Stephen Pickard | Michael Welker | John Witte (Eds.): The Impact of Education (Leseprobe)

22 Stephen Pickard
ture is a “Leaver” culture that resonates with “natural systems as members of the
bio-community.” Leaver cultures across the world, representing 99 percent of the
time that the human genus has existed, “make amore appropriate baseline for
determining the goals and methods of moral education.” Narvaez addresses the
“neurobiology of morality and the vitality of nature-centered morality.” She argues
for areturn to a “sustainable Indigenous wisdom.”
Narvaez identifies the hubris of civilized moral educationasobservedindiscussions
of morality that “move too quickly into abstractions, reasoning,and right
thinking, leaving behind the cultivationofmoral being, manner,and virtue.” She
contrasts ancestral moral development—“evolved nest or evolved developmental
niche, EDN,” as an extragenetic inheritance—with children ofcivilized nations,
who typically lack many of the evolved-nest components even before birth and
arrive at school already less developed “in terms of self-in-nature, lacking selfconfidence,and
exhibiting various pathologies.” Narvaez identifies some critical
areas for twenty-first-century moral education to thwart the destructive trajectory
toward the self-demise of the human species. The chapter is apowerful clarion
call to recover “an earth-centered, nature-respecting moral education.” It is afitting
and prophetic chapter to round out arich and diverse volume.