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In his 2006 essay, “Moral Education’s Modest Agenda,” Robin Barrow argues for a clearly bounded conception of morality; he presents the moral domain as concerned with moral principles, and moral education as the cultivation of moral understanding. Barrow rejects behaviourism, character education, values clarification, developmentalism, and what he calls “the insidious influence of political and moral correctness” as practices and ideas that are irrelevant and inappropriate for moral education. While I share some of Barrow’s concerns about some of these approaches, I believe he over-restricts the scope of legitimately moral concerns and what educators ought to do in the name of moral education. In this paper, I make a case for a broader and bolder agenda for moral education, putting the question of what constitutes a human life (which Barrow takes to be a non-moral question) at the very heart of morality and moral education.

It is both a pleasure and a privilege to have this opportunity to review Clarence Joldersma’s recent book, A Levinasian Ethics for Education’s Commonplaces: Between Calling and Inspiration (hereafter LEEC). Joldersma has participated in and contributed to the scholarship on Emmanuel Levinas and education for the past 15 years or so, and I see this book in part as a consolidation of that work. I must admit that, on first reading, I was puzzled that he had chosen not to engage more explicitly with the work of other philosophers of education whose work is also informed by Levinas. I am thinking, for example, of Sharon Todd, Gert Biesta, Paul Standish, Claudia Eppert, Denise Egea-Kuehne and others (although several are named in the acknowledgments). But when I read the book a second time, I noticed a brief comment in the preface where he says that in the process of working and reworking the manuscript over a period of many years, what emerged—to his surprise—was his own voice. And indeed, as I returned to the body of the text, I started to see the book as a sort of pedagogical creed—an unpacking of Joldersma’s own fundamental beliefs about teaching, learning, curriculum, and the larger projects of schooling and education, as inspired by Levinas’s ethics. We learn, for example, that, for Joldersma, education is not about competition or primarily about passing on disciplinary knowledge, but rather a response to the call to justice—a fundamentally other-centered vision of education oriented toward the poor and marginalized, and to a commitment to human flourishing in our local communities and around the globe. Joldersma’s Levinasian-inspired education is obviously a radical departure from other conceptions of what education ought to be about, such as the pursuit of ‘‘academic excellence, personal development, finding truth, or the American dream’’ (p. 107). When I approach LEEC as a pedagogical creed, it becomes less important whether or not I agree with Joldersma’s interpretations of Levinas on particular points, or whether his interpretations align with or depart from that of other philosophers of education. Rather, reading the book through that lens allows me to

In contrast to the Kantian principle that we are morally accountable only for those actions over which we have control, Bernard Williams, Thomas Nagel, and others have argued that luck plays a significant role in the moral life. Put briefly, moral luck is at play when we are appropriately praised or blamed for our moral actions despite the fact that at least some aspects of what we are being judged for lie beyond our control. In this essay, Ann Chinnery discusses the concept and various types of moral luck, and draws on two news stories from the summer of 2013 (one involving an incident in the United States and the other in the United Kingdom) in order to suggest that a nonideal approach to moral education could go some way toward mitigating the morally limiting effects of “constitutive bad luck.”

Debate is arguably a central aspect of philosophy. There are a number of topics, however, on which the weighing of argument and counter-argument does not reach a final conclusion, but only a temporary settlement before the issue raises itself again. Understanding the historical development of such debates in philosophy of education is crucial to an appreciation of contemporary discussions in the field of education more broadly. They are debates that seem to have been always there and that continue to challenge new developments. Each chapter in Section 3, Revisiting Enduring Educational Debates, situates the debate related to a particular topic, considers its relevance, and highlights how it continues to influence educational theory and practice today.

Over the past 20 years, there has been a shift in history education away from a view of history as the pursuit of an objective, universal story about the past toward ‘historical consciousness,’ which seeks to cultivate an understanding of the past as something that makes moral demands on us here and now. According to Roger Simon, historical consciousness calls us to ‘live historically’ – to live in a particular kind of ethical relationship with the past. However, no matter how much educators might believe in the importance of learning to live historically, if students do not see it that way, even the most thoughtfully designed program in history education will never get off the ground. This paper is an attempt to see whether the notion of ‘caring for the past,’ based on Nel Noddings' ethic of care, might help us begin to address the problem of moral motivation in educating for historical consciousness.