ABSTRACT
Utopias are ideal societies which do not necessarily exist. They do, however, exist in the minds of men and women, and express their most deeply held values and aspirations. Since these differ amongst individuals, it is possible that the same utopia may represent heaven for one person and hell for another. When a utopian vision is actively striven for, education is an obvious component in the enterprise, since children need to be prepared for utopian existence and the utopia can, to some extent, be prefigured in educational practice. The Republic of Plato (1970b) is a utopian vision with educational prescriptions attached, while Rousseau’s Emile (1911a) is, arguably, an educational prolegomenon to utopia. In modern times utopian educational projects have existed wherever people have thought that there was a prospect of developing a utopia. A socialist utopian project – the kibbutzim movement – started in Israel, while various forms of post-Enlightenment movements in Europe have served utopian projects based loosely on Rousseau’s vision of a society founded on equal self-respect. A notable example is Robert Owen’s New Lanark of the 1840s (Owen 1991). The problem for educational utopianism is that it must invariably
remain outside public education. Public education systems are usually based on pragmatic compromises between groups with different values who cannot fully implement those values without coming into conflict with each other. Educational utopians are by nature intolerant. They require that the full implementation of their value-system takes place in the education of their young. Compromises will destroy the original utopian vision. Those who dislike a world of bland compromises may well find utopianism in education attractive.
One of the most popular and influential accounts of moral education currently extant is virtue theory, inspired by Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (1925) and, latterly, by MacIntyre (1981). Virtue theorists maintain that moral concepts are to be explicated in terms of character traits, into which children can be educated, initially through a process of training (Kazepides 1991) and subsequently through increasingly reflective practice. Desirable character traits such as courage, kindness or fairness are known as virtues and are to be cultivated through moral education.
