ABSTRACT
In this chapter I discuss the role of community in moral education, and I emphasize the school’s academic curriculum. These are connected by viewing academic subjects as practices in Alasdair MacIntyre’s (1981) sense of that term. Education is an initiation into practices and into the communities that sustain them. Initiation into these communities involves learning norms and valuing goods that contribute to the development of a sense of justice. I will refer to this process of initiation as normation (Green, 1999). Effective normation requires the endorsement of norms by communities that are strong enough to have their endorsement carry authority. However, schools are rarely strong communities, and may sometimes endorse the wrong norms.
