Moral pain and an ethics of care
At some point in the past year (a year!) of writing this blog, I came across Thoreau’s line, “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” Well, recently I have been out living much more than writing: wrapping up my teaching year, taking ownership of the Mathematics of Morality fellowship, reading, discussing, and listening. But writing — even the vainest — is thinking and reflecting too, and I feel a pull back towards it building. Early this summer I hope to consolidate some thoughts on Howard Gardner’s “Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed” and The Center for World Philosophy & Religion’s “First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come,” two books that place education at the center of our civilization’s current challenges and future promise.
But first, to ease back into the writing process and to establish the context for the more radical views of education I am currently exploring and processing, here I summarize and update my brief literature review for a paper last year in a class on moral education called On Becoming a Good Person and Leading a Good Life.
We have to first clearly see the ways in which and the reasons why our forms of education, intergenerational transmission, and human-raising are failing before we’ll consider the dramatic changes we need to meet a dramatic moment.
Youth in moral pain
Peter Marin describes one form of moral pain as “the way most of us suffer when we cannot act out in the world our response to the suffering we have seen in it” (1981). Damon calls this gap between the life one lives and the suffering they see in the world “existential guilt” (1988), which is super-charged in teens today by the hyper-globalized access of social media and modern technology. Accumulation of this shame without strategies for dealing with it “corrodes moral motivation” and leads to destructive expression (Weissbourd, 2009). Miller calls this a judgment-action gap, maintained not only by acts in violation of one’s principles but also by the omission or absence of acts aligned with values (2013).
It is therefore clear that civic, political, social, or moral education detached from opportunities to act out learned moral capacities is both a disservice to the students and a dead end in terms of the realized impact on others of one’s morality.
This gap is surely one among many phenomena that is fueling the persistent rise in mental health challenges in young adults, teenagers, and even children across the U.S. and around the world (St. George & Strauss, 2022). Adolescence in particular is a time of heightened dedication to principles and ideologies, and teens are focused on social interactions and community as sources for forming their own moral identities (Hardy & Carlo, 2011). And yet moral and character education in schools fail to adequately provide pathways and interactions that meet these needs, if this type of education is even emphasized at all. Weissbourd and Jones document how caring has been subordinated as a priority behind achievement and happiness (2014), and Kohn documents how most legacy moral education programs are merely “telling and compelling” models (1997). Where then other than the margins, at best, can students explore and act on their ideals ? How do they imagine their lives as caring, moral beings?
An ethics of care
The literature on hope and purpose provides a wealth of suggestions and recommendations for restoring the centrality of an ethics of care in teenage experiences of schooling. Damon and Colby describe purpose as “an active commitment to accomplish aims that are both meaningful to the self and of consequence to the world beyond the self.” They recommend showing students examples of admired adults choosing an occupation with purpose in order to culminate in students long-term commitment to their values (2022). Malin describes three dimensions of this articulation of purpose: goals, motivation, and activity (2018). Noddings notes that the pervasive “ideology of control that forces all students to study a particular, narrowly prescribed curriculum devoid of content they might truly care about” selects against students developing these necessary intrinsic goals and motivations (1995).
Even students who persevere through this years-long filter against creative and ambitious morality are left to face the existential guilt or judgment-action gap if their aspirations far outpace their ability and opportunities to be agents for change. Educators can “deliver [students] from false hope by teaching in ways that connect the moral outrage of young people to actions that relieve the undeserved suffering in their communities” (Duncan-Andrade, 2009). Intergenerational mentorship is therefore a key component of a curriculum of care (Noddings, 1995), as is an action-orientation that allows students to zoom in to the immediate needs around them and out to the bigger picture global context (Weissbourd & Jones, 2014).
Taking it seriously
From this literature emerge several key takeaways that make much more understandable some of the seemingly radical reformations of education on offer by the authors about which I will be reading and writing this summer:
- Students need trusted intergenerational elders to promote a curriculum of care that offers for students clear visions of what their futures as caring, contributing members of a community could look like.
- Student agency and self-direction are key for developing genuine and sustainable moral goals, motivations, and identity.
- Teenagers in particular need to engage in acts of care in order to relieve the tensions experienced by social-media-induced hyper-awareness of injustices and suffering.
Imagine these or similar principles guiding our design of schooling. How would we structure and support eight hours a day for a sixteen year old full of curiosity, energy, and care? It’s not a question I can answer fully, but I’m pretty confident it’s not, for example, the 9th grade math final my students have to sit down to take for my class tomorrow.
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Perhaps schooling as we know it would no longer even be the right model of education. Are we ready to consider this? What common understanding of our civilization’s metacrisis do we need to develop before we are?
References
Damon, W. and Colby, A., (2022, Forthcoming book chapter). Education for a purposeful life.
Damon, W. (1988). Chapter 1 and 2 In The moral child: Nurturing children’s natural moral growth. Free Press. pp. 1–11 and 13–29.
Duncan-Andrade, J.M.R (2009). Note to educators: hope required when growing roses in concrete. Harvard Education Review. 79 (2), pp. 1–13.
Hardy, S. and Carlo, G. (2011). Moral identity: What is it, how does it develop, and is it linked to moral action? Child Development Perspectives, 5(3), pp. 212–218.
Kohn, A. (1997). How not to teach values: A critical look at character education. Phi Delta Kappan, February 1997, 78 (6), pp. 428–439.
Malin, H., (2018). Teaching for Purpose: Preparing students for lives of meaning. Harvard Education Press. pp. 77–100.
Marin, P. (1981). Living with Moral Pain. Psychology Today. 15(11). pp. 68–80.
Miller, L. (2013) Ethical parenting: Is there such a thing? Just ask your children. The New York Magazine.
Noddings, N. (1995). A morally defensible mission for schools in the 21st century. Phi Delta Kappan, January 1995, 76(5), pp. 365–368.
St. George, D. and Strauss, V. (2022). The crisis of student mental health is much vaster than we realize. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/12/05/crisis-student-mental-health-is-much-vaster-than-we-realize/
Weissbourd, R, (2009). Chapter 1: Helping children manage destructive emotions, In The parents we mean to be. Houghton Mifflin. pp. 9–25.
Weissbourd, R. and Jones, S., (2014). The children we mean to raise: The real messages adults are sending about values. Making Caring Common.
