A Standard Account of the Theoretical Debate

A standard contemporary account of the ethic of care begins with the critique by Carol Gilligan, a psychologist, of her colleague Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of the stages of moral development in children. Kohlberg defined the highest attainable stage of moral development as a “postconventional morality” in which “good actions” are “those which accord with universal standards of justice.” He and his researchers found that few females achieved a post-conventional morality. Gilligan exposed the reason for this harsh judgment of females: the initial research Kohlberg used to conceptualize the stages of moral development was conducted exclusively on boys, yet Kohlberg’s model was being used to judge both girls and boys. Had Kohlberg and his team taken the time to listen carefully and without bias to girls speaking about moral decision making, Gilligan contended, they would have learned that girls, beginning as early as preadolescence, develop an alternative yet equally mature approach to ethics. Specifically, said Gilligan, girls view the main moral task in any difficult situation as the preservation of relationships between parties involved in a dispute. This approach came to be called the “ethic of care” in opposition to the “ethic of justice,” which places obedience to universal moral rules as the highest goal. Although Gilligan took care to point out that the adoption of one or the other as a personal ethic does not break neatly along gender lines, an ethic of care became regarded as a feminine or feminist contribution to the philosophical discussion of ethics.

The work of Nel Noddings strengthened the position of the ethic of care as an alternative philosophical approach to ethics by providing a phenomenological analysis of caring. In a prolonged relationship of caring, the one-caring experiences a displacement of motivation, and actually desires to do what benefits the one-cared-for. Although the one-caring does not fully lose herself or himself, ordinary epistemological barriers between people dissolve, and the one-caring may experience an intuitive, unmediated knowledge of the needs of the one-cared-for. Yet Noddings stresses that caring must be a reciprocal relationship, as caring is impossible unless the one-cared-for accepts the care. Ideally, though not always realistically, both the one-caring and the one-cared-for will take mutual pleasure in the relationship. Many of the examples Noddings explores are experiences of traditionally female roles, such as caring for babies, the sick, the elderly, and elementary school students.

Some feminist philosophers have criticized the ethic of care for limiting the moral growth of women by overemphasizing their femininity and domesticity. For example, Sara Lucia Hoagland has written that an ethic of care mires a woman too deeply in commitment to the needs of others, and makes it difficult for her to envision possibilities for personal growth. Sandra Lee Bartky, explicitly concerned with the limitations the notion of femininity places upon women, examines the case of Theresa Stengl, wife of Nazi concentration camp administrator Josef Stengl. Frau Stengl, who had explicit misgivings about her husband’s employment, chose nonetheless to play the role of the virtuous wife and support her husband throughout the war years. Making points similar to Bartky’s, Victoria Davion and Alison Bailey have argued that an ethic of care ties women to the small circle of their own family’s well-being, and blocks them from understanding and trying to transform the larger unjust society in which they live.

The work of Hoagland, Bartky, Davion, and Bailey shows that much of the current philosophical discussion of the ethic of care attempts to decide whether the practice of care offers an alternative to or a reinforcement of traditional social arrangements. Many feminist philosophers wonder whether the ethic of care infuses women’s work with a unique and powerful problem-solving approach or entraps women by limiting them to relationships in which they are exclusively attentive to the needs of other powerful individuals. Rephrasing the argument so as not to focus exclusively on women’s situations, these philosophers wonder whether the ethic of care describes a public ethical or political alternative that can heal failures of justice or merely a feature of private relationships that has no public or institutional effect.

Taken as a whole, the three books reviewed here respond to these questions by declaring that caring has the potential to offer an alternative to justice, if its ethic is fully developed and widely practiced. More specifically, these books suggest that the practice of caring ought not to be understood as gendered, that it ought to be taken as a model for public institutions, and that it is an irreplaceable element in creating and maintaining just institutions.

Oliner and Oliner: Caring is Ubiquitous

Oliner and Oliner’s book, Towards a Caring Society: Ideas into Action, suggests that the ethic of care, while often employed in the struggle against politically dominant groups, is not a startlingly new or unusual approach to ethics. Instead, it is widely practiced and widely taught. The task is for educators and other citizens to become more aware of their caring work, bringing it more self-consciously to their public and political actions. Neither the gendered nature of care nor the dichotomy between justice and care are issues for the authors.

