The radical ethics of critical theory, from Marx to Habermas, proposes principles through which ethical deliberations might be pursued. The radical nature of Habermas’s ethics involves a recognition of “the other” as worthy and valid in their own right. Such radical openness to others has the potential of transforming us toward what is better. When an individual’s conception of the good life necessitates an awareness and orientation toward what is good for “others,” ethics converges with the moral point of view through what is just: the good life as synonymous with just living. The chapter begins with a compelling story of a Ugandan peaceworker through which the authors draw out critical ethical principles. Then, the authors apply the radical ethics of Habermas’s critical theory to the contemporary US policy discourse around trans athletes’ participation in school sports. That discourse is analyzed according the principles introduced through the story at the beginning of the chapter.

The aim of this chapter is to establish that children are owed a sense of their own interiority. The chapter argues that although the literature on philosophy of childhood constitutes an advance on the deficit model of childhood insofar as it supports children’s rights and childhood goods, it risks reifying adult-child relations by continuing to essentialize childhood. While Gareth B. Matthews’ theory of development as socially and linguistically mediated begins to shift the focus toward the child’s own inner life, it falls short insofar as it fails to challenge the fact/value dichotomy. Drawing upon Iris Murdoch’s philosophy, the chapter concludes that a rejection of this dichotomy is in fact necessary for developing the notion of a morally inflected consciousness that is as available to children as it is adults.

This chapter explores health policies and practices in schools, paying special attention to the presumed placement of health in schools and the ethical entanglements that arise because of this supposition. Evidence is provided to demonstrate that school health–related policies and practices are rarely born out of neutral “habits of mind” but are often influenced by various political, moral, and empirical agendas. In providing these historical and contemporary examples, research reveals important complexities and contestations. Ultimately, the chapter highlights the ethical problematics that are bound up in the taken-for-grantedness on giving schools complicated social problems to remedy. The chapter provides an alternative approach to health education through encouraging teachers and students to engage in critical explorations of existing health policies and projects. The authors hope to help unravel entanglements, expose contradictions, and shed light on the some of the ethical quandaries of these health-related projects.

This chapter advocates for an emotion-aware approach to climate change ethics education. The authors begin by reviewing traditional strategies, both noting their strengths and limitations and highlighting how these traditional approaches often neglect the role of emotion in climate change ethics education. From here the authors discuss five philosophical frameworks that motivate and give substance to a more emotion-aware approach. They then detail four central pedagogical elements that are characteristic of this approach, explaining how these elements give shape to a distinctive and compelling pedagogical approach to climate change ethics education. They conclude by discussing both the benefits and challenges of adopting a more emotion-aware strategy.

This chapter explores the connection between ethics and mindful leadership in education by situating the discussion within the tradition of moral and ethical leadership. Drawing on virtue ethics, the concept of virtuous mindful leadership is proposed. This leadership construct refers to the present-moment attention to self, people, and events that reflects the leader’s moral character. This form of leadership transcends a leader’s obligation to adhere to moral rules or ensure good outcomes to the leader’s ethics, conduct, and role-modeling. A virtuous, mindful leader contributes to human flourishing by helping others to achieve eudaemonic well-being. In educational administration, such a leader creates and sustains a school culture of authentic mindfulness, promotes social justice education, and supports mindful collaboration with staff.

This chapter focuses on the accelerating pace and unprecedented reach of technological innovation. Ethical issues, evident, for example, in the impacts of social media and the burgeoning applications of artificial intelligence, raise questions as to how technological advances align with and alter human values and ways of life. Education is pivotal where such questions are concerned, but its role may be constrained by technologically amplified forms of cultural and temporal parochialism, and technologically enhanced efforts optimize education in terms of narrowly configured outcomes aligned with prevailing forms of meritocratic order. Alternatively, evolving forms of educational practice may provide, in the form of ethically responsive, intergenerational practical deliberation, a counterweight to the cascading social and cultural influence of emerging technology.

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.

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.