Teaching and Moral Perception

Abstract

Moral perception, the capacity to comprehend the unique needs and aspirations of individual persons and the best possibilities of equally unique social contexts, is important to teachers who rely on sympathetic understanding to facilitate their classroom practice. Yet moral perception and teachers’ “intuitions” have been denigrated and ignored by educational theorists and researchers who emphasize rational judgment and rule-governed principles. In our article we develop the Aristotelian theory of practical reasoning and its defense of moral perception as logically necessary to any goo d moral practice. We bolster our defense by calling on the work of John Dewey. We explicate the neo-Aristotelian theory of practical teaching wisdom in terms of the assessments of one fourth grader, Tony Mitchell. We argue that assessing students without providing a role for moral perception is a tragic mistake.