Ethics and Teaching: A Religious Perspective on Revitalizing Education »

Alan Block has worked in the public schools for over thirty-five years, as both a high school English teacher and a professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. The author of numerous articles, book chapters, and five books, he continues to be an engaged educator and concerned Other.

This book studies education and curriculum from the perspective of the teacher’s stance in the classroom. Writing through the lenses offered by autobiography, a lifetime in the classroom serving as teacher, and drawing heavily on Jewish and secular scholarly texts, Block offers a vision of education that serves as an alternative to the increasingly instrumentalist, managerial, standards-driven impersonal nature of contemporary schools. He advocates not for a pedagogy of ethics, but for the original ethical stance every teacher already assumes by entering into the classroom. It is from this stance in ethics, he argues, that all pedagogy derives.

Hakdamah 1

Pt. 1 Every Third Thought Is of the Grade

1 Why Be a Teacher 17

2 A Pedagogue for Two Teachers 39

3 On Finding Lost Objects 65

4 From Sinai to the Water Gate: Curriculum Stories 93

Pt. 2 Every Third Thought Is of the Brave

5 It Must Suffice 115

6 Study and Benevolence 135

Pt. 3 Every Third Thought Is My Grave

7 Intimations of Immortality: An Ode of Sorts 159

Notes 189

References 195

Index 199