• Introduction
• Taking Learning Seriously
• The Scholarship of Teaching
• The Context of Public Discourse on Teaching
• The Language of Teaching
• Student Expectations and Faculty Ideals
• The Character of Knowledge
• Expectation and Assessment
• The Development of a Language of the Scholarship of Teaching
• The Value of Moral Language
• A Common Public Language
• Conclusion
• Notes and References
• Printable Text of Article

© Copyright 2000 by Hugh Sockett (hsockett@gmu.edu). The right to make additional exact copies, including this notice, for personal and classroom use, is hereby granted. All other forms of distribution and copying require permission of the author.

If we examine the pathologies Shulman has identified, we can see how moral language sheds a different kind of light on each. Shulman himself is uncertain about the significance of amnesia. That is no surprise because memory, though useful, is epistemologically trivial and morally irrelevant for teaching. Why is fantasia a morally important defect? Holding one's beliefs in such a doctrinaire way, which includes being committed to misunderstandings, is an ethical not a technical lapse. 

It ignores what such scholars as Antony Quinton have described as the ethics of belief (1987). The question "Ought I to believe what I believe?" is a moral question at the heart of intellectual life. It draws attention to the significance of our paying attention to evidence and the way in which better evidence should alter what we believe, if we are to hold our rationality as of moral significance. The fantasia student believes in mastery, not a speculative stance to the truth. S/he is committed to mastery, even if it is wrong. 

Inertia is an epistemological problem driven by a stress on facts and information. This pathology is one where people know things, but can't go beyond the facts into synthesis, application etc. Yet it would be surprising if it originated in universities. Presumably no university teachers worth their salt think that their subject can be taught by a) first teaching the facts, and b) then teaching the synthesis (or application or whatever). For in teaching (a) at university levels, the teacher is unavoidably teaching (b), and can't logically teach (b) without (a). "Facts" and "mental skills" are so epistemologically integrated that even to define them as conceptually separate does harm to the integrity of any discipline. 

But recall Messrs. Gradgrind and M'Choackumchild in Charles Dickens' Hard Times. Too frequently in K-12 schools, teachers transmit a bunch of "facts" (information) about history, say, without ever having children try to see the world historically. Science is mistaught as information where children never experiment or work out a hypothesis. So combating inertia demands understanding the epistemological core of a subject by teachers at all levels and how that is reflected in how they teach it -- what Shulman and his followers have elsewhere described as pedagogical content knowledge. 

Yet people grow worried by the use of the word "moral" partly, I suspect, because it is assumed that there is a connection with religion. That apart, we can assess one another's actions as moral or immoral, i.e. make evaluative judgements about each other's thoughts or actions. Second, were we anthropologists, we could describe the morality of a group, not to pass judgement on that group, but simply to give an account of what the group saw as its moral norms and conventions. Finally, we can use the word "moral" to describe that form of thought and practice in which we discuss matters like what we ought to do, what we think is good, how we should treat people, and so on. 

Opening up the moral language, i.e., trying to think about teaching with moral language, carries no judgements about the morality or immorality of other frames of language to describe teaching. It is simply to look at the phenomena of teaching and learning within a moral frame.