Deborah Court is an associate professor in the School of Education at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Her research and publishing center on school culture, specifically religious school culture, religious education, the nature of teachers’ knowledge, and qualitative research methodologies.

In The Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle writes that the greatest good for people, and the loftiest aim of practical thinking is eudaimonia, a word often translated as happiness but perhaps better understood as human flourishing. According to Aristotle, pleasure is not a good; neither is self-indulgence or amusement. Human good, and thus human flourishing, comes from the pursuit of justice, the pursuit of intellectual virtues such as reason and practical wisdom, and from friendship. Aristotle describes how education can form in students the habits that lead to the development of good character, critical thinking and the ability and will to make conscious choices between good and evil, and between good and lesser good.

The great educator and philosopher John Dewey built on Aristotelian ethics but stressed that arriving at philosophical principles is no end in itself. Ethics is dynamic, involving critical thinking about specific problems and leading to action. Making moral decisions involves disciplined inquiry, and inquiry begins with a felt need in the context of interaction with others that arouses interest and passion in individuals. The development in school of the skills and propensity required for such inquiry is immediately connected to moral decisions in the community because the school is an inseparable part of the community.

Interest in community welfare, an interest that is intellectual and practical, as well as emotional – an interest, that is to say, in perceiving whatever makes for social order and progress, and in carrying these principles into execution – is the moral habit to which all the special school habits must be related if they are to be animated by the breath of life (John Dewey, 1909, p. 17).

Bridging between Aristotle and Dewey we can say that ethics is practical. Education for ethics means creating an educational environment that models and embodies the pursuit of justice, of reason and practical wisdom and of friendship, and invites shared inquiry. The school needs to teach methods of inquiry and to enable everyone, students, teachers, parents and school leaders, to inquire into goals, challenges and problems and to work together towards the good.

The overburdened school leader struggling to balance the various needs and demands of teachers, students, parents, curriculum and community may find it difficult to maintain an ethical compass that guides his or her decisions. School leadership literature explores these issues within various conceptual frameworks. Ehrich et al (2015) found that while ethics is a central consideration in how principals lead, principals see practicing in an ethical manner as exceedingly complex and challenging due to competing priorities and the need for a wide variety of strategies to deal with the dilemmas they face. Authentic leadership (Wilson, 2014) involves key moral and intellectual virtues associated with authenticity that provide an ethical framework to guide school leaders’ actions.

One key to lightening the leadership load seems to be sharing it, through the building of community and “connectedness” (Frick & Frick, 2010), which is both a strategy and an ethic; and distributed leadership, which includes creating bounded empowerment for participants, developing participants’ leadership, sharing decision- making and creating an environment that enables collective engagement (Hairon & Goh, 2015). Distributed leadership is also both a strategy and an ethic. Among the implied values are community, democracy and mutual respect. Community is the life we lead, both in and out of school and, as Dewey taught, practical ethics involves engagement, investigation and shared problem solving.

As we exercise leadership, face dilemmas and challenges and build community in schools, we would be hard pressed to find a better ethical compass than that provided by Aristotle. Call the goal happiness – not a bad goal for all the participants in the educational enterprise – but better, let’s call it eudaimonia, human flourishing. The concept of human flourishing has been applied to the educational context:

Prosocial behavior is nurtured in climates that promote flourishing… caring school and classroom communities have the following characteristics: students are able to demonstrate autonomy, self-direction, and influence teacher decisions. Students interact positively with one another, collaborating and discussing course content and classroom policies. Students are coached on social skills. Teachers exhibit warmth towards and acceptance of students, providing support and positive modeling. The teacher provides multiple opportunities for students to help one another (Narvaez, 2008, p. 318).

It is no great leap to substitute “teachers” for “students” in this quote, and “school leaders” for “teachers.” The school leader who practices authentic leadership, builds community and enables distributed leadership will help to build classrooms like the one above, and a school climate and community in which dilemmas and challenges are faced, and problems solved, together; a place of intellectual, social and moral flourishing.

Human flourishing is a beacon towards whose light we instinctively want to move. It’s not the whole story (the devil is in the details), but it sheds a rich and wholesome light on the ethics of school leadership.

References

Aristotle (trans. 1990) The Nichomachean ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dewey, J. (1909). Moral principles in education.

Ehrich, L.C., et al (2015). The centrality of ethical leadership. Journal of Educational Administration, 53(2), 197-214.

Frick, J.E. & Frick, W.C. (2010). An ethic of connectedness: Enacting moral school leadership through people and programs. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 5(2), 117-130.

Hairon, S. & Goh, J. (2015). Pursuing the elusive construct of distributed leadership: Is the search over? Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 43(5), 693-718.

Narvaez, D. (2008). Human flourishing and moral development: Cognitive and neurobiological perspectives of virtue development. In Handbook of moral and character education, Eds. Larry Nucci, Tobias Kretanauer and Darci

Narvaev. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 310-325 Wilson, M. (2014). Critical reflection on authentic leadership and school leader development from a virtue ethical perspective. Educational Review, 66(4), 482-496.