The authors’ confidence in the ethic of care is due to the nature of the research that grounds it. They studied Holocaust rescuers, non-Jews who risked their lives to hide or assist Jewish refugees. Was there something special in the upbringing, self-perception, or ethical commitments of rescuers that inclined them to rescue? Yes, say Oliner and Oliner: the typical rescuer reported both a history of closer family relationships than non-rescuers did and a history of interethnic friendships. Caring, they say, is not a matter of choosing a close circle of personal relationships over commitment to the larger society; instead, it is about integrating the two.

The authors suggest that caring is accomplished through a series of eight social processes. Four are “attaching processes ...which focus on means to promote attachments with those in our immediate settings,” and four are “including processes ...which focus on promoting caring relationships with those outside our immediate settings and groups, extending to the globe.” Oliner and Oliner see the attaching processes as prerequisites for engaging in the including processes, yet they also recognize that exposure to and engagement in both kinds of processes does and must happen simultaneously if caring is to be learned and practiced. I shall list the eight processes in the words of the authors, and then give an example of one connection they make between attaching and including processes.

The ...four attaching processes ...include opportunities for (1) bonding: forming positive connections and a sense of communion with others; (2) empathizing: understanding others’ feelings and emotions, sometimes even feeling what they feel; (3) learning caring norms: acquiring caring rules and values; and (4) practicing care and assuming personal responsibility: participating in caring activities and developing a sense of personal obligation for doing so.

The ...four including processes ...include opportunities for (5) diversifying: interacting in a collegial way with different types of people for the purpose of getting to know and understand them; (6) networking: working together with multiple diverse others for the purpose of developing and implementing shared objectives; (7) resolving conflicts: learning the strategies for using and resolving conflicts for mutually beneficial purposes; and (8) establishing global connections: linking the here-and-now with people and places far-and-wide throughout the planet in the service of care. Examples of the connections Oliner and Oliner make between attaching processes and including processes abound. In their discussion of learning caring norms, they distinguish between “caring norms” and “rules.” Norms are general statements about attitudes, while rules prescribe particular behaviors in particular situations. “Help your neighbor” is an example of a caring norm, while “help your neighbor carry heavy packages” is an example of a rule that the norm implies. If young people learn caring norms, say Oliner and Oliner, then they can use those norms to derive a great variety of specific behavioral rules. As an example of a self-conscious program for teaching caring norms, they offer the example of an elementary school program designed to promote “prosocial behaviors.” The articulated purpose of the program is, in education-speak, “encouraging children to be responsive to the needs of others, without at the same time inappropriately sacrificing their own legitimate needs and interests.”

Successful childhood internalization of this caring norm can lead to successful adult approaches to problem solving, as in the following example of a workplace conflict. In the 1970s, a medical laboratory was staffed with eight experienced, but not professionally trained, technicians, all of whom were members of ethnic minorities. Management, believing that productivity would increase if skills were upgraded, hired a white, university-educated technician to supervise the lab, who subsequently hired seven other university-educated whites. When raises were allocated based upon professional and educational qualifications, the lab staff split into two antagonistic groups marked by ethnicity as well as educational background. The first two consultants management hired to troubleshoot the problem ended up identifying with and advocating for the members of their own ethnic groups. Finally management identified a supervisor who had internalized the caring norm of responding to the needs of others without inappropriately sacrificing one’s own legitimate needs and interests. This supervisor involved all fifteen of the lab’s employees in developing a new performance appraisal system. She took care to listen to the perspectives of both groups and finally to involve them in working together on creating a performance evaluation system that took into account the expertise of both groups. As Oliner and Oliner describe it, “the interaction script changed from a win-lose black-white confrontation to finding a way to resolve the performance issue so that the interests of all were safeguarded.”

Rephrased in the language of philosophical theory, this example shows that, for the authors, justice and care are not mutually exclusive approaches. Instead, they are interdependent. In the example, a failure of justice is resolved by the application of care, which leads to the institution of a new standard of justice.

Eaker-Rich and Van Galen: Institutional Barriers to Caring

Deborah Eaker-Rich and Jane Van Galen’s edited collection, Caring in an Unjust World: Negotiating Borders and Barriers in Schools, reports on specific attempts to practice caring education in elementary and secondary school systems. Although the authors of different chapters in the book define “caring education” differently, all seem to agree that the school systems they report on place significant barriers in the way of practicing, and therefore teaching, care. Thus, they imply that structural changes in administration, teaching, and community relations practices will be necessary to facilitate both the practice and the teaching of care.

