Ethics and Complexity of Educational Action

The article starts from the analysis of the relationship between education and ethics, taking into account the role played in this context by communication. Every educational relationship is based on a preliminary ethical and anthropological option and it is essential to work on the nexus between ethics and education, without resorting to moralistic exhortations or prescriptive logic. For this perspective, it is useful to consider the etymological roots of the lemma ethics, which, in the ancient Greek world, encompasses a semantic spectrum of concepts that include habit, usual environment, custom. Its meaning is therefore often signifi cantly different the modern one, and may imply a different system of norms and values. If we accept that ethos designates the common home of humanity, we must accept that education and training cannot crystallize into a set of rules and precepts independent of the autonomous becoming of subjectivity. Educational practices are always part of deliberative moral contexts requiring commitment, responsibility and sharing of rules, and are subject to the dialectic between freedom and necessity. Education should be the autonomous and creative construction of people seeking their place within the general context of humanitas. The task/challenge of education and educational theory, then, is to propose theoretical approaches and concrete practices that contribute to the growth of the individual as a ‘constructer of ethical and political reality’ and to educational and communication strategies that promote the interrupted dialogue between education, ethics and politics in contemporary society.