ABSTRACT
Chapter 9, What is Education For?, summarizes the primary aspects of a pedagogy of responsibility developed in the other chapters, focusing on principles emphasized throughout Berry’s work, and the resulting particularities of character as they define and shape membership in community. I discuss the question: What is education for?, as a primary challenge that I pose to my own students. Not, what kind of schools or curriculum should we have? Not what is “good teaching?” But rather, what are we aiming to accomplish when we set ourselves to the tasks that we define as education? What sorts of skills, attitudes, virtues are we hoping to develop in the young people that we send out into the world? And, what do we expect them to do with those skills and qualities of character? Berry writes that the ecological crisis is a crisis of character, and the crisis of character is a cultural crisis. Recognizing this we see that we are also talking about a crisis of education. This chapter addresses what a pedagogy of responsibility requires as we face these crises.
