CHAPTER 9: Classroom Management and Creating an Ethical Community

James Macdonald, the well-known curriculum theorist, declared that the above two questions were the most important questions we can ask in education. The second question is the ethics question and is the question with which we shall be concerned in this chapter. Ethics fundamentally asks the following questions: “How shall we relate to each other?” and “What constitutes a good person, good life, and good society (where ‘good’ is meant in its ethical guise)?”

Macdonald not only noted that these are the two most important questions we can ask; he also emphasized that we answer these questions every day in schools. How is this? Every day in schools we organize, monitor, and control student-tostudent, student-to-teacher, and student-to-administrator relationships and interactions. We can see this occurring in our classroom management/classroom discipline schemes, the monitoring and controlling of passing times (on the way to lunch and recess, between classes), how one enters the school itself in the morning and leaves in the afternoon. In short, everywhere in schools we address how to live with each other, and our surroundings are a location where ethics lives.