Bringing Caring into Our Education: A Perspective of Care Ethics

【Abstract】In the highly competitive commercialized context, our test-oriented and curriculum-driven education has ignored its ‘human’ aspects, resulting in demoralizing effects and increasing campus violence, and suicide. By referring to the caring theory of Nel Noddings, this article claims that educators and teachers need to re-conceptualize our moral education and the relation in teaching, so as to produce caring and competent whole persons for transforming the values-distorted society.

【Key words】Education; caring theory; care ethics; Nel Noddings

【作者簡介】李平，安徽医科大学人文医学学院外语系。

1. Introduction

Nowadays, more and more mass standardized tests have been developed to strike the traditional meritocratic education, but such education has equated school education to factory management, ignoring the human responses and the caring needs of living students. In reality, too many highly proficient people commit fraud, pursue paths to success marked by greed, and care little about how their actions affect the lives of others. This undoubtedly reveals the failure of such inhuman education to produce democratic citizens who exhibit sound character, have a social conscience, think critically, are willing to make commitments, and are aware of global problems (Soder, Goodlad, & McMannon, 2001).

By sharp contrast, Nel Noddings put forward caring theory that emphasizes individual differences, respect for each student’s feelings and experiences as well as the cultivation of students’ care consciousness and care abilities. This theory helps us better reflect upon our non-caring education and realize the urgency of establishing a caring education.

2. Caring Theory

Caring theory can be considered as the application of care ethics in education. Care ethics as a recognized approach to moral philosophy, based largely on the experience of women, appeared in the 1980s (Gilligan, 1982; Noddings, 1984). Noddings asserted that the ethic of care, while rooted in the female perspective, is applicable to males and that both males and females alike can take the role of one-caring or cared-for (Noddings, 1984; Gilligan, 1986; Lyman, 2000). It countered with Kohlberg’s measurements of moral development by stating that the moral orientation was less related to justice, equality, autonomy and Abstract reasoning, but more related to care, concern, empathy and connection with people (Gilligan, 1982). Built on the work of Gilligan and others (Buber, 1965; Murdoch, 1970; Mayeroff, 1971; Weil, 1977), Noddings (1984) philosophically examined the concept of care in depth and applying it to the field of education.

Caring in education should not be seen solely as a behavior, but rather a relation with others (Goldstein, 2002a; Noddings, 2008), which leads the one-caring to commit to actions in the others’ behalf (Noddings, 1984). Caring ‘provides the motivation for us to be moral’ and ‘learning what it means to be cared for is the first step in moral education’ (Noddings, 1984, 2008). Meager success in education would be achieved unless children believed that they themselves were cared for and learned to care for others. By Noddings’ caring theory, education is designed to nurture human life strength that gives birth to sensibility of care and happiness. The individuality of each student should be cared for and all educational activities center on cultivating students’ caring consciousness and caring abilities. With this goal, the school curricula should be developed on the basis of caring. It is one possibility to organize the curricula around the themes of care: caring for self, for intimate others, for strangers and global others, for the natural world and its nonhuman creatures, for the human-made world, and for ideas (Noddings, 1995).

Noddings (1984/2003, 2002a) meanwhile claimed that caring moral education involved modeling, dialogue, practice and confirmation. Teachers must fulfill as models to show, in their own conduct, the ways in which they want students to behave. Dialogue gives students power in decision-making and allows teachers and students to familiarize with each other (Noddings, 1992). In dialogue, teachers raise questions, suggest responsibilities, and guide students toward moral thinking. Practice gives students opportunities to employ the moral knowledge and skills discussed to become good at caring for others. Dialogue and practice working together may be considered acts of induction (Hoffman, 2000) to develop a capacity for empathy (Slote, 2009). Confirmation is a teacher’s continuing efforts to help students realize their own best selves, by showing them an attainable ideal self despite their present reality.

3. Establishing Caring Relations in Teaching

Philosophers of education are now giving considerable attention to the importance of relation in teaching (Thayer-Bacon, 2000; Sidorkin, 2002; Bingham & Sidorkin, 2004; Johnson, 2006). John Macmurray (1964) consistently held that ‘teaching is one of the foremost of personal relation’ and ‘the relation in education is one of pure dialogue’ (Buber, 1965). Teacher-student relation has always been a decisive factor in education but what relation makes the biggest difference remains controversial.

