A Deweyan Approach to Integrity in an Age of Instrumental Rationality

Educators in the contemporary United States are increasingly faced with demands to teach prescribed curricula using scripted methods driven by standardized assessments -all grounded within an instrumental rationality that prizes use value over intellectual exploration.Such demands may conflict with the concomitant expectations to be nurturing, caring educators, conflicts that can pull at teachers' senses of moral integrity.This moral tension is only exacerbated by the common linking of student test performance to teacher and administrator evaluation, creating conditions in which educators are asked to distance themselves from their students morally, to treat them as means to ends, not as ends in themselves.As one of my students, an elementary school principal, recently asked: When do we decide to stand up to these demands because it has become morally wrong to comply?Likewise, David Berliner and Sharon Nichols ask us: "Shouldn't we be concerned about a law that turns too many of the country's most morally admired citizens into morally compromised individuals?" 1