is arguably important to distinguish both teaching and the larger project of education from various processes we merely undergo (such as socialisation and schooling); we are hard put to engage in teaching or benefit from education in the absence of witting or intentional participation or engagement. In 42 EDUCATION, TEACHING AND PROFESSIONALISM the rest of this chapter, however, we need to say a little more about education as a profession in this more particular sense: more, to be precise, about why it might be appropriate to regard teaching and education as closer in crucial respects to such enterprises as medicine and law than to some of the other vocations, trades and services with which, as we saw in the last chapter, they have sometimes been (explicitly or implicitly) compared. So far so good. However, although I shall also proceed to suggest that a strictly traditional view is far from entirely correct, I suspect that this 194 ETHICS & EDUCATION, MORALITY & THE TEACHER is a mixture of prejudice and conceptual error. It is absurd to suppose that doctors deal with patients or professors with students with the aid of a stopwatch, and how much time and attention it is proper to devote to a client clearly depends crucially upon sensitive professional judgement of personal needs. But this is just what educational enquiry and research, for reasons we shall shortly proceed to examine, has arguably failed to discover in support of either of these alleged educational alternatives. 10114; Hostetler, K.D., Ethical Judgement in Teaching, Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1997; Pendlebury, S., Practical reasoning and situational appreciation in teaching, Educational Theory, 40, 1990, pp. Competing trends towards professionalisation on the one hand (via, for example, the proliferation of codes of ethics, or of professional conduct), and towards challenging the power of the traditional liberal professions on the other, have required exploration of the concepts of profession and professional. 13 Dearden, R., What is general about general education?, in R. Dearden, Theory and Practice in Education, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984. After discussing the moral implications of professionalism, Carr explores the relationship of education theory to teaching practice and the impact of this relationship on professional expertise. Punctuality. Hume, D., A Treatise of Human Nature, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969. Thus, in the example presented in the Republic,7 any socially responsible answer to the madman whose weapons one has borrowed seems dishonest, but any honest response is likely to be harmful. Thus, if adult members of the school community operate according to a strict line management in which some dictate to others without consultation, and others follow orders without question, it is unlikely that the right ethos or climate of responsible democratic engagement will be set from the outset. 36175. Similarly, few can deny that teaching is an activity which is at least like nursing or midwifery to the extent that it involves a significant dimension of affective care and support; the good teacher is invariably someone who is able to win the confidence and trust of those in his or her charge. 124 Nieman, A. 222 PARTICULAR ISSUES One can recognise, of course, that the inclination to hive off the professional from the personal and private aspects of individuals lives is often based on an ostensibly laudable desire to protect the integrity of professional practice from the vagaries and caprices of human character and personality: to uphold a standard of professional conduct which is precisely impartial by virtue of being personalityproof. After discussing the moral implications of. But since professionals cannot but be aware of how easy it is to get things wrong in their dealings with clients, it is clearly professional folly to give further hostages to fortune via unprofessional liaison, as well as a matter of urgency to cultivate the professional virtues required to limit the damage that is already inevitable in the regular course of professional engagement. It is therefore arguable that it cannot be a matter of total indifference either to professional educationalists or parents what a teacher is like as a private person in the sense that it is a matter of (relative) indifference what a surgeon or lawyer is like, precisely because educational goals cannot be disentangled from wider considerations and ideals of personal moral development. and Peters, R.S., Social Principles and the Democratic State, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1957, p. 353. 11 For the distinction between conservative and liberal traditionalists, see Carr, D., On understanding educational theory, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 17, 1985, pp. In this respect, indeed, there may be something to radical or progressive claims that schools often do seem to serve purposes of social control rather than education; promoting mindless conformity to, more than critical questioning of, received injustices and inequalities. Thus, there is no difficulty at all in supposing that there are what we may refer to as agent-neutral moral and other reasons for valuing certain practices or courses of action, reasons which apply universally to all agentsor, at any rate, to all agents in so far as they are human. However, it is equally important to recognise that there are some areas of learning in which it is quite inappropriate to think like this, and in which no such rough-and-ready line can or should be observed. All of this arguably serves to implicate a professional practice such as medicine in a range of ethical considerations, which external consumer pressure might well be needed to force some recognition of in other occupational spheres. But this must also mean, I think, considerably playing down the actual importance which theories and theorising as such have been given in relation to the question of what constitutes principled understanding of professional practice. 