“Without continual reflection on aims, education becomes merely ‘what goes on in schools,’ and our only measure of success becomes how successful we are at what we think we are doing.”
Nel Noddings, Happiness and Education, p. 251
Teaching and learning are usually thought of as cognitive and psychological, and often social. School has economic, political, and vocational implications. This is all true.
But what if I tried to convince you that teaching and learning might also be considered moral, and even indeed theological, topics?
Two Catholic theologians, whom I know only through their writing and slightly through email, and last month through a marvelous zoom call with one, have been grappling with the question of pedagogy and in particular with the topic of grading and ungrading, in the context of moral theology.
In January 2026 they sent me a link to their just-published article which puts the topic of ungrading into the context of Catholic moral theology. It’s called “From Coercion to Fascination: Grades, Vulnerability, and Responsibility.” In it, Jason A. Heron and Alessandro Rovati argue for the importance of wonder, something I also aim to cultivate in my own courses. Not only in the education grounded in the Church, they state that “practices form persons because of the commitments they embody and foster” (p. 105; my emphasis). They argue, summarizing much research, that “traditional modes of grading are a mechanism whereby both teachers and students become invulnerable to the fascination essential for a good theological education”(p. 106)—or any good education. They emphasize, following Pope Francis, the need to empower people for “the adventure of freedom” and following a theologian named Luigi Giussani state that education should be conceived of as “taking a risk.”
Now, I’m not Catholic, but I have been teaching at a Catholic institution for a quarter century, and I deeply appreciate the serious engagement that so many of my colleagues have with questions of good and evil and how it is that one can navigate the world in a principled way. In the case of my university, this often means working on behalf of what Partners-in-Health physician and anthropologist Paul Farmer called “a preferential option for the poor.” (The term was first used in 1968 by the superior general of the Jesuits, Father Pedro Arrupe, and embraced in various settings, including in Liberation Theology, which was founded by my late colleague Gustavo Gutierrez.)
In this sense, Catholic Social Teaching is usually focused on justice, equality, and lovingkindness. I’m Jewish, but there is nothing in this, or indeed in the teachings that I understand from the Gospels, that I object to, if we are to take love and lovingkindness, recognizing the divine spark in every person, as the core.
But isn’t school about getting good grades? About dancing when the teacher says “dance” and sitting when the teacher says “sit”? Isn’t compliance the measure, and perfection the goal?
Not if you begin with respect for the autonomy of persons.
Not if you think about the power relations.
Not if you put forward dignity as a “learning outcome.”
Not if you think that wonder is one of our most miraculous human qualities.
The notion that education is moral is not new at all. It has deep roots in many traditions, both Judeo-Christian and Chinese, to mention the ones I know best. Teachers have great responsibility, and power.
What do we do with it?
How do our ideals match the actual effects of our large-scale educational systems?
Are all our students thriving?
Are all our students experiencing wonder, freedom, joy?
Professor of education Yong Zhao talks about the “side effects” of even the most benevolent intentions, when “what works” in terms of, for instance, increasing test scores, simultaneously “hurts.” He gives the example of interventions that raise test scores in reading but make students hate reading forever.
Students fail.
Students drop out, and are relegated to less socially valued employment.
Students compete and sabotage each other and resort to cheating (which makes sense, if the goals are purely instrumental).
Are these side effects trivial?
I would argue that some of what happens in business-as-usual grade-focused education is a waste, and worse. Some of the effects are immoral, if by that we mean conflicting with broad beliefs about the idealistic outcomes of education.
So if at an ideal level humans are precious and we should gently care for each of them, yet in fact so much of education is harmful, creating undesirable outcomes, then….then what?
Many teachers at all levels are despondent. From high stakes testing to AI and everything in between, schools are filled with alienating mandates and trends. Teachers experience moral injury, burnout, depression. Many leave the profession. In higher ed we also have precarity, as the majority of faculty are now contingent (without even the possibility of the security of tenure, and often very poorly compensated). Other than a few superstars, most educators in the US are paid far less than other professionals with the same training and experience.
