Rick Hess, Education Week; What Is Educational Ethics? A Teacher Turned Harvard Prof Explains
"Meira Levinson is the Juliana W. and William Foss Thompson Professor of Education and Society at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. While we disagree on much, I’ve always found her provocative, insightful, and wonderful company. We first met maybe 20 years ago, when she had only recently left teaching middle schoolers in Atlanta and Boston. Since that time, she’s become one of the nation’s most influential education philosophers. In recent years, she’s been working to develop the field of “education ethics.” It’s an intriguing endeavor, which raises all kinds of questions about what that even means, if it has any practical value, and whether it can be in a way that isn’t political? The summer seemed like a good time to sit down and chat with Meira about all this. Here’s what she had to say.
—Rick
Rick: Meira, you’ve been working to build out the field of educational ethics for a while, but it’s probably new to a lot of readers. So, let’s start with the basics: What exactly is educational ethics?
Meira: Think about educational ethics as a field that is analogous to bioethics but focused on ethical questions that arise in educational policy and practice rather than on ethical questions that arise in medicine, public health, and biomedical science. Like bioethics, educational ethics provides theoretical, pedagogical, and policy-oriented tools to help practitioners and policymakers identify, analyze, discuss, and enact the ethical dimensions of their work in more complex ways...
Rick: Educational ethics isn’t a big field today, is it? Who else is doing this besides you?...
Meira: It is and it isn’t. If you were to go around the world and ask educators, philosophers, policymakers, researchers, and so forth, “Are you an educational ethicist, or do you know anyone who is?,” you’d basically hear a chorus of “Huh? No. What even is that?” On the other hand, if you were to ask, “Do you research and write about values and moral principles in education or do you think carefully about the ethical dimensions of your work in education?,” a ton of people would say, “Absolutely! That’s central to my work!” So in part I’m just trying to name something that a lot of people already identify with and care about. But it is also true that I’m trying to recruit people to the field. Even though many people care about the ethical dimensions of educational policy and practice, many fewer are working directly with educators, school and district leaders, state policymakers, nonprofits, ministries of education, and the like to help them reflect upon and address the specific ethical issues they are wrestling with in their work. This is different from a field like bioethics, where every major hospital in the U.S. has bioethicists on staff or on call as consultants, and most major policy decisions say about kidney-distribution policies, vaccine mandates, or end-of-life care directives include bioethicists among the consulting stakeholders. I don’t know of any major school district, charter network, or education agency that has educational ethicists on call, so I’m trying to change that!"
