Notes
As part of my ongoing work within the National Research Project EDU-2015-65743-P (2016–2019), and the Teaching Innovation Project FPE_017.18_INN (2018–2019).
The question of whether education can be understood as a virtuous practice has also been recently retaken by professor Burbules (2019).
Higgins (2003), Katayama (2003) and Kerdeman (2003) all opt for an interpretation that goes beyond MacIntyre’s own work. They revisit some of the elements present or lacking in his discourse on education (the idea of internal goods in the first case, the ethics of virtue in the second, and the multidimensionality of teaching experiences in the third case) and then make their own proposal within the reflection-philosophy-education framework (Higgins, regarding professional ethics; Katayama, regarding the possibility of having a shared framework for moral education; and Kerdeman, on nurturing self-questioning and doubt in the teaching practice).
‘Why (…) should we even consider the suggestion that it would be the task—and hence the responsibility and perhaps even the duty– of one human being to make the grown-up existence of another human being possible? We could respond to this question by referring to the fact that this seems to be what educator have always been doing, that it is key to what it means to be a parent and that it is key to what it means to be a teacher, and that what I am trying to do is simply to explore what this might mean in our times. We could also say that the ambition to make the grown-up existence of another human being possible expresses an interest in freedom and, more specifically, and interest in the freedom of the other, and that this is key to what education ought to be about’ (Biesta 2017, p. 9).
The book turns out to be part of an argument that Sennett is holding with one of his teachers, Hannah Arendt. In her own portrait of the human condition, Arendt distinguished between the world of animal needs and a ‘higher’ world of art, politics and philosophy. This division is, for Sennett, a serious philosophical mistake with serious ethical and political consequences. Not only does it demean those who labor with their hands, it also fails to recognize one of the foundations of good citizenship and cannot then imagine the kind of democracy in which governance is widely diffused, not given over to expert elites. Sennett contends that ‘nearly anyone can become a good craftsman’ (2008, p. 268) and that ‘learning to work well enables people to govern themselves and so become good citizens.’ (Ibid.) This line of thought depends, among other things, on the Enlightenment assumption that craft abilities are innate and widely distributed, and that, when rightly stimulated and trained, they allow craftsmen to become knowledgeable public persons.
‘The craftsman’s desire for quality poses a motivational danger: the obsession with getting things perfectly right may deform the work itself. We are more likely to fail as craftsmen, I argue, due to our inability to organize obsession than because of our lack of ability’. Something that in a recent publication, Francisco Esteban (2018) has called teachers to pursue as well.
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Thoilliez, B. The Craft, Practice, and Possibility of Teaching. Stud Philos Educ 38, 555–562 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-019-09669-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-019-09669-w