Coaches and professional development people urge us to “remember your why,” to rediscover the passion and motivation that led us to become teachers in the first place.
Parker J. Palmer’s Center for Courage & Renewal offers workshops and other resources to promote “deep integrity and relational trust, building the foundation for a more loving, equitable, and healthy world.”
Nel Noddings writes of a care ethic, a moral dimension of schooling.
Yet the public conversation and the administrative discourse about teaching is almost entirely different: Prepare students for work and good jobs. Be rigorous. Give a lot of bad grades to raise standards. Cover the content. Stop indoctrinating our students. Make sure they aren’t cheating. Do more with less. Publish. Be a social worker. Differentiate the curriculum. Get good evaluations from all students. Fix everything.
It’s exhausting. It’s demoralizing.
Can we re-moralize the conversation but in terms of structure, not content? This is not to argue for teaching only the classical western canon, and is definitely not supporting Christian nationalist ideals. But it is to suggest that learners are precious—not necessarily delicate, though many are—and our relationships with them, and theirs with each other, should be helping to create the world we wish to bring about. Heron and Rovati call for “a pedagogy that lifts students and teachers up to their full stature as knowers and lovers destined for communication with each other and their Creator” (p. 111). Nontheists can take “Creator” as metaphor.
I’ve written about ideals in my 2024 book Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning and in a Substack post on democracy. Teaching democracy, in which all voices matter, is not only about lecturing and testing about administrative rules and voting policies. It might also be about experiencing a democratic classroom. John Dewey a hundred years ago wrote about it. But generally speaking, the voice of control and sorting, Edward Thorndike’s focus on sorting, competition, testing, and measuring has dominated our educational systems, but now with neoliberal fears of slipping down the economic ladder. Fear, control, eugenics, sorting, punishment, threats are familiar.
This does not seem like a context ripe for conveying the values of any religion or outlook that honors the human.
Nonreligious people might take inspiration from the language of spiritual commitment to the good world that we might dream of. We can’t just dream it. We can’t just speak about it. We must enact it, and we can’t do it alone, nor can we wait to start.
As always it’s helpful to remember the words of the Pirkei Avot, words of our ancestors: “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.”
So whether you take religious beliefs as metaphor or literal truth, the divine as idealism or actual incarnation of a deity, the notion of “education [as] a form of accompaniment” (p. 114), this vision of a better, humane, moral, principled world must inspire us to query our in-classroom practices.
Heron and Rovati state that, according to Giussani, “education requires respect, a sense of fear and trembling for the mystery that dwells in the other person….essential because another person’s life and destiny are sacred and beyond [the teacher’s] capacity to possess or fulfill” (p. 122). How different is that from the sliced-and-diced uniform “learning outcomes” that every student must demonstrate?
Given the realities of our educational system, with STEM mandates to demonstrate complete mastery and the linked curriculum, this might sound like pure pie-in-the-sky fantasy. For those teaching huge classes, it might be.
Yet those who teach wicked problems, design thinking, problem-based learning, who acknowledge that the world does not in fact come completely known, embrace just such an approach. I observed this in a three-year study of an engineering-based internship, where the outcomes were not predetermined but the learning was deep, robust, and often technical. In my own teaching, for more than a decade, like Heron and Rovati, I have shifted my focus “away from coercion and performance to the centrality of fascination and freedom, risk and responsibility” (p. 123). For me, as for them, ungrading has been a key necessity, but it alone is not enough. If we relinquish the coercion, the threats and the extrinsic rewards, then we might have to have more trust and more opportunities for playful discovery.
And though I teach anthropology, not Christian theology, I share their distaste for the behaviorist, and dehumanizing, relationship embodied in grades. I’ll end with their words: “We do not want to proselytize or coerce them into learning about the Chistian faith [or, for me, anthropology]. We prefer to take a risk on the encounter between their freedom and the fascination of truth [or insight] instead” (p. 128).
It might not be possible immediately, but surely we wish to strive for the right thing to do, whatever is in our limited individual power.
How do today’s activities, structure, relationships edge closer to the world we envision?
I don’t have all the answers, but I have so many questions! And so, if given the freedom, do our students.
