Cultivating an Ethical School

Often the school is left as an institution seemingly ethically neutral, leaving untouched questions about whether the school itself is not a site of injustice towards both educators and children. Springing from his well-known Building an Ethical School , Robert Starratt looks more closely at the educational leader's responsibility to ensure that the whole fabric of the educational process reflects an ethical philosophy of education.National and state accountability demands have increased, which have narrowed attention to the three-fold, balanced mission of schools to promote the personal, the social, and the intellectual growth of pupils. Schools' attempts to more exclusively promote pupil's intellectual development are based on a misguided understanding of and assumptions about intellectual development, and indeed about the very nature of intelligence as well as learning. Cultivating the Ethical School addresses this issue by indicating the possibility and desirability of marrying the increased attention to the intellectual development of pupils to their psychosocial journey toward personal identity and social participation in career and citizen explorations. Starratt shows the key is to organize both a curriculum and a pedagogy that simultaneously respects and cultivates the intellectual, personal, and social qualities of being human.

Robert J. Starratt is Professor of Educational Leadership in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College, USA. He received the Roald Campbell Lifetime Achievement Award in the field of Educational Administration, awarded by UCEA in 2006.