| Education has long been charged with the task of forming and shaping subjectivity and identity. A central concern of moral education, then, is the forming and shaping of moral identity, or moral agency. In this dissertation I focus on moral responsibility as a defining feature of moral agency. In contrast to the self-interestedness of the prevailing (modernist) view, I take as my starting point the ethical turn toward the other in postmodern and poststructuralist thought, focusing especially on the work of Emmanuel Levinas.; I begin by sketching out a number of formalized attempts to cultivate moral responsibility in North American public schools over the past 100 years. From this picture it becomes clear that, whether these approaches favour cognitive development (as in Kohlberg's stage theory) or moral behaviour (as in character education), they all share a commitment to the same modernist conception of moral responsibility as derivative of sovereign rational autonomy. In the next chapter I discuss the difficulties and limitations of this view, namely that it permits only a thin conception of responsibility to and for the other. I then explore Levinas's conception of subjectivity as always already constituted by ethical responsibility to and for the other, and point toward some ways in which reframing responsibility and subjectivity along this line might offer new possibilities for conceiving moral agency in education. Finally, I address the implications of this framework for teaching and teacher education. |