Teacher-student relation is influenced by the view of nature. Interestingly, in the context of classical Teleology, the relationship between teachers and students is intimate and kind, with equality and mutual respects between the two sides which calls for reverence for teachers. In the context of modern Mechanism, however，the relationship means alienation rather than fraternity, it is contract-orientated rather than partner-orientated. That is the condition under which equality is achieved at the price of educational nature. For the modern context, the features of teacher-student relationship have the unhealthy characteristics of alienation and conflict in the course of heading for democracy and equality (Li, 2012). This is exactly true with the evolution of teacher-student relation in China where the modern education has been commercialized and industrialized. Even teachers of public schools begin to imitate the fashion of training institutions, teaching for high scores, for career promotion, for enrollment rate but not for the cultivation of whole persons. Teaching now has been reduced to a job not a profession. Teacher-student relation is limited only in classrooms, and a number of teachers don’t bother to think about teaching out of the classroom. They teach to earn a living rather than to make their life more meaningful and they just teach the textbook rather than teach with the textbook, mechanically and emotionlessly. This has reduced teaching to a technical skill like riding a bike.

Such unhealthy teacher-student relation originate from the lack of caring. Good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of teachers, from good people (Palmer, 1997) and what we teach is what we value. The distorted concentration on producing “talents”, who do well on standardized tests and who define success as getting a well-paid job, leads regrettably to a society of inhuman humans. Establishment of caring relation in teaching must be the top priority. Teachers must truly and willingly care for students and care about their thinking, needs, aptitudes and individuality, playing the role of responsible carer.

The caring teacher-student relation, by its nature, is unequal but both parties contribute to the establishment and maintenance of caring (Noddings, 2012). As carer, teachers must be all attentive to the expressed needs of the cared-for (students), not simply the needs assumed by the school as an institution and the curriculum as a prescribed course of study. However, it requires teachers to decide when to put aside the assumed need to learn a specific aspect of subject matter and address the expressed need of the student for emotional support, moral direction, or shared human interest. Sometimes when teachers cannot satisfy the expresses needs, they should find a mode of response to maintain the caring relation. Meanwhile, students don’t have to express gratitude but must provide responses without which the caring relation is incomplete. To spur cared-for’s reaction, teachers as the carer should emphasize the difference between assumed needs and expressed needs so as not to confuse what the cared-for wants with that which we think he should want.

In order to build caring relations, listening and thinking are essential (Noddings, 2012). As Buber (1965) indicated that ‘the relation in education is one of pure dialogue’, listening to the ideas of students is clearly important pedagogically, emotionally as well as intellectually. When students realize their thinking is respected, they will enter the spirit of dialogue. For example, they may express their dislike or hatred for school, particularly English, the teacher is suggested to temporarily put aside the demands of institution and engage in the dialogue with students about matters other than English. Good teachers must be capable of using their professional and moral judgment in responding to the needs of their students. However, it should be clear that caring requires thinking and the caring characteristic of caring relations has both cognitive and affective dimensions (Noddings, 2012). Teachers respond empathically when they ‘feel’ what students are going through or something congruent with students’ feelings. Teachers sometimes are too quick and too subjective to judge what the cared-for is going through, so the ‘empathic accuracy’ (Ickes, 1997; Steuber, 2006) must be guaranteed. This requires teachers again further ask questions and reflect upon answers to make sure what they feel is congruent with students, earning students’ resonance and rewarding trust in teaching competence.

The establishment and maintenance of caring teacher-student relations seems much possible within one subject during two or three years, but keeping the continuity of such educational experience is quite challenging. Each teacher may meet new students each semester and even teach a new subject in a new place, and this discontinuity of persons decreases the possibility of caring relations. Though challenging, it is a great chance to help teachers get competent for ‘caring is not just a warm, fuzzy feeling that makes people kind and likable but implies a continuous search for competence’ (Noddings, 1995). In this sense, in the context of degrading teaching ethics, teachers, educators and education researchers in our country are strongly suggested to collaborate with one another to create a climate for caring to rejuvenate our pre-Mechanism humanistic education.

4. Conclusion

Our education regrettably overemphasizes standardized tests and missed out the human aspects of education. This has warned us to bring caring into our education. All teachers and educational policymakers should cooperate to establish a climate in which caring relations can flourish. Caring provides the motivation for us to be moral (Noddings, 1984) and students’ contact and exposure to ‘caring’ teachers is a significant factor in student retention (McArthur, 2005). In a caring teacher-student relation, teachers as carers care about the feelings and thinking when the cared-for (students) are being educated. Such caring-oriented educational thoughts dwarf our test-oriented non-caring education.

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