Schools self-identify as caring communities and teach young children to
be caring for each other. But schools also teach other contradictory and
competing messages, such as individualism and self-reliance, rationalist
concepts of justice and meritocracy, and other neoliberal approaches to
life and community. Furthermore, while endorsements of care are com
monly found in educational institutions, caring is not always (or even
often) practiced or regarded as a major aim in schools, in contrast with
human capital approaches to youth development. This essay examines
how schools do and don’t care. At its core is the rearticulation of care
ethics in education, and what caring means within the contemporary
field. Over time, enthusiasm for care ethics has peaked and waned. It
begins with a brief explanation of what caring is within the field of care
ethics, before it considers how caring is ideally involved in education.
In this case, discourses of care ethics and caring in education can be
coopted against the writings of care ethicists to complement positive
psychology, socially conservative character education and civic education,
and individualistic and neoliberal approaches to education. As a result,
schools can appear to care, but do so in highly distorted ways. These
distortions, I argue, do not reveal fundamental limitations or flaws within
care ethics approaches to care. Instead, they demand a reconsideration
and rearticulation of care ethics in the contemporary education land
scape: a context which has changed considerably since debates and
articulations of care ethics in the 0000s.