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. Other volumes examine issues relevant to particular professions, including those which have hitherto received little attention, such as social work, the insurance industry and accountancy. It is, of course, characteristic of the traditional or paternalist view to flourish best in those circumstances of cultural and evaluative homogeneity which do not, by and large, prevail in modern developed societies, which explains why such a perspective is sometimes thought to be inapplicable to contemporary circumstances. But although we are to some extent free to call them what we like, it behoves us in discussions of such serious matters as education to employ our terms with care; if the discourse of educational theory is precisely to do any useful theoretical work, it is wisest to deploy it in a way which conduces to the best discernible conceptual advantage. 238 Pendlebury, S. 244 Perry, L. 243 Peters, R.S. But then, why should we not assume that the 92 EDUCATIONAL THEORY AND PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE same is true of any human enterprise or activity -plumbing, hairdressing, nursing, general medical practice, teaching - for which the question of overall competence is a serious issue? If radical actions seriously undermine the schools effective fulfilment of its responsibilities to parents and the wider community, then disciplinary procedures invoking considerations of professional negligence may well be in order. Is this a matter for compromise of deeply held educational principle? Thus, in any attempt to find a coherent way between the theory-dependence and theoryindependence views of professional practice, it is crucial to appreciate that there can be meaningful construal of and/or reasonable responses to the particularities of professional experience which are neither matters of technical application of the causal generalities of scientific theory, nor of intuitive non-deliberative engagement with unconceptualised or unconceptualis-able practical experience. 88 Boostrom, R.E. 6 At any rate, this view has often been ascribed to, or associated with, the best-known form of consequentialismutilitarianism. Thus, for example, despite their continued influence on behavioural objectives models of educational assessment and competence models of professional training, it is highly unlikely that psychological learning theories are suitable for direct classroom application. From this viewpoint, however, coercion and subjection to external discipline may appear to be the very raison dtre of schooling, and there may therefore seem to be every reason why schools should not be ordered on democratic lines. 18 In my view an attempted reply to this point by David Bridges (in Bridges, D., Competence-based education and training: progress or 248 NOTES 19 20 21 22 villainy?, Journal of the Philosophy of Education, 30, 1996, pp. Despite this, we have already argued that it may sometimes be appropriate for teachers as moral exemplars to try to modify their characters or personalities in the light of professional demands. 241 Lawler, S. 244 Lawrence, D.H. 88, 173 liberal educationalists 52, 124, 126, 172, 192 logical positivism 111 Luntley, M. 251 Lyotard, J.-F. 253 MacIntyre, A.C. 1258, 240, 241, 243, 248, 249, 253 McKeon, R. 246, 247, 248 McLaughlin, T.H. 14969. Appreciation of the ethical, in short, must lie at the heart of any professional understanding and deliberation worthy of the name. Hare, R.M., The Language of Morals, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952. 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. In this connection, if circumstances should dictate that classroom control requires the injury of force, then it is surely better that the insult of humiliation is not added to it. 30927. In the event, whereas deschoolers appear to identify with schooling what modern liberal educationalists have generally regarded as educationa broad initiation of individuals into those forms of rational knowledge and understanding crucially transcendent of merely local and particular concerns11they seem to identify education with what liberals are more inclined to regard as (vocational or other) training. In short, to try to understand educational professionalism from the direction of discretely specifiable competences is essentially to start from the wrong end of things. Photo by Naveed Ahmed on Unsplash. This leads to the equally misleading thought that if clients, patients or pupils do receive their fair shares of professional time and attention, then professional justice can be said to have been done. Having explored various possible comparisons of teaching with religious ministry, nursing and social work, it may be 14 EDUCATION, TEACHING AND PROFESSIONALISM helpful to examine different conceptions of educational professionalism, via comparisons of teaching with other familiar occupations and services. 