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Title: Voices: The Educational Formation of Conscience by Thomas F. Green ISBN: 0-268-04355-8 Publisher: Univ of Notre Dame Pr Pub. Date: September, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.95

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: This book on moral education aims at life without "oops"!
Comment: Since it is arguable that the fundamental task of every society is to empty the nursery and populate the commons, reflections on the educational formation of conscience are not only welcome but crucial, especially in our time. That is what this book by Thomas F. Green, internationally regarded philosopher of education, is about. But it is not a work that applies philosophy's reasonings to the conduct of education. Rather it unravels what is already philosophical interesting and fallacious in the implicit behaviors and attitudes of education. It teaches us what we already know and forget, what we took for granted. It unwraps the ordinary. It is brilliant, to be sure; but more, it is wise. It is common sense, and we hadn't noticed.

The argument is that conscience is important, that it speaks in "voices" that reflect about things that matter, and that these voices are formed through normation. The "voice" of conscience is multiple. Its first three dimensions are craft, membership, and sacrifice. But its last two voices, orthogonal to the first three, are memory and imagination, which cut across our craft of conscience, our membership in conscience, and our sacrifices of conscience. It is just these last two voices that Green hears so clearly. It is memory and especially imagination that gives the book its wisdom, as its craft gives it its brilliance.

The imagination of normation--the educational formation of conscience--is what provides the book's iconoclastic surprises, its real contribution to moral education in our world today. For example, it leads Green compellingly to argue the following: that in moral education the idea of "teaching values" is not only a deception but is the problem for which it claims to be the source; that until 1910 or so no one "had" values, and that having values and applying norms (like applying paint to a barn door), though apart of current cultural vocabulary, are largely meaningless; that imagining and remembering norms requires prophecy and poetry, a poetry that cannot be reduced to prose or programs without killing it; that public speech actually consists in our capacity to entertain the speech of others as candidate for our own; and that the notion of the self as autonomous is an illusion.

This is only a taste of this most remarkable book which revises and, I believe, revolutionizes thinking about moral education. It aims at nothing less than a life without "oops."