The teacher as ethical subject: A Foucauldian analysis of Plato's 'Alcibiades I' and Montaigne's 'On Educating Children'

To consider teaching as an ethical activity is to consider the extent to which teaching is a worthwhile endeavor for the teacher. Recent work in the philosophical study of education has failed to address teaching in this sense, and has only given serious consideration to the moral obligations and responsibilities of teachers in relation to students. Furthermore, the history of the philosophy of education has mostly been interpreted as the formulation of various foundational approaches to problems in education, rather than as an enactment of an ethics of teaching.;The intent of this dissertation is to bring Michel Foucault's notion of ethical subjectivity to bear on two critical texts in the philosophy of education: Plato's Alcibiades I and Montaigne's "On Educating Children." What these texts reveal through Foucault's understanding of ethics is that teaching is an ethical activity in that it brings the self into closer relation to the self for the purposes of cultivation, formation, self-knowledge, and self-fashioning. Furthermore, by coming to an understanding of teaching is an ethics, we are better able to see the relevance that philosophical study has for the education of teachers.