What is education good for in an age of AI? How can state schools in a country with rising authoritarian politics protect children from learning intolerance and hatred while also remaining democratically accountable? When the next pandemic or deadly heat wave threatens to shut down schools, what principles should guide which children should receive priority services, how marks should be assigned, and how to balance children versus adults’ risk? To answer these kinds of questions, I will argue, we can’t just look to general moral and political theories and apply them to children or schools. Instead, we need ethical principles and concepts that are specific to education: i.e., a field of educational ethics (or edethics, for short).
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Speaker
Professor Meira Levinson is Chen Family Educational Foundations Professor and Courtesy Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. She is currently working to start a global field of educational ethics that is philosophically rigorous, disciplinarily and experientially inclusive, and both relevant to and informed by educational policy and practice. In doing so, she draws upon scholarship from multiple disciplines as well as her eight years of experience teaching in the Atlanta and Boston Public Schools.