Care Ethics in Education

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Care Ethics in Education
Introduction
Ethicists worldwide are by now thoroughly familiar with Carol Gilligan’s criticisms of moral
development characterized in terms of increasing individuation, abstract reasoning abilities,
and objectivity.1 Regardless of their opinions of her positive suggestions for an alternative
theory of ethics, the value of her insights regarding the blindness of such developmental
theorists as Piaget2, Erickson3, and Kohlberg4 and has been well established. Indeed,
despite numerous ongoing debates, which ranging in content from whether Gilligan’s “other
voice” articulates any themes new to moral philosophy5, to whether the ‘care’ approach is in
fact an ethical theory at all, rather than simply a psychological orientation6, and if so, what
kind of theory it is,7 the language of care has become widely accepted, and even favored,
especially in medical ethics. In the field of ethics education, however, authors often write as
though no critique of the tradition has ever been offered. Discussion of ethics in education
continues to be framed in terms of curriculum to be directed toward students, and
specifically, curriculum focused upon either applying principles to cases, or upon developing
familiarity with, and encouraging the exhibition of, certain virtues.8 The incompleteness, and
indeed the potential for harm, deriving from the continued exclusive focus on traditional
models in the discourse of ethics education has apparently gone unnoticed.
Some ethics education packages operate through presenting a set of principles, and then
instructing students in their application, employing such vehicles as ethics games, tests, or
writing assignments. Martin Marietta (now Lockheed-Martin), for example, distributes to
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high schools a game-like program, based upon its training tool for employees.9 The teaching
process involves instruction in a decision-making process based upon three principles,
presentation of scenarios involving ethical dilemmas, and presentation of four possible
responses. Students are to discuss the dilemmas in small groups, and then decide which
response is best. Points (or “steps”, as the game is set up) are awarded based upon the
desirability of the response given. “Correct” reasoning is outlined for students by the
teacher, as each potential response is evaluated, and the “best” one is identified.
More typically, especially in elementary and middle schools, moral education appeals to
some version of virtue theory. Certain character traits, determined by curriculum creators to
be more or less universally admired in our society, are described and discussed, and their
assimilation encouraged. Methods of such encouragement differ, but most involve some
form of praise or blame, or, more concretely, punishment or reward, with rewards usually
consisting of such things as badges, stickers, notices on bulletin boards, notes to parents,
“Good Citizen” awards, write-ups in school newspapers, etc. Punishments may consist in
such things as loss of privileges, detention in class while other students are free, or in having
students, upon being discovered to have committed an infraction, confess to a school official
which of the virtues he or she had failed to exhibit, and then describe in what manner the
questionable actions fell short of the mark.
More radical than either of these sorts of moral training is the “directive moral education”,
or moral indoctrination approach, argued for by William Bennett and George Sher10.
According to this view, which appeals to Kohlberg’s developmental theory, since children
are not psychologically capable of being motivated to moral behavior by reason alone, it is
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appropriate to instill in them certain traits and principles through providing punishments,
approval, and role models whom the children would be moved to emulate. In response to
challenges that such training violates the children’s autonomy rather than developing it,
Bennett and Sher declare that directive education provided in childhood may actually
support one’s autonomy in adulthood, since the good habits one will have developed
through such means will “neutralize or eliminate what would otherwise be a competing
motive, and so may enable one’s appreciation of reasons to affect one more strongly”.
(Bennett and Sher, 1997). That is, one may become more autonomous in the sense of being
less susceptible to views other than those supported by a specific set of reasons if one is
already disposed toward the results to which that set of reasons would lead.
Difficulties Created by Current Practice
These types of ethics education, at least in their unmitigated forms, involve several
difficulties. First, they continue to emphasize punishments and rewards, despite all
theoretical and empirical arguments against the value of such inducements. From the
beginning of the century, such tactics have been criticized as ineffective and potentially
counterproductive, if not downright destructive. Maria Montessori, for instance, nearly one
hundred years ago, wrote that “prizes and punishments are, if I may be allowed the
expression, the bench of the soul, the instrument of slavery for the spirit…these are not
applied to lessen deformities, but to provoke them”.11 Again, arguing that human beings can
only be satisfied when work is done for its own sake, she declared that “All human victories,
all human progress, stand upon the inner force” (Montessori, 1964, p. ). The theme
continues to be echoed today, most recently and popularly by Alfie Kohn in his Punished by
Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise and other Bribes.12
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Surely, if the case against such external inducements has been plausibly made for a full
century, and continues to receive both philosophical and popular support, it is incumbent
upon educators to at least critically consider the value of their use as they attempt to assist
young people’s ethical development.
In addition to their dogmatic adherence to these tactics, the value of ethics programs
typically adopted by schools is jeopardized by their persistent presumption that the mature
moral agent is and should be an autonomous, individual who makes decisions through an
increasingly abstract process of verifiably accurate reasoning. They simply do not recognize
the possibility of other types of moral reasoning, such as the kind exemplified by Gilligan’s
“other voice”, which focuses on interpersonal relationships and the psychology of particular
individuals, rather than on abstractions, and on needs rather than on rights. In fact, each of
the types of moral education so far described consciously fosters, to the extent it can, the
maturity of the moral agent as defined in the language of Piaget, Erikson, and Kohlberg.
