More Ethics in Adult Ed

My colleague Les had an interesting thought or two. He started by discussing Substantive Focus, Theoretical Issues and Methodological Approaches, and to that discussion I say . . . I'll have to keep pondering, but I will say that in terms of ethics in Adult Education he hit on a doozey of an argument for me, almost as tough as the last (see here). 

When I worked in my previous position as a contractor there was very little thought as to ethics in our training dept. The only ethics we thought about was whether or not we could cover the cost of the training we were able to provide our branches. Pretty black and white. There's a whole nother issue on the ethics of not training in that world. 

Regardless, now that I work solely in Adult Education, the subject of ethics in our organization has come up a few times. Strangely, it wasn't until I was forced to write a paper on it in a previous class that it came to the forefront of my mine. Working for a non-profit, who services all types of folks, we deal with ethical issues often. Some of the most pernicious being:

• How do we balance charging enough to stay in business vs making training economical for our learning community
• With so many non-english speakers, do we train in their native language that they best understand? How will that affect their safety in teh field when so much safety equipment, standards, procedures, and signage is in English?
• If we know that the best, most effective way to train is to do "x", and we do "y" because it's the most economical, can we really say we are satisfying our mission of keeping our learners safe in the field?

I guess that all of the above are more "consequentialism" since what we see that matters is that the learner goes away having learned and hopefully being safer in the field. 

What I've found regarding ethics is similar to what you've said about discussions of the weather, with a side helping of cost consciousness. So much of what we deal with in the contracting world boils down to two things, "does it have to be done by law" and "do we have the money to do more."