Abstract
As I have just argued in Chapter 3, if circulating swirls of desire constitute one classroom dynamic that teachers and students have trouble seeing, another elusive is the contradiction alluded to in the title of this chapter. Teachers seldom frame the educational outcomes for their students as outcomes that distinguish the minds of educated persons from the minds of uneducated persons, and they seldom do this simply because they don’t know how. What teachers do know how to think about is the content of their disciplines.
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Notes
In recent decades, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, and evolutionary psychologists have been investigating the cognitive roots of ethical and moral judgments, which reveals that ethical and moral determinations, like a lot of other kinds of human cognition, occur in the deep recesses of our minds far distant from easy conscious inspection, and that appear to be protocols encoded in our neural structures by evolutionary development, not by consciously designed educational practices such as prescription or logic. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Experiments in Ethics (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008) surveys much of this work and links it to the philosophical search for moral principles. Related commentary can be found in such references as David P. Barash, “The Conflicting Pressures of Selfishness and Altruism,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 18, 2003 (http://chronicle.com/article/The-Conflicting-Pressures-of/14561); David P. Barash, “Unreason’s Seductive Charms,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 11, 2003 (http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/ill/11b00601.htm); Sharon Begley, “Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around?” Newsweek, June 20, 2009 (http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/06/19/why-do-we-rape-kill-and-sleep-around.html); Paul Bloom, “Moral Life of Babies,” The New York Times, May 3, 2012 (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/magazine/09babies-t.html?); Patricia Churchland, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011); Frans De Waal, “Morals Without God?” The New York Times, October 17, 2010 (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/ 2010/10/17/morals-without-god/?); Benedict Carey, “A Shocker: Partisan Thought Is Unconscious,” The New York Times, January 24, 2006 (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/24/science/24find.html? emc=etal); Stephen Pinker, “The Moral Instinct,” The New York Times, January 13, 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html …0&en=d041d46d284660a9&ex=1200978000&emc=etal); Nicholas Wade, “Is ‘Do Unto Others’ Written Into Our Genes?” The New York Times, September 18, 2007 (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/science/18mora.html?ei=5070&en=7e843a8b7643ae35&ex=1190779200&emc=etal), and in many other places.
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© 2013 Melissa Valiska Gregory
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Gregory, M., Gregory, M.V. (2013). Ethical Pedagogy. In: Gregory, M.V. (eds) Teaching Excellence in Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137373762_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137373762_4
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