Ethical Issues in Education - Essay Example

The purpose of decision making is to direct human behavior towards a future goal. In school environment, group decision making involves co-acting members with specialized knowledge, interacting to arrive at some valued decisions or outcomes. Ethical and moral decision-making in schools are important because it determines the main trends and approaches to education including staff relations and teacher-student interaction. Educational leadership in schools is interpreted in simple terms, such as getting others to follow or getting people to do things willingly, or interpreted more specifically, for example as the use of authority in decision making.

It may be exercised as an attribute of position, or because of personal knowledge or wisdom. Although, modern views on leadership underline the importance of personal traits of educational leaders and his/her ability to lead and direct teaching staff and students. The aim of the paper is to analyze and evaluate the main issues and problems faced by school principals, and their impact on education process and moral development of students. In schools, ethical decision-making is purely a matter of subjective choice or preference, or a matter relegated to religious beliefs and dogma is also misguided.

Ethics can be and has been the subject of public debate and public consensus. Ethical decision-making is gained from reflecting on the ways the community solved the practical problems of living together in a self-governing community. Following Beck (1994) in one sense, ethical knowledge does not issue in absolutes, for the community never came up with the one best way to respond in all situations. In schools, ethical and moral decision-making of a principle is crucial because he/she demonstrates how to be an ethical person by living in the community and learning the normal ways the community conducted its affairs and relationships.

As long as educators have been able to draw on the conception of science as the authority about the world, they have been able to legitimize a claim to always "know what is best" for their students. Acknowledging that the voice of the student carries its own distinctive authority means challenging the accepted distribution of power and authority within school. If questions of the nature of knowledge cannot be untangled from those of ethics, neither can they be untangled from questions of education politics (Aiken et al 1995).

Accordingly, ethics needs to focus on the practical decision-making context. It must certainly be multidisciplinary: sociological, philosophical, psychological, and educational. More importantly, it needs to return to the real roots of education itself and to immerse itself in its own proper theoretical objects. The accumulation of these ethical decisions, together with the technical decisions with which they are intimately linked, contributes importantly to the final outcome of any particular encounter (Ashbaugh & Kasten 1995).

Allowing for the context in which the original approach to the school principle is made educational outcomes depend more on the ethical decisions than on any other factors, including the decisions that may, in relevant circumstances, eventually emerge regarding the more familiar life and education issues. In school, the principle is a leader