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. Download Professionalism And Ethics In Teaching full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Phillips, M., All Must Have Prizes, London: Little, Brown and Company, 1996. Professions, in D.L.Sills (ed. (ed. Indeed, one of the problems about courses of professional ethics which operate ancillary to the theoretically or technically orientated parts of professional programmes is that they may be restricted to consideration of those more contractual aspects of professional development of a kind emphasised in codes of professional ethics. Any such procrustean assumption, however, risks missing the range of complex logical relations between diverse forms of so- called educational knowledge and understanding at the expense of a dangerously simplistic and lopsided view of the relevance of such reflections to practice. First, apart from the implausibility of assimilating judgements of moral value to expressions of personal preferencefor, on the contrary, it is clear that we give reasons for and argue for our moral values in a manner we should find inappropriate with regard to personal tastesthe very possibility of moral education is undermined on any subjectivist view of moral values. (eds), Managing Partnership in Teacher Training and Development, London: Routledge, 1995. However, to the extent that our main present interest in corporal punishment concerns the proper logical or ethical form of any enquiry into this question, it is probably worth reaffirming an earlier point about the importance of distinguishing the different levels of practical argument upon which this issue is liable to be debated. 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. Hence, as already indicated, one can hardly deny that theory (principled reflection) is invariably implicated in intelligent practice, or that practical pursuits have frequently significant consequences for the understanding of theory. Any difference between these two positions, then, is by no means a matter of simple conflict between advocates of absolute authority and unbridled freedom, more a complex difference between rival correlative notions of authority and freedom. A teacher as a professional is required to acquire knowledge and skills in his/her teaching field. Again, according to the story so far, it should be clear that what lies at the heart of this confusion is persistent failure to observe a crucially important distinction between education and schooling. This is one way, to be sure, in which any such techne may not even be necessary for effective teaching. In order to have the job done right, teachers need to know exactly what they are expected to do. On the other hand, however, it makes teaching look rather more like hairdressing to the extent that we ought not to want to say that competent teaching requires a thorough grasp of academic psychology or sociology in quite the same way and for the same reason that effective surgery depends on a thorough knowledge of anatomy or physiology. There may be much disagreement about what exactly these criteria arebut this is as often as not against a background of civilised agreement that certain forms of conduct are downright wicked. Indeed, psychiatry itself, unlike the general run of medical practice with which it is more popularly associated, often seemsvia its concern with liberating patients from their anxieties or neuroses through an understanding of their psychogenetic causesto resemble education or training, more than clinical intervention. ), Four Progressive Educators, London: Collier-Macmillan, Educational Thinkers Series, 1967. All the same, it seems hard to deny that cultural differences do sometimes reflect morally significant contrasts between quite diverse, in some cases contradictorily opposed, conceptions of human flourishing. Reason and Argument, Oxford: Blackwell, 1976 The Virtues, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Ethical Issues in Youth Work presents a systematic analysis of some of the core ethical di. In conceiving education as exclusively a matter of transmission of uncontroversial information and instrumental skills, the centralising approach inclines to construe the teacher as no more than classroom technician, the effective (or ineffective) deliverer of top-down curriculum packages. Hence, university lecturers probably regard themselves as considerably superior to lecturers in further education, lecturers in further education see themselves as a cut above secondary teachers, it is not unknown for secondary teachers to look down on primary teachers (as well as upon each other according to whether they teach in independent, grammar or grantaided or comprehensive schools), and there is at least a common TEACHING AND PROFESSIONALISM 41 public perception of upper primary school teaching as more the real educational McCoy than infant and nursery teaching. One might, in short, have an argument for school and/or professional uniforms. Knowledge and truth in religious education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 28, 1994, pp. 220 13 ETHICAL ISSUES CONCERNING EDUCATION AND SCHOOLING The character implicatedness of teacher professionalism In the previous