I’m re-examining the work of Nel Noddings, so I’m reading The Challenge to Care in Our Schools, so that’s what is informing this post. On a personal note, It’s exciting to reexamine her work after a few years away from it, especially since her work has been so formative in the way I think about the structure of the relationships at SLA. (There’s a few dozen posts worth of work in that last sentence, but anyway…)

Noddings argues that so many students don’t think that teachers care about them and yet so many teachers do. What is the cause for this? One of the powerful arguments that Noddings makes is that the standards — and I would argue, standardization — movement has created an objectification of students. We search for the best way to teach some mythological "student" object and then attempt to craft systems where all students are taught that way. What we have done, in the service of worthy ideals, is create a distance between teacher and student and the distance between is a mandated curriculum where the "why" of what we teach is rarely questioned and the "what" is defined in such a way that students end up feeling that teachers care more about the subjects they teach than the students they teach.

Noddings writes in detail about the ramifications of that idea, and she puts forth a compelling argument for how we can change our schools to make them more humane places, but that’s not what I want to write about today. (And Dan, before you think that Noddings is someone who is arguing for a wishy-washy definition of care, she’s not. In fact, I think she’s a theorist that if you were to read, you’d love because she’s someone who gives powerful language to many of the things you do in your own practice.)

But I want to examine a different but necessary change in the rhetoric of schooling that, in my opinion, stems from this revaluation of care. It is common in the language of school reform to hear people talk about the need for a 21st Century workforce. Now, there are a lot of reasons why I think this is shooting too low, but Noddings offers another reason why that’s the wrong lens. The notion that our job as teachers is to create a new workforce suggests to our students an objectified relationship that is the antithesis of care. To me, the language of school as pathway to workforce does not suggest an active, engaged, caring relationship between teacher and student. It, instead, suggests that education is something we do to kids in service of the larger need of society — and a market economy — to have an educated workforce. Personal growth, emotional well-being, the need to educate and care about whole child take a back seat in that rhetoric.

Instead, if we talk about schools that help students become 21st Century citizens, we can speak to their need to be engaged and involved in their entire world. We can talk about how our hope for them to find their place in our society, not just as worker but as person. That rhetoric, to me, speaks to a transaction of care, because it aspires to help students find a rich and meaningful life while also teaching the need to be part of the larger society in powerful ways. Surely, we can find ways to explain the need for mathematics, science, literature and the like through that rich lens. Surely, we can explain why our desire to teach those ideas to students speak to a care for them and for our world that can convey to students the belief that our schools — and the people within it — are there because they care about them.