ABSTRACT
The cultivation of an ethical school does not involve superimposing a set of demands on an already overburdened educating work. Rather it involves educators practicing their profession with an integrity that goes right to the core of their work. In other words, the work of educating young people is by its very nature as a profession an ethical work as well as an intellectual work. That does not mean that in practice it cannot degenerate into unethical and irrational or mindless work. However, when one considers the intrinsic good that the work of education intends, it has to do with the inquiry into and contact with the intelligibility of the world as well as the learners’ inquiry into a responsible participation in that world thus understood as intelligible. The work conducted in what we recognize as schools inescapably engages educators and their pupils with an academic curriculum, a social curriculum, and a civic curriculum. The work concerns the personal as well as the communal learning of how the world works and of one’s actual and potential membership in that world.
