Each profession, and teaching as well, implies formal education and professional competences. Accredited programmes of professional development of teachers mainly aim at these aspects of professionalism while also the notion of responsibility and expectation and the trust of the public in the teaching profession is implicitly linked to professionalism.
However, professionalism, besides formal education and professionalism, must also imply the ethics of teachers. The ethics of teachers is especially important, considering the fact that a teacher is a de facto partially (and at large measure) free agent (in the classroom and outside of it as well). In the hyperproduction of information, the risk of the conscious and intentional hiding of relevant important information for teaching and achievements of students, or the hiding of the facts showing if a specific teacher is a worker of knowledge is growing. Future research should show if such behaviour of teachers (the hiding of relevant information) is a basic cause of the escalation of entropy in educational system because a professional teacher is a pedestal of educational system and a trueknowledge worker(knowledge worker in Drucker’s sense)
Analogously to the macro level that a society isn’t sustainable without ethics and morality, understood as endogenous elements of the social system, so someone who’s not ethical can’t be considered a professional. Isn’t it obvious, and not just expected, that moral attitudes in young people can be formed only by someone who himself owns them [1]?
The research and analyses of teachers’ ethics are being complicated because of several reasons:
Firstly, the ethics of teachers is a complex, tridimensional phenomenon in a procedural, extrinsic and intrinsic sense of ethics (Schienke, et al., 2009).
Secondly, a teacher does not have to be aware of ethical questions or dilemmas in which he or she is. For example, a teacher is not acquainted with or aware of key questions related to the content of formal curriculum.Ethical Blindess (EB) in a post truth timeWar On Factshas almost assumed a shape of pandemic. EB can be connected with Dunning-Kruger effect.
Thirdly, the problem is becoming more complex because of the effects of a series of other social and psychological biases such as, for example, self-realizing prophecy (Pygmalion effect) (Merton, 1948) or the fundamental error of attribution (Popadić, 2015) . All of these biases contribute to the growth of negative effects of EB as well, creating a vicious circle which is difficult to leave even with the help of professional services and colleagues. The list of the manifestations of a cognitive bias is made of more tenths of biases, these phenomena aren’t new and it seems that it would be justified that far more meticulous attention is paid to the building of a new paradigm of education by those phenomena of biases in teachers . The phenomenon of the cognitive bias is related to the hidden curriculum in the part in which a teacher isn’t aware of his actions and their (ethical) effects.
Fourthly, and it seems more significant, the moral risk of a teacher’s conscious and intentional hiding of relevant information in an effort to keep his place of work on “the market of educational industry” is escalating by geometric progression. In a narrow (school) and wider (society) environment in which individualism of human capital is promoted, and at the expense of social capital as the basis of dynamic comparative advantage of education, economy and the whole society of XXI century, a rational teacher has an interest in continuing to hide relevant information, so making the whole system unsustainable.
This blog article has been written on the basis of the work by Vasić, V, Petković, N.SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT – TOWARDS A NEW PARADIGM OF EDUCATION, MEF conference, By innovations to sustainable development, November 2017.
[1] We are talking about applied ethics – a discipline dealing with the use of a universal moral criterion on one separate area of experience (Babić, J. p. 34). [1] It’s true “programmes (at pedagogical studies, remark of the author) don’t have an effective critical reflection which leads to self-understanding, including the consideration of these contextual suppositions and previously unfounded personal prejudice. Teaching is a complex interference among social, cultural, psychological and physical factors, and interactions in classrooms are often automatic and reactive” (Sager, 2013, p. 19). [3] The programme of the State University in Portland, being structured in such way so as to include four dimensions: a. Self-understanding and dedication, b. Systemic view on the world, c. Networking and d. Tools for sustainable changes. This example of the education of teachers on sustainability is clearly intended to recognize and sanitize a sore spot and this is the bias of teachers.
Babić, J. (2000) Uvod u poslovnu etiku, Virtus, Prag.
Merton, Robert K. (1948) The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. Antioch Review 8: 193–210.
Popadić, D. (2015) Socijalna kognicija, Filozofski fakultet, Univerziteta u Beogradu, http://moodle.f.bg.ac.rs/file.php/49/socijalna_kognicija_2016.pdf .
Sager, M. (2013), Understanding the Hidden Curriculum: Connecting Teachers to Themselves, Their Students, and the Earth, Leadership for Sustainability Education Comprehensive Papers Educational Leadership and Policy.
Schienke, E. W. i ostali (2009) The Role of the National Science Foundation Broader Impacts Criterion in Enhancing Research Ethics Pedagogy, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248987739_The_Role_of_the_National_Science_Foundation_Broader_Impacts_Criterion_in_Enhancing_Research_Ethics_Pedagogy