Luigina Mortari - Böcker

This book champions care education in early childhood school contexts, addressing the critical need for an effective and meaningful ethics education grounded in Platonic and Aristotelian reflections on virtues, and ultimately positing a theory of ethics education that connects ancient philosophy to contemporary care thinking.This theory is supported by the empirical findings of the MelArete Project, a 10-year research project in care and virtues education that guides children’s attention to the concepts of care and virtues. Unique amongst contemporary virtue and character approaches, Mortari and her colleagues have developed a rich research base that combines recent educational theories with ancient and continental philosophy.Ultimately arguing for an ethics education centered on care in the wake of our current ethical crisis, the book contributes to a growing body of literature on prominent virtue and character education programs around the world and will therefore appeal to scholars, researchers, and postgraduate students working in moral and values education, ethics education, and educational theory more broadly. Care ethicists and early childhood educators will also benefit from this volume.

This book is focused on the philosophy of care. It explores the concept of care in ancient Greek philosophy, before arguing the primacy of the action of care in human life. It also analyses how to define the care of the self and, in this perspective, it recalls and develops the concept of "spiritual practices" as performative techniques of the way of being. The text also considers the cognitive and emotional practices through which we can give a good shape to ourselves, such as paying attention, achieving inner silence, allowing oneself time, taking away, cultivating vital energy, and writing and thinking. It represents a major contribution to current debates on care ethics, and highlights how the ethics of the self takes form through the exercise of spiritual practices.