> Has anyone ever stopped to consider the ethical question of applying the latest unproven fads of educational theory to unwitting students?
Since this Catherine Project seems to be trying to offer a traditional education practice to students who are both witting and willing, and thus, to me, at least, doesn’t seem to raise any serious ethical issues, I will comment on your point about ethical issues in public education.
I teach and do research on foreign-language education in a non-English-speaking country, and a few years ago I started to think about the ethical issues involved in that area of education. In Japan, where I live, all school children are required to study English even though the majority of Japanese children and adults have little or no need for English in their lives. The teaching methods can involve activities that some students find embarrassing, such as presentations and role playing; some children also seem to feel that being required to speak a foreign language threatens their personal identity.
While children themselves will complain about having to study English and raise ethical issues about it (“Why do we have to do this!?”), the discourse among both educators and the general public seems to ignore whether it is morally acceptable to require all children to study and try to speak a foreign language that most of them will not use and will soon forget.
When I mentioned my inchoate thoughts about these issues to a philosopher colleague, he pointed me to the is-ought problem raised by David Hume [1, 2, 3]. That helped to clarify for me a related issue that had been bothering me. A lot of research about foreign-language education seems to be based on empirical, objective information (what is), such as whether a particular teaching method leads to higher test scores or not. Education researchers, however, often conclude their papers and presentations with ethical recommendations for action (what ought to be done), such as to adopt the teaching method that does lead to higher test scores. The ethical and logical problem with that kind of is-to-ought reasoning rarely if ever is discussed, at least in my corner of the field of education.
I don’t know if the same problem exists in other areas of education or in education policy in Ontario. But I can say that I was similarly annoyed as a child, in public schools in California more than fifty years ago, when I realized that we were being experimented on with a series of educational “innovations” of dubious benefit and without our consent.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
[2] https://iep.utm.edu/evol-eth/#SH1c
[3] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume-moral/#io