Nel Noddings, a notable philosopher of education, apparently died on August 25. I touch on her views in my Ethics class; she's a major figure in what is usually called the Ethics of Care.
Noddings takes education to arise fundamentally out of care relationships. These care relationships are characterized by three features:
(1) The carer devotes close, careful attention to the needs, wants, and actions of the cared-for. Noddings calls this engrossment.
(2) Out of this engrossment, the motivations of the cared-for become part of the motivations of the carer. This is motivational displacement.
(3) So far, we only have the carer's side, but a care relationship by its nature needs to be a relationship. However, we can't assume that the care relationship is symmetrical. For instance, babies can be in a care relationship with their mothers, but babies don't have the kind of understanding of what is happening that would be required for engrossment and motivational displacement. Babies can't care for their parents, they can only be cared for. There are many analogous situations. Nonetheless, even babies are responsive to care; they adapt how they communicate their motivations, they make clear what they like and what they do not like, and they even, as they develop, return attention to the limited extent they can. This response suffices for a relationship.
This is what is involved in caring for something; but Noddings notes that there is a secondary and derivative kind of caring, caring about something, in which we have a first step, so to speak, in a care relationship, but the attention and displacement are relatively perfunctory, as when you donate a given amount of money to a charity -- you've paid attention, and taken into account what was needed, and acted upon that, but then you just move on. This is more important than it might sound (it plays a significant role in the working of society, and caring-about can facilitate the development of caring-for); but we ultimately learn how to care about things from our caring-for relationships.
Noddings's view is that many of the things that we think of as moral guidelines and rules are actually things that develop out of our experience with care relationships -- learning from care relationships we have had with parents and teachers of various kinds, we develop a sense, and sometimes articulate accounts, of what is required to make care relationships sustainable and constructive. What is more, it's care relationships that give us a sense that morality matters; we want to be moral to enhance our caring relationships and see ourselves as competent carers. Thus there is no real distinction between 'ought' and 'is'; oughtness, as she puts it, is part of our isness, because 'ought' arises to facilitate relationships we cannot actually do without. This is a purely descriptive point; many of our 'oughts' just are, as a matter of all actual human behavior, things we use instrumentally to be in certain relationships.
She also holds, and this is where the account of care plays a role in her philosophy of education that care relationships of various kinds form the natural soil for teaching and learning. In an ideal educational situation, teachers (of whatever kind) model a certain, perhaps limited, caring; this is expressed in a sort of dialogue, a give-and-take, between teacher and student; students are given practice in at least caring about things, and reflection on what is involved; and students are given encouragement and tailored advice in this dialogue and practice.
