Why ethical debate is crucial in the classroom

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why ethical debate is crucial in the classroom
Miranda Mowbray, JISC, 2019/04/10
I'm going to use this post as an excuse for discussing the part where I disagreed most with Kate Bowles (see below). She very clearly ties the need for open education with an ethics of care. In a similar manner, I listened to a radio show today connecting our response to climate change with a certain ethical perspective. And I see the reasoning - if only people adopted a certain ethical perspective, then systems would be humane and people would do the right thing. However, my fear here is that if we are putting our trust in ethics (in both education and environment) then we are putting our trust in exactly the wrong thing. We can discuss ethics, we can refer to them - but you can't make people ethical - at least, not in the sense that everybody is ethical in exactly the same way everyone else is ethical. More...