This seems problematic for at least two reasons. First, as Gilligan discovered, men who
have undergone the sort of maturation process such approaches seem to value and foster are
often disaffected in their personal relationships as adults, with the result that they feel
dissatisfied with their lives as they move into and beyond middle age. Clearly we ought not
uncritically dismiss these men’s own testimony in our determination to continue along the
present path. What is more, given the increasing level of abstraction involved in children’s
day-to-day existence in our culture currently, due to the amount of time they spend on
television, playing video games, and surfing the internet, it seems that they are already in
significant danger of distancing themselves from other real human beings and human affect.
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Promoting further movement in that direction hardly seems wise, since autonomy pushed
beyond reasonable bounds clearly promotes a kind of pathology.
The second reason these kinds of approaches to ethics education, at least when unmitigated
by something like the care approach, seem problematic, is that they de facto devalue
patterns of reasoning most often attributed to women, with the result that they perpetuate
the undermining of young women’s confidence. As Mary Pipher has pointed out, girls who
in preadolescence are “marvelous company, because they are interested in everything”
undergo dramatic changes in early adolescence. During this period, “just as planes and ships
disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls go down in
droves.” 13 Girls “become more deferential, self-critical, and depressed”. They undergo this
transformation, at least in part, if Gilligan and Pipher are correct, because their mode of
thinking is underrated, dismissed, and disqualified from “adult” conversation, while the
abstract, principled thinking characteristic of developing males is embraced the sign of
maturity. But if even Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz, exemplar of the rationalist tradition in
philosophy, could say that a fully developed ethics “would need a new type of logic entirely
different from what we have known until now”14, then surely we should not automatically
assume that simply because this other kind of moral reasoning is not the kind officially
espoused and taught by the philosophers in the Western tradition, it has no place or value
there.
Care Ethics as Resolution
Teaching a care-based ethics, officially and vocally, would provide a much-needed balance to
the one-sidedness currently characterizing ethics in the education of our youth in at least
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two ways. First, it would promote a more fully human notion of the mature moral agent.
Boys as well as girls would be encouraged to examine and value more of their own
capacities, and to develop the entire range more fully, with the possible result that both
would be prepared to develop satisfying interpersonal relationships as adults, and thus
ultimately to enjoy more fulfilling lives. At the same time, girls, no longer shut out of the
moral dialogue, would have a better chance of maintaining their pre-pubescent self-
confidence, which might very well contribute to the development of other talents which
within the present culture seem to disappear at puberty. Even more important, including
care ethics in the moral training of our youth could significantly influence the degree to
which they are willing to become involved in violent activities, since they would be focusing
attention specifically upon their own identities in terms of relations to concrete others.
The second way in which including care-based ethics in moral education would provide
balance concerns the climate of our schools themselves. In perhaps no places other than
prisons are there more clear patterns of “actions and consequences” than in our schools. In
nearly any classroom one might care to visit from 6th to 12th grades, especially in public
schools, one can see the rules and “consequences” listed. What is more, the actions of
teachers and administrators are similarly circumscribed at every visible level. Ultimately,
even principals, who allegedly are in control of the environments for which they are
responsible, admit that their actions are largely prescribed either by school district rules and
policies or by laws that permit lawsuits against schools, districts, and/or the individuals who
serve them. All of these structures and strictures demand only compliance—nothing more
than adherence to rules, just because they are the rules, the orientation characteristic of of
Kohlberg’s 4th stage (of six) of moral development. What is more, many of them depend for
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their effectiveness upon precisely the kind of thinking he describes as the 2nd stage of
development, in which punishment and obedience are the focus. So much focus upon law
and order, punishment and obedience, does not seem to promise an environment very likely
to stimulate either intellectual or emotional development. Surely the conscious attention to
the interpersonal, the relational, which instruction in a care-based ethical orientation require,
might reasonably be expected to positively affect this situation.
A Potential Objection Answered
A critic of the present proposal to bring care ethics into education might object that a
requisite to any such implementation action would be a well-reasoned and fully fleshed-out
articulation of the theory. Such does not, however, exist. The debates described at the
beginning of this paper indicate that care ethicists have so far only managed to delineate for
themselves the problems with traditional approaches, and to articulate an orientation that
might provide the basis for an alternative. So, the objection might continue, including care
ethics in moral education, at least at present, can not be expected to have any real impact,
for there is nothing of substance to teach.
