Education for moral seriousness

In many of his writings Richard Pring defends the educational aim of helping children and young people to be ‘morally serious’. Michael Hand attempts to clarify that aim and consider how it might be realised. He agrees with Pring that equipping children for moral seriousness requires more than initiating them into academic disciplines. But what more? Finding Pring’s talk of opportunities to ‘make knowledge personal’ unhelpfully vague, Hand argues that children should be initiated into forms of practical inquiry. These will include, at a minimum, vocational inquiry, relationships inquiry, moral inquiry and political inquiry.