chapter we looked briefly at a range of issues concerning the role of the teacher, with particular respect to issues of the interplay of the personal/private and professional/public aspects of teachers lives. To investigate whether teachers' sex modify the relationship between their perception of professional ethics and professionalism, an independent sample t-test was used. Adhere to a responsible pattern of conduct expected of them by the community. But later revision of initial moral diagnosis (the wisdom of hindsight) will often uncover moral saliences which we had missed at the time, and we are not in any technical way able to retrieve our moral mistakes. Hence, even though moral deliberation is quite properly apt for construal as a species of practical discourse, it should not thereby be assumed that its only point is to guide action towards the solution of moral problems. On the one hand, then, certain powerful anti-realist trends in epistemology and the philosophy of science seem to have disposed of the very ideawhich may at least have been implicit in forms of knowledge theorists talk of testability against experience16 of a mind-independent reality against which our statements or judgements about the world of experience may be tested for their truth or falsity. Of course, someone might say, is not the means in this casethe just flogging of offendersjustified by the reasonable and rational end of the establishment of good order for learning in the classroom, just as the dismantling of my car is justified by the reasonable and rational goal of establishing the good running order of my car? From this viewpoint, I believe that the first and second conditions of important public service and significant theoretical expertise are key notions for understanding the professional status of education and teaching. In fact, the analysis of teaching styles is a prime example of the constituent-end reasoning characteristic of phronesis which involves an exclusively a priori conceptual unpacking of what can readily be understood about teaching in pre-theoretical terms. Thus, it is hardly surprising that we encounter a fundamentally shared moral grammar of attitude and value behind surface socio-cultural differences: common subscription to the moral importance of honesty, loyalty, self-control, fairness, courage, compassion, and so on. 256 Gribble, J. Hence, as already noted, it seems nowadays more or less taken for granted in some influential educational philosophical quartersmoving well beyond the fallibilism which says that universal or absolute truths are unavailable to humans in their epistemically fallen state to a denial that there might be any universal or absolute truths to be knownthat there is little more to be humanly had in the way of knowledge than rival cultural myths or narratives. BIBLIOGRAPHY 259 Carter, R., The Doctor Business, New York: Doubleday, 1958. Thus, just as idealist or phenomenalist claims that human knowledge can only be a matter of subjective experience appear to presuppose some sort of distinction between subjectivity and objectivityto which such theories are not entitledso postmodern claims to the effect that there are no facts of human natureor that any science which might presume to teach us such facts is simply one myth or narrative among othersinvariably smuggle in a great many assumptions about the nature of human life and development to which they are equally not entitled. These are: consciousness-raising about how codes of ethics are used to judge allegations of teacher misconduct, appreciating that ethics education is part of the core work of professional formation rather than a frill, and working All this, 234 PARTICULAR ISSUES however, can only be achieved via the removal of parliamentary democracy and a range of civic liberties (the right to vote out the government, withdraw labour, and so on). Hence, even if someone is inclined to insist that there should, in the name of real justice, be some kind of punitive response to a crime or misdemeanour, there are clearly problems about any construal of this which would justify the use of capital punishment for murder or corporal punishment for school misbehaviour or bullying. Martin, M.W., Rights and the meta-ethics of professional morality, Ethics, 91, 1981, pp. The value of dispositional accounts of human and other activities, however, is that they purport to account for the effects of natural and acquired powers by relating their typical manifestations or expressions to (physical or other) features of ourselves or the environment in terms of causal generality;9 we do thus and so because we have this or that sense organ, or because we have been causally conditioned in this way or that by our physical, social or educational circumstances. From this point of view, one can hardly fail to notice that general public, political and professional aspirations to common universal educational provision have ever been compromised by calls for alternative forms of schooling, respecting different and diverse conceptions of human growth and fulfilment. Knowledge of the cohabitation, homosexuality, unmarried pregnancy or sexual promiscuity of teachers is invariably taken in the stride of most contemporary nonreligious state schools, as well as by the secular-liberal parents whose children attend such schools, although such conduct is more likely to raise questions in the houses (for