Many of the authors represented in this collection take the theoretical debates of the ethic of care as starting points and reattach these issues to concrete practices. For example, “Understanding Caring in Context: Negotiating Borders and Barriers” takes up Noddings’s idealistic assertion that caring must be a mutual relationship between the one-caring and the one-cared-for. This chapter shows just how difficult it is in practice to construct across human differences the mutuality that theory demands. Cultural, educational, and age differences within one inner-city school made the implementation of “caring” quite difficult. The different constituencies could not agree on what constituted caring behavior, on who actually practiced it, or on who deserved to be cared for. An evaluation team at the school revealed that teachers, many of whom were white, showed their desire to empower their students by trying to offer opportunities for self-expression and self-direction. Parents, many of whom were black, took the opposite tack, indicating that they would express caring by providing a highly structured, disciplined environment, which in the long run would empower their children more effectively. Students, taking a third tack, labeled teachers who punished them by removing them from “social interaction and classroom activity” “uncaring teachers.” Teaching assistants, who did not themselves hold college degrees, maintained that the college degrees earned by the head teachers were not relevant to the job of teaching, and that on the contrary one learns about children only by developing specific caring relationships with them. And, finally, parents also complained that teachers did not show enough care for parents because teachers had failed to create relationships of close communication with parents.

Several chapters in the book question the construction of caring as a gendered orientation by pointing out that individuals who are not traditionally feminine often operate out of an ethic of care. They are, however, met with resistance, as one might expect when caring as an ethical orientation is defined as “feminine.” James R. King’s “Uncommon Caring: Male Primary Teachers as Constructed and Constrained” and Rita M. Kissen’s “Forbidden to Care: Gay and Lesbian Teachers” discuss some of the difficulties of constructing particular caring relationships between individual students and teachers. These authors argue that our society holds rigid stereotypes about who is allowed to care. Individuals who try to care across these boundaries often encounter barriers. Because caring is seen as “women’s work,” male teachers are discouraged from working with primary schoolers. Even those male teachers who prove through hard work that they are “sensitive [and] nurturing...could be perceived by others as providing a role model that is inappropriate for young boys.” Similarly, gay and lesbian teachers are watched closely in their interactions with students, as parents and principals may question these teachers’ motives for working with children. Simple hugs and shoulder pats may be assessed with suspicion. A teacher who “comes out” to a gay high school student in order to help the student feel less alone may risk losing her or his job. Although the personal involvement that caring demands always involves a risk, social prejudices render caring a greater risk for some individuals than for others.

The perception of caretaking as a woman’s role in an intimate relationship seems to serve as a barrier against caring as an orientation in more public situations. Yet these three chapters show that the attempt to extend caring into public institutions has the potential for revising institutional structures. At the very least, poorly received offers of care can motivate caring teachers and administrators to examine the structural and psychological barriers to satisfying reciprocal relationships of care.

Reardon and Nordland: Envisioning a Caring Worldview

Learning Peace: The Promise of Ecological and Cooperative Education is even more radical than Caring in an Unjust World. The co-editors, Betty Reardon and Eva Nordland, along with their American, Russian, and Norwegian colleagues in the Project on Ecological and Cooperative Education (PEACE), go beyond advocating revised administrative communication channels or teacher-student relations. Instead, they argue, we must change the very conceptions of knowledge and personhood that inform education. Education’s new paradigm must be ecological, i.e., rooted in awareness of the simultaneous interdependence and uniqueness of all beings. The discussion of ecological and cooperative education offered in this book points the way to an expanded, public, and global notion of care.

Eva Nordland’s opening essay, “New World—New Thinking—New Education,” details some of the interlocking problems of global economic development and ecological preservation that sparked the PEACE project. Global economic development, says Nordland, is controlled by multinational corporations headquartered in a handful of nations that dictate what other nations may produce. Less powerful nations are often called upon to develop only a narrow spectrum of their natural resources and to draw on these until they are nearly depleted. The production decisions are based entirely upon the needs of the corporations and take little account of the need for countries to preserve the integrity of their ecosystems through careful management of resources. The imbalance of power between richer and poorer countries is exacerbated as the poorer countries become resource-poor through the haphazard resource management necessary for survival under the current economic system.

