Morality at the margins: a silent dimension of teaching and learning.

Teaching is a moral endeavour. It transmits moral messages based on values and expectations. This paper explores the relationship between school practice and the democratic values endorsed in the Swedish national curriculum. A lunch‐time episode illustrates the discrepancy between the national curriculum’s ethical values and their realization in practice. This discrepancy problematizes the decentralization process in Swedish schooling. Furthermore, it suggests that episodes at the margins of school practice may be just as important to the moral curriculum of school as the knowledge‐related elements conventionally deemed to be the core of the curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]