The pervasiveness of the language of care in discussions of health care ethics, however,
seems to undermine the power of such an objection. Authors as well as practitioners in the
field, even without fully developed theoretical structures, manage to use the approach with
confidence and efficacy in addressing the complex problems that are their specialty. In any
event, the introduction, even in the broadest terms, of alternative orientations to the ethical,
of alternative modes of moral reasoning, would surely be a positive addition to the restricted
ethics education students currently receive, when any instruction is offered at all. We needn’t
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settle, however, for such meager goals. Maria Montessori, for one, nearly a century ago
articulated a view of the developing human and an understanding of the implications that
that view has for ethics education. Although I am in no way suggesting that all aspects of
her observational method ring of care ethics, or that her method should for that reason be
uncritically accepted, it does seem significant that the values and practices she suggested
clearly exhibit some of the main themes embraced by care theorists. She cites a scene in the
novel My Millionaire Uncle, for instance, whose message renders it worthy of recounting at
some length. In it, a rich young boy is tremendously moved by seeing for the first time
…two kind eyes full of sad tears, and he had felt moved within himself , and at the
same time a great shame had rushed over him; the shame of eating near to one who had
nothing to eat.
Not knowing how to express the impulse of his heart, nor what to say in asking her
to accept the offer of his little basket, nor how to invent an excuse to justify his offering it to
her, he remained to victim of this first deep movement of his little soul.
Fufetta, all confused, ran to him quickly. With great gentleness she drew away the
arm in which he had hidden his face.
“Do not cry, Fufu,” she said to him softly, almost as if pleading with him. She might
have been speaking to her beloved rag doll, so motherly and intent was her little face, and so
full of gentle authority, her manner.
Then the little girl kissed him, and my uncle yielding to the influence which had filled
his heart, put his arms around her neck, and, still silent and sobbing, kissed her in return. At
last, sighing deeply, he wiped from his face and eyes the damp traces of his emotion and
smiled again.
A strident voice called out from the other end of the courtyard: “Here here, you two
down there—be quick with you; inside, both of you!”
It was the teacher, the guardian. She crushed that first gentle stirring in the soul of a
rebel with the same blind brutality that she would have used toward two children engaged in
a fight.
It was time for all to go back into the school—and everybody had to obey the rule.
(Montessori, 1964, p. )
Conclusion
When the rules exert such priority that humanity is dampened, something has clearly gone
awry, and yet the hearts of those around us are the last things considered as we carefully
train our students in ethical reasoning. Many of the virtue-based programs, it is true, include
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compassion among the characteristics to be valued and assimilated. But is a cold-hearted,
duty-directed compassion that shows its face when students are moved to it by rewards or
punishments, or by rational adherence to duty. Only that response and the kind of
accompanying thinking which arises naturally in the human being, and which is nurtured by
other human beings, can balance the abstract, detached reasoning that attention to principles
and policies demands. Care ethics relies upon that response, and, for all the difficulty it
brings to theorizing about care, the unashamed appreciation and dependence upon it is the
most valuable feature of the approach. Incorporating care ethics our school, both in the
instruction of teachers as well as in that of students, has, precisely because of that reliance,
the potential to provide our schools with a level of humanity heretofore unheard of in the
United States.
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1 Carol Gilligan (1982) In A Different Voice, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
2 Piaget, Jean (1965) The Moral Judgment of the Child, New York: The Free Press (Originally published 1932).
3 Erikson, Erik H. (1950) Childhood and Society, New york: W. W. Norton. Also see (1964) Insight and Responsibility,
New York: W. W. Norton.
4 Lawrence Kohlberg (1981) The Philosophy of Moral Development. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
5 Georg Sher. “Other Voices, Other Rooms? Women’s Psychology and Moral Theory”, in Women and Moral Theory, E.
Kittay and Diana Meyers (Eds.), reprinted in Christina Sommers and Fred Sommers (Eds.)(1997) Vice and Virtue in
Everyday Life, 4th ed., New York: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, pp. 641-656.
6 Margaret Olivia Little (1998) “Care: From Theory to Orientation and Back”, in Journal of Medicine and Philosophy,
23, 2, 190-209.
7 Robert M. Veatch (1998) “The Place of Care in Ethical Theory”, in Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 23, 2, 210-
224.
8 This point has been noted by Barry Chazan (1985) in Contemporary Approaches to Moral Education: Analyzing
Alternative Theories, New York: Teachers College Press. Otherwise, the increasingly popular language of “character
education”, rather than ethics education, as for example in Thomas Lickona’s (1991) Educating for Character: How our
Schools Can Teach Respect and Responsibility, New York: Bantam Books, presumes a virtue approach, as does the work
of William Bennett (see citation at footnote 10), as well as the Character Counts! program, and many other currently
popular discussions of the topic.
9 The game is entitled The Right Thing: An Exploration of Ethics for High School Students, distributed by Martin
Marietta Specialty Components, Inc., and based upon the Six Pillars of Character and other materials developed by
Michael Josephson and the Josephson Institute of Ethics.
10William Bennett and Georg Sher (1982) “Moral Education and Indoctrination”, in The Journal of Philosophy, 79, 11,
665-677.
11 Maria Montessori (1964) The Montessori Method, 2nd ed., trans. Anne E. Georg, New York: Stokes Company.
(Original work published 1912), p.
12Alphie Kohn (1993) Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and other Bribes,
New York: Houghton Mifflin Co.
13 Mary Pipher (1994) Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, New York: Ballantine, pp. 18-19.
14 G.F.W. Leibniz (1978) Letter to Burnett, in G. W. Leibniz: Die philosophischen Schriften, trns. C. J. Gerhardt, 3, 183
(Original translation published 1875-90).