Nordland calls for education in a new way of thinking about political as well as ecological relations. This new education will be based upon a revision of educators’ conceptions of knowledge. Under the old conception, knowledge carries a right to power, and thus the educated have a right to exploit the less educated. Book knowledge is superior to knowledge gained through direct experience, and every problem can be solved through the educated application of technology. These assumptions, says Nordland, are artifacts of the scientific “worldview that emerged with Newton, Bacon, and Descartes,” in which nature is inert and bodies are mechanical. On this view, human beings have a right to control nature, and will progress only insofar as they exercise this right. Nordland points out that many contemporary intellectuals, such as Gregory Bateson, Fritjof Capra, and Paulo Freire, have questioned this worldview and sketched an alternative involving “a feeling of personal and historic responsibility for everything that lives on planet Earth.” Nordland calls for educators to put aside paradigms based on outdated philosophies and restructure education to incorporate these new philosophies.

Other chapters in the book offer a variety of visions of what the new model of education will look like. In many cases the new model seems to be defined against the background of the particular social problems an author has experienced. For example, in her essay, “Learning Our Way to a Human Future,” American author Betty Reardon articulates a vision of “cooperative learning” wherein groups of students practice “power with” rather than “power over” others. In cooperative learning environments students will set and achieve goals cooperatively, modeling a type of care that, as adults, they will bring to national and international organizations. Reardon’s aim is to imagine an alternative to the egoistic individualism that drives people to dominate others, including other people, animals, and natural environments.

On the other hand, in his chapter “Education for Democracy, Social Responsibility, and Creative Activity in the Russia of Today,” Russian author Anatoly Golovatenko articulates a vision of the “responsible individual” that sounds like an enlightened liberalism. The core of his vision is respect for the individuality of others. The responsible individual is tolerant of others, has a healthy respect for tradition, understands that freedom is freedom “to think and act in a constructive way,” and has a well-developed ability to compromise. Further, the responsible individual does not treat other persons as means to her or his ends or as impediments to success that must be brushed aside. Educators, says Golovatenko, can begin to model responsibility by treating students as distinct individuals, by teaching informed respect for various traditional cultures, and by encouraging students to connect the study of history with contemporary concerns. Golovatenko, who explicitly recognizes that education for social responsibility will be relative to a specific cultural and historical situation, aims to compensate for “the lack of democratic experience” among Russians today.

All three of these essays, along with others in the book, share a vision of caring as a conscious act of social responsibility. Caring, for these authors, is the new model of justice. The practice of caring involves a struggle against unjust social forces. The struggle is motivated by a vision of power as a shared activity rather than a hoarded commodity, and is carried out through the cooperative exercise of shared power. While caring may be learned in specific interpersonal relationships, its proper sphere is the entire range of public economic and political activity. Within this vision of care, women’s work in local relationships shows the potential for a global ethic of care worthy of the name. The fact that women’s interpersonal and healing work is often undervalued is reason to call for an expansion of, not a moratorium on, such work.

Conclusion: Agenda for Educational Theorists

I recommend all three of these books to anyone interested in questions of ethical and political education. Oliner and Oliner’s Towards a Caring Society is a luminous book, not only well written but also inspiring because of the sheer volume and diversity of the materials the authors survey. Towards a Caring Society reads as a manual, as well as an analytic chronicle, of caring action. Eaker-Rich and Van Galen’s anthology, Caring in An Unjust World, is more unevenly written and more pessimistic. Yet the authors who contribute to the anthology are thoughtful theoretician-practitioners who reveal important hidden dimensions of school structures and climates. Reardon and Nordon’s anthology, Learning Peace, makes an important contribution to both peace theory and peace education, particularly in the unequivocal connection it makes between education for ecological and social responsibility. I look forward to a sequel, in which educators present specific curricula designed to implement the new philosophies of caring, connection, and responsibility these authors offer.

Taken together, these three books offer educational theorists a multifaceted agenda for continuing research. Some of the areas include:

(1)defining care at interpersonal, institutional, national, and international levels;

(2)integrating conceptions of private caring and public responsibility;

(3)articulating relationships between childhood experiences of care and adult behavior in public institutions;

(4)studying ways in which climates that promote caring norms facilitate caring practices;

(5)recognizing ways in which cultural differences impede our ability to care;

(6)understanding relationships between conceptions of knowledge and conceptions of ethics;

(7)developing critiques of political theories and behaviors from the perspective of an ethic of care.

The potential impact of this research on the design and delivery of curricula in moral education, teacher education, and school administration is significant. I look forward to further developments in both the theory and practice of caring education.