Grounding Education on Ethical Values: A Caring-Kindness Centered Approach

(T)he need for an ethical learning represents a justified direction in rethinking about the current education especially in the nowadays context we are moving from crisis to crisis. It seems that the human relationships and, no less, those between humans and nature are emptied out of a basic moral and aesthetic sense, leading to a kind of meaningless vision upon life. We easy observe that a serious moral crisis affected a healthy and longtime safe style of living, because the disregard or even the reversal of fundamental spiritual values and principles, such as: trust, respect, care, empathy, kindness, responsibility, prudence, wisdom, etc. Somehow, in the context of the robotizing humanity process, we must deal with the risk of following an inhuman or posthuman pathway. To not losing the peculiar humane value and not going too far away from which does make the good and the beauty of human beingness, respectively the authentic creative potential of human condition, it is necessary to restore some moral axiological and normative articulations, and to disclose them as landmarks of education. Learning from the Ancients' wisdom, we can give ourselves a chance to building and maintaining a good life, one of equilibrium, measure and harmony with all-there-is-alive. Some of the ethical values of living such as care and kindness come herein into play. They cover a full and dynamic understanding of a certain form of love: the ethical love; respectively, the nucleus of philia under the kalokagathia ideal the Greeks have so much appraised. In this paper we try to unfold an education approach centered on care and kindness, and to explain why we plead for them as basis of education, and, why not, as Golden Rule for the adult education, building human wellbeing, and eventually sustaining the experience of a life worth to be lived.