Teaching as a Moral Craft: A Metaphor for Teaching and Teacher Education

The reigning metaphor in North American education undoubtedly portrays teaching as an applied science.' This metaphor is a reflection of the enormous impact on education of the social and behavioral scientists who have been seeking lawlike relationships among educational phenomena. Elsewhere (Tom to appear) I have argued that educational phenomena are not the kind of natural phenomena which under careful study yield lawlike relationships among variables and that there are no logical or empirical reasons for believing that every educational problem has one best solution. Prominent researchers have also questioned whether it is possible to find fundamental and lasting regularities in education (Cronbach 1975; McKeachie 1974; Snow 1977). The intellectual underpinnings of the applied science metaphor are crumbling. Concurrent with the growing pessimism concerning the possibility of a science of education, there is a rediscovery of the moral dimension of teaching. Teaching is moral in at least two senses. On the one hand, the act of teaching is moral because it presupposes that something of value is to be taught (Peters 1965). On the other hand, the teacher-student relationship is inherently moral because of its inequality. This relationship, notes Hawkins (1973), entails "an offer of control by one individual over the functioning of another, who in accepting this offer, is tacitly assured that control will not be exploitative but will be used to enhance the competence and extend the independence of the one controlled..." (p. 9). Those who adhere to the applied science metaphor are insensitive to the moral dimension of teaching because their primary focus is on increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of teaching. Since the applied science metaphor directs our attention away from the moral dimension of teaching and has not even delivered its long-promised fundamental regularities, this metaphor no longer merits our faith. I believe it is time to develop a new teaching metaphor, one that does not assume that education must mimic the natural sciences. At the core of this