The Role of Virtue Ethics in the Deontological Training of Prospective Teachers

Today, the topic of insuring the quality in education is brought up often in public, legislative and academic debates. By analysing the new educational politics, we got to the conclusion that among the variables which ensure a quality education, there is the so called “quality of the teachers’ work”. This, in its own turn, depends on the quality of the initial and continuous training, on instructional standards, on the evaluation and certification of the didactical skills (Dumitru, 2007, pp. 13 - 23), and even on the deontological values and norms in the spirit of which the training and the teachers’ skills improve. The pedagogical language plays a special role in the training of future teachers. Its formative value is given both by its socio-cultural values and its pragmatic ones. Besides all these, there are also the ideological values that reflect the political conception which, at a given moment, dominated the society’s educational policy which was applied at the school level. All of these make the true educational message harder to be perceived by the future teachers, and many times it seems to be inadequate for the nowadays school system. So, it looks hard to put it into educational practice. This is the reason why our proposal is to have a deontological training content open towards virtue ethics which could restore the power of the moral values and virtues, the returning to their abstract significance and to the concrete reality they express.