Ethics in the mathematics classroom

抄録

Despite some recent progress, ethics remains a peripheral topic in mathematics education research. My intention in the first part of the article is to show that ethics is omnipresent in the mathematics classroom. However, ethics does not always operate in the same way. To better grasp the nature of ethics, in the second part of the article, I discuss two ethical systems that have been influential in Western thought (Hobbes’s and Kant’s). These systems have largely informed the understanding of the mathematics classroom, even if, more often than not, they remain implicit. Then, I move to a short discussion of ethics in postmodern times and try to pinpoint what is at stake in ethics. The previous theoretical considerations pave the way to approach, in the last part of the article, ethics from an educational viewpoint. I argue that, in educational contexts, such as the school, ethics appear framed by the way in which we understand teaching and learning. I end the article with an outline of the communitarian oriented relational ethics articulated in the theory of objectification—a communitarian ethics whose practice features responsibility, commitment, and care.