and of the character) are given appropriate expression. Borrowing from McLaughlin
(2003a) who uses the term pedagogic phronesis to describe the practical wisdom
necessary for good teaching, I want to claim that one of the aims of education for nurses
and others engaged in professional activities is to make possible, indeed to positively
encourage, the development of professional phronesis in students and practitioners.
This idea encapsulates the notion that while compulsory schooling may aim to educate
for citizenship and for everyday phronesis, it does not prepare sufficiently for
professional life: whereas professional education should strive to educate for
professional phronesis.
If this is true then it should be clear that professional education must do more than
merely teach propositional and practical knowledge; it must educate for professional
practical wisdom, this is to say that those involved in the education of nurses must take
seriously their obligations in enabling students to develop professional phronesis. And
this means that one important feature of professional nursing practice is (to paraphrase
Aristotle) the ability for an individual nurse to aim at doing the right thing with (or to)
the right patient at the right time in the right way and for the right reason(s). Understood
in this way it is evident that competence in propositional and practical knowledge
(knowing that and knowing how) of itself is insufficient for professional phronesis.
Education for professional phronesis is a form of moral education. Moral education
presupposes that people do in fact have enduring traits of character and that it is both
possible and desirable to encourage in students dispositions that contribute to human
flourishing while at the same time discouraging character traits that detract from the
pursuit of human goods. As such, moral education is education of character as well
intellect. In this largely Aristotelian conception of ethics, moral education seeks to
ensure that, in the realm of nursing practice, knowledge and/or technical ability is not
divorced from associated and inherent values. This is important for nursing as a
professional practice, as opposed to say plumbing, precisely because nursing aims at
human goods and, therefore, requires more than mere technical mastery and expertise4.
It is not that moral education is a separate subject to be taught in the way that
physiology or ethics may be taught, it is rather that the practice of education per se
should not ignore or neglect matters of character. In education for professional life it is
necessary that practitioners are encouraged to behave in morally acceptable ways not
4 For a fuller discussion of this point but in relation to teaching see Carr 2003
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