perhaps rather different reasons) of religious and private education. Moreover, any suspicion of intellectual affectation notwithstanding, it is arguable that such an apparently trivial matter as professional dress invites considerable clarification of some fairly complex problems at the interface of philosophical anthropology, politics, ethics and aesthetics. It is likely, for example, that many culturally enshrined gender inequalities are more the hand of man than God, and are therefore objectionable on broadly the same moral (and, more than likely, theological) grounds which should lead us to reject torture and slavery. Capacities, on the other hand, are more than abilities in any such simple sense of causal power. From this viewpoint, it is small wonder that appointed guardians of received culture will often react strongly to abuse or wilful neglect of received usage, especially on the part of those professionally charged with the task of sustaining and transmitting culture. Legal ethics. Moreover, some of the enduring positive effects of such initiation appear to be very widely appreciated, not least by those nonreligious parents who are inclined to send their children to religious schools for the firm moral discipline they are held to provide. Thus, liberal perspectives are inclined to be deeply agnostic, if not downright sceptical, concerning claims to moral truth of the sort apparently presupposed to traditional or paternalist views, and this agnosticism tends to be reflected, even enshrined, in much liberal moral pedagogy. However, despite the central theoretical and practical importance of the distinction between schooling and education, it has been quite seriously fudged of late in a variety of ways. In brief, justifications for punishment appeal either to deterrence, retribution or reform.4 The argument which appeals to the deterrent value of punishment, for reasons already given, is not obviously a moral argument as such. The neutral teacher, in M.Taylor (ed. ; or the Muslim or Hindu values of the British offspring of immigrant parents? In that case, however, it surely ought to be possible to discover something in the nature of agentneutral grounds for supposing that one sort of educationa childcentred or a teacher-centred oneis appropriate for all children. It is also arguable, however, that other accounts along these lines have not been as resolute as might be wished in observing the distinction which Aristotle was clearly at great pains to draw between the moral and technical aspects of practical deliberation, and that this crucial distinction is in particular seriously blurred by those who are inclined to characterise principled educational enquiry and practice in the terms of moral or practical science.9 Indeed, I believe that it is impossible to regard the idea of a moral or practical science as other than thoroughly anomalous in Aristotelian terms, since it precisely rides rough shod over the distinctions between theoretical enquiry, technical conduct and moral wisdom which Aristotle himself took so much trouble to observe; for a science, at least in the sense in which it will nowadays be inevitably construedas a mode of theoretical knowledge focused upon the discovery of truth by observation and experimentis just exactly what phronesis is not for Aristotle. It is here that quite serious questions are sometimes raised about the knowledge and expertise of teachers as compared to doctors or lawyers. Kohlberg, L., Essays on Moral Development: Volumes IIII New York: Harper Row, 1984. This series seeks to examine these questions both critically and constructively. 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. To be sure, there may be reasons for supposing teacher involvement with willing sixth formers to be more excusable than any absolutely inexcusable sexual abuse by teachers of small children, but that is not to say that there is nothing professionally untoward about the former involvements. But there can also be little doubt that such ways of dealing with the ethical implications of professional involvement are liable to be distortive or misleading in a not entirely dissimilar way to the reductive strategy of competence models. 264 BIBLIOGRAPHY Warnock, M. Moreover, any such Idealist notion of truth must be more a matter of theoretical or conceptual coherence than of empiricist correspondence to fact, since, of course, there are no objective facts (in the required sense) to which our perspectives or theories might correspondand a coherentism very much along these lines has exercised considerable influence in modern pragmatist philosophy of science. Professional conceptions However, although one need not doubt that most contemporary career teachers would readily identify and sympathise with at least some of TEACHING AND EDUCATION 13 these vocational priorities, it is arguable that there has over the years been a marked shift towards conceptions of education and teaching of more professional than vocational temper: conceptions, that is, which are more inclined to observe a fairly clear distinction between the private or personal, and the public or professional, and to define the occupation of teaching in terms of prescribed skills and rules of conduct. It is arguable, for example, that the movein some respects constructiveaway from the academic-based teaching courses of the 1960s and 1970s has in some places already gone too far in the direction of nuts-and-bolts conceptions of professional training, focused primarily if not exclusively upon quasi-technicist initiation into craft skills. 