Abstract
Integrating ethics into science classes requires a kind of critical thinking about values in science that can play a significant role in fostering the reasonableness of students. This chapter will offer several reasons for concluding that this is an appropriate objective of science education in the schools, even at elementary levels. Thus, an effort will be made to make a case for science teachers seeing themselves as moral educators while teaching science. This chapter will feature the work of [the late] environmental chemist Theodore Goldfarb in his efforts to help pre-college science teachers bring ethics into their classes.
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Notes
- 1.
This work was highlighted by my Philosophical Adventures With Children (University Press of America, 1985) and Reasonable Children (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1996).
- 2.
This manual, Ethics in the Science Classroom: An Instructional Guide for Secondary School Science Teachers, is fully accessible at Online Ethics in Science and Engineering under the heading, “Pre-College Materials.” It was supported by “Workshops For High School Science Teachers: Ethics in the Classroom, NSF Grant No. SBR-932 0255). Included is my, “Reasonable Children: Science Teachers as Moral Educators,” which forms the early basis of much of what follows in this chapter. See: www.onlineethics.org/Resources/precollege/childrenreason.aspx. I further develop the notion that science teachers can, and should, see themselves as moral educators in “Ethics in the Science Classroom: Science Teachers as Moral Educators,” in Moral Sensibilities and Education III: The Adolescent, Wouter van Haaften, Thomas Wren, and Agnes Tellings, eds. (London: Concorde Publishing House, 2005), pp. 113–132.
- 3.
Readers may notice a frequent shifting back and forth between ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’ without a substantive distinction being made between them. This is intentional.
- 4.
This book was recommended to them by Martin Benjamin, David’s father, then a professor of philosophy at Michigan State University. He shared with them Matthew Lipman’s children’s novel Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery. Delighted with the philosophical explorations of Harry and his friends as 5th graders, David and Jeremy waited several years for philosophical thinking to be encouraged in their regular school classes. Frustrated, as 10th graders they approached David’s father for a reading list. That list included Nagel’s book.
- 5.
- 6.
I attempt to support this in my Reasonable Children. Damon (1988), provides a useful summary of relevant research on this topic.
- 7.
A particularly useful resource for high school science teachers is Ethics Primer, published online by the Northwest Association for Biomedical Research (NWABR), available at www.NWABR.org.
- 8.
This paragraph and the next are taken from my Reasonable Children, pp. 77–78.
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Pritchard, M.S. (2018). Promoting Reasonableness: Science Teachers as Moral Educators. In: Englehardt, E.E., Pritchard, M.S. (eds) Ethics Across the Curriculum—Pedagogical Perspectives. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78939-2_16
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