Education and Human Values: Reconciling Talent with an Ethics of Care

How can we reconcile a realistic acknowledgment of the unavoidable differences in student levels of talent and creativity with the moral spirit of caring and democracy? Can educational institutions and practices recognize and reflect those realisitic differences compatibly with a caring and democratic morality that most of us also want to endorse? In Education and Human Values: Reconciling Talent with an Ethics of Care, Michael Slote looks to care ethics to provide an answer to these previously neglected questions, arguing that if we can teach people to be more caring and open-minded, we can take some of the edge off of the disappointment and resentment that occur when people are led to believe they are less talented or less intelligent than others. Through his demonstration of the inadequacies of an educational system devoted to maintaining a classroom atmosphere of blind democracy and absolute equality, Slote's work-which draws upon the scholarship of Artistotle, Kant, Lawrence Kohlberg, John Dewey, and Nel Noddings, among others-constitutes an answer to important questions his predecessors were unable to recognize or simply failed to address.