Ethical Caring\'s Great Contribution Is to Guide

¶ … Ethical caring's great contribution is to guide action long enough for natural caring to be restored and for people once again to interact with mutual and spontaneous regard" (Noddings 1998: 187).

Noddings believes that rather than ethics shaping moral behavior, our moral, spontaneous caring is what is more important and must come first. This impulse is sometimes interfered with, which is why we need ethical systems, but caring comes before the creation of ethical systems.

Statement: "All human communities are founded upon specific shared information, and the basic goal of education in a human community is acculturation - the transmission to children of the specific information shared by the adults of the group or polis" (Hirsch cited by Coppola 2011).

Comment: This reflects Hirsch's belief in the need for a common curriculum, or shared values that must be transmitted to all students to create a more homogeneous and cohesive society.

Statement: "And again, I'm a big fan of standards. But I'm against standardization which I take to be fundamentally anti-democratic. And I'm for standards set by people working in classrooms with one another. And then we see the metaphorical market being held up as the ideal of what the public schools should become" (Ayers 2006).

Comment: This statement reflects Bill Ayers' belief that standardized testing as a benchmark of school success is misguided. Every school has different needs, based upon the economic and social history of the student body, which will inevitably affect results. There is no standardized, one-size-fits-all curriculum. Ayers is against school choice or vouchers, which he believes takes away money and resources from poorer public schools, but still supports localized control and teachers working together with the community to improve schools.

Step 2: How has your knowledge of curriculum foundations developed over the last several weeks? In what ways were you able to draw on your knowledge of curriculum foundations in this activity?

Taking this class has been very empowering for me as an educator, because all too often I have felt powerless in designing my own curriculum There is so much pressure to conform to the demands placed upon us because of standardized testing. I have little creative leeway to use a curriculum design that uses innovative assignments and reflects as diverse and holistic an approach as I would like. This class has showed to me that there is no singular, correct curriculum and there is a great deal of debate as to what constitutes the best way to structure the modern educational system.