Nel Noddings

Works

• 1984Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education

  Ethics begins in the caring relation itself, not in principles – and moral education means practising care.

Position

In Caring (1984) Noddings set out an ethics that starts not from principles but from the relation of care between a “one-caring” and a “cared-for”. Caring involves “engrossment”, open attention to the other’s reality, and “motivational displacement”, in which the carer’s energy flows towards the other’s projects. The relation is complete only when the cared-for responds, if only by growing. “Natural caring”, as between a mother and her child, comes first; “ethical caring”, the effort to care where one does not spontaneously want to, draws on the memory of being cared for and on an ideal of oneself as caring. Universal principles, she argued, can distract from the person in front of us. The book’s subtitle, “A Feminine Approach”, drew objections: Sarah Lucia Hoagland and Claudia Card argued that unequal relations of care can exploit the carer and that the theory has little to say about strangers, distant others or injustice. The second edition (2013) is subtitled “A Relational Approach”, and in Starting at Home (2002) she extended care ethics to social policy. Her main field was education. In The Challenge to Care in Schools (1992) she argued, in the tradition of Dewey, that schools should be organised around centres of care – for oneself, for others, for animals, plants and the earth, for ideas – rather than around a fixed canon of subjects.

Life & context

Nel Noddings was born in 1929 in Irvington, New Jersey. She studied mathematics and physical science at Montclair State College and mathematics at Rutgers, and for seventeen years taught mathematics in schools and worked as a school administrator. She then took a doctorate in education at Stanford in 1973, directed the laboratory school of the University of Chicago and in 1977 joined the faculty at Stanford, where she was Lee L. Jacks Professor of Child Education from 1992 until she retired in 1998. Later she taught at Teachers College, Columbia, at Colgate University and at Eastern Michigan University. She was president of the Philosophy of Education Society and of the John Dewey Society. She died in Florida in 2022.

Further main works

• Women and Evil (1989)
• The Challenge to Care in Schools (1992)
• Philosophy of Education (1995)
• Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy (2002)