A great deal of recent scholarship on economically disadvantaged students and higher education works under the foundational assumption that going to college can and/or should serve the goal of economic mobility. This article considers a cost of using higher education for this purpose – specifically, the impact on the decision-making of poor students. I argue that the narrative of higher education for economic mobility places poor students in a problematically restrictive normative framework as compared with their wealthier peers in which decisions involving the pursuit of future economic goods change from matters of preference into ethical dilemmas. In turn, poor students are forced into a narrow cost–benefit, consequentialist mode of decision-making. This is especially problematic because higher education for many students is a transformative experience – a type of experience which is particularly unsuited to consequentialist reasoning. The solution involves reframing the way in which we think about decision-making in higher education, which is at least partially contingent on increasing social supports to shift the burdens of poverty off individual students.
In this essay Dustin Webster argues that it is not the teaching of academics, but instead contributing to the ethical development of students that allows teachers to flourish in their roles.Engaging in what he calls "ethics education" provides intrinsic value that serves a teacher's flourishing as well as adding instrumental value in allowing a teacher to overcome certain crises in their practice. This essay begins by defining the idea of ethics education and how it is this component of education specifically that allows a teacher to flourish. Examples from teachers show that even within their instructional academic roles, it is the ethical components of student development that are most important to them. Lastly, the instrumental value that ethics education holds for teachers in solving dilemmas of justice is discussed.
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