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Why Bother Teaching? Despairing the Ethical Through Teaching that Does Not Follow

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Abstract

Contemporary education policy discourse in the United States views teaching as the primary instrument to effect student achievement, and teachers are responding by leaving the profession and discouraging students from becoming teachers. While teaching is more commonly associated with hope, I argue that the growing dissatisfaction of teachers with their profession can be understood through despair as an ethical act. Rather than disavow the role of despair in teaching and education more broadly, the critical and provocative roles of despair are emphasised here as an ethical response to a normative order of effective teaching. These roles are expressed through the question of why bother. Understanding why bother teaching as an ethical question that arises from despair serves to critique the present and provoke movement without yet projecting a future. Thus, this paper traces the ways the ethical negates a normative order to arrive at a teaching that does not follow from instrumental logic in service of a future goal, aim, or objective. This leads to a consideration of the risks involved in despairing the ethical, which I describe as a practice for which risk cannot be managed or minimised while remaining ethical.

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Acknowledgements

My thanks to the 2015 Ethics and Education conference attendees for feedback on my presentation of this paper, especially to Tomasz Szkudlarek for prolonged discussions on ethical negativity, teaching, and despair, and to Andrzej Wiercinski for pointing to my use of despair as an invitation to think about its general disavowal in philosophy of education. I also thank Margaret Walshaw for her comments on an earlier draft of this paper and Rahna Carusi for her continued engagement with me on these ideas. Finally I wish to thank the Studies in Philosophy and Education reviewers for their thoughtful comments. Research for this paper was supported by a grant from the National Science Centre (NCN) in Kraków, Poland (Grant Number 2014/15/B/HS6/03580).

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Carusi, F.T. Why Bother Teaching? Despairing the Ethical Through Teaching that Does Not Follow. Stud Philos Educ 36, 633–645 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-017-9569-0

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