81101. Introduction. Of course, if it makes sense for me to argue as a Catholic teacher in a Catholic school that the Roman faith is true, and that Catholic pedagogy enshrines a correct view of human development, there would be no reason in principle why Catholic teachers should not be conceived along with teachers of other religious or cultural affiliations as participants in a common professional dialogue about the proper character of human pedagogy. Moreover, it should also be apparent that although personal, communal and universal reasons for holding a given value are by no means mutually exclusive, they need not go together. However, it is not that impersonal moral or managerial rules or imperatives can never have any application, more that they have most appropriate application in moral, political and occupational contexts in which individual differences of personality, background and value are not centrally implicated in the purposes of the project. Indeed, it is likely to be complained by modern-day educational professionals of their vocational colleagues in the independent and old direct grant sectors (many of whom may have entered service without benefit of postgraduate professional training) that such teachers, precisely in so far as they have not been properly initiated into a complex understanding of the theoretical mysteries of learning and motivation, or the esoteric professional skills of pedagogy and management, are ill-equipped to cope with the educational demands of all but a few able and privileged young people. 17 This seems to have been the position of A.S.Neill. 8 RIVAL CONCEPTIONS OF EDUCATION Universality and professionalism It is of some importance to appreciate the precise implications for educational professionalism of the issue about educational values raised at the close of the previous chapter. In short, we may now be free of all remaining doubt that moral training is itself partly constitutive of moral understanding, for it is only through elementary moral rulefollowing that children can come to acquire basic first-hand experience of the meaning and value of, for example, generosity or co-operation: that is, some idea of the reciprocal benefits of dispositions for positive human association. The particular question of whether there can be the same kind of open enquiry into meaning and truth in the sphere of religion as there can in the field of science clearly matters for religious education.16 If there can be no such enquiry, there can be no religious education in any robust (emancipatory) sense of this term, but also no profession of religious education worthy of the name (only shamanism). Consider the first case: if whatever I do betrays some moral value, then it hardly matters what I do, and reason is entirely powerless to help me act morally for the better. Moreover, since, like most other influential philosophical theses, the general idea of the inextricability of theory and observation, value and fact, appears to be a fairly rich stew of important insight and conceptual error, my use of the term half-baked is more descriptive than abusive. Such reflection is also, moreover, an occasion for the development of attitudes of genuine moral commitment to these goalsand this important consideration reinforces yet further the point that professional competence in the capacity sense cannot be reduced to competency in any narrower technical-dispositional sense. 81101; Hirst, P.H., The theory and practice relationship in teacher training, in M.Wilkin, V.J.Furlong and M. Booth (eds), Partnership in Initial Teacher Training: The Way Forward, London: Cassell, 1990; 244 NOTES 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Smith, R., Theory: an entitlement to understanding, Cambridge Journal of Education, 22, 1992, pp. Indeed, while it is because the professional is liable to encounter novel problems and dilemmas to which there are not established or cut-and-dried technical answers that he or she requires thorough acquaintance with the best which has been thought and said on such potential difficulties, professional theory is by the same token more often advisory than precisely prescriptiveand responsible professional decision depends in a large part on the quality of personal deliberation and reflection. But a certain disillusionment, not unfamiliar to teachers of educational theory, soon set in. On the other hand, such practices as psychological counselling and midwifery, which once lay in the realms of guesswork and folk wisdom, might nowadays be regarded as candidates for professional status precisely in the light of scientific developments in psychiatry and obstetrics. and Soltis, J., The Ethics of Teaching, New York: Teachers College Press, 1985. G.Bennington and B.Massumi (eds), Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. First, since I believe that post-war philosophers of liberal education were quite right about the conceptual connection between rational autonomy and objective truth, I have to concede that if these sceptical postmodern doubts about the very possibility of knowledge as traditionally conceived are true, they must be quite fatal to any coherent notion of rational autonomy. 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