Ethical Leadership An interview with Dr Rupert Higham by Shengling Hong MA Educational Leadership (pre-service)
“The traditional ethical
frameworks in education fail to address the existential threats we face” Dr. Rupert Higham has been active in education research for 12 years, with a particular focus on responsible leadership, values-led school improvement, and dialogue. In his publication last year, he elaborated on the urgency to reframe ethical leadership in a world with economic, political, and environmental volatility [1]. He stressed that traditional ethical frameworks in education fail to address the existential threats we face. In the past three years, he argues, we have experienced a pandemic and geopolitical conflicts that have radically changed our lives. We are still far from achieving the essential goal of carbon neutrality by 2050. These urgent threats require that we rebuild an education system grounded in an ethic of collective engagement, dialogue, and transformation,
where young people’s knowledge, skills, and dispositions are developed to respond intelligently and humanely to new challenges and opportunities [1]. What is Ethical Leadership? Dr. Higham defines ethical leadership as “framing the practice of leadership through shared moral principles and frameworks”. In the western tradition, there are three broad schools of ethical theory that frame educational leadership, namely Deontology, Utilitarianism, and Virtue Ethics. “While these all remain valuable perspectives, they are fundamentally flawed in that they rely on the future being like the past,” he argues. “Deontology presumes adults have the moral authority to say what values children should have, what they should learn, and what the aims of education should be. However, it is no longer logically and scientifically defensible to teach the next generation that what we were taught was all right and good. The utilitarian position presumes we can calculate and predict the best outcomes, but often modelled on a future similar to the present. For example, we cannot be sure what will constitute a ‘good job’ in 2030 and beyond, as many industries may become unstable. Lastly, the virtue ethics’ approach assumes we have time to develop the character and attitudes of young people in a protective bubble, and then send them to face the challenges of the world at the age of 18 or later. In reality we have little time – and those values and virtues must in part be cultivated through acknowledging and responding to those challenges”. In response, Dr. Higham calls for a new ethical theory drawing on dialogue, Deweyan Pragmatism, and Noddings’ Ethics of Care that can enable “an intelligent and humane response to the