In To Belong, To Be Free, Nel writes that stories and literature should be taught to illustrate a tradition of care. Here are Nel’s words: “Dorothea Dix, Florence Nightingale, and Jane Addams should have prominent places in the history curriculum. Students should be encouraged to seek out and to tell the stories of their foremothers, particularly those heroic stories of compassion that cross lines of difference and enmity.” (38)
So I want to first point out how apropos to Nel’s life and work the idea for this panel is. We’re coming together here to tell stories. And stories personalize the pursuit of knowledge.
As you all know, she also noted that children learn about caring by first being cared for.
Nel exemplified this idea in practice with her students. She was on my doctoral thesis committee at Stanford University and was a hugely active and helpful member of the committee. But one of the memories I most cherish was a Dewey seminar that met every week at her house where we were welcomed with warmth and caring. Her husband, Jim, always made us cookies. It was one of my best educational experiences at Stanford.
But caring is not only an individualized act. Nel knew that while relationships are between people, those relationships take place within systems and contexts that push and pull them. She notes this when talking about character education programs in schools. For example, Noddings and Tian Yu, in the preface to the Chinese edition of The Challenge to Care in Schools write that:
Character education often supposes that there is something that must be done to kids to make them moral, while caring supposes that something must be done to the environment to make moral living both desirable and possible. (Nodding and Yu, 2004, p. 41)
A society – full of poverty, neglect and racism and hungry and houseless children – these are conditions that are “morally deplorable” Noddings and Yu argue.
Caring must address systems of injustice and not only individual relationships.
The last thing I want to say about Nel’s legacy pertains to Dewey.
I’m at a Philosophy of Education conference, so I thought it was mandatory to first quote Dewey, then say how it could have been written yesterday, and then point out how the quotation seems to be directly about my work.
In 1916 in Democracy and Education, Dewey told us that democracy is not only about governance: “it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoined community experience.”
In much of her writing, Noddings extends this notion of associated living, arguing that students need experiences in relationship-building, mutual care, and community and that democracy requires more than a reliance on principles of decision-building and political representation.
But contemporary civic life is increasingly characterized by ideological factionalism, fragmentation, and social and political gridlock.
It would be tempting to attribute our current situation to the breakdown of community. And it is that in part.
But community, as Noddings has frequently pointed out, has a dark side. Relational bonds across differences build democracy. But relational bonds that exclude differences and foster feelings of superiority among an “in” group move us along the path to totalitarianism.
The biggest lessons I learned from Nel about schooling are this:
If we want to produce people who will care for one another, then it makes sense to give students practice in caring.
We need schools that:
(1) teach associated living and the habits of healthy and happy human relationships;
(2) help students to care for and understand those different from themselves;
(3) give deep thinking and feeling as much as or more prominence in school than mastering technocratic skills, following the rules, and performing well on standardized tests.
We will miss you, Nel.