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Neel Noddings

Decent Essays

The concept of care and caring relationships vary from person to person. Author Nel Noddings addresses these concepts in her 2005 book The Challenge to Care in Schools: An Alternative Approach to Education. Once idea that Noddings discusses is caring for distant others; distant others would be the people you see on a day to day basis but are not connect with emotionally. She suggests that we are not obligated to care for distant others but I have a differing view. In my opinion, we are obligated to care for distant others by watching out for/warning others about dangers that may negatively impact their lives Caring for those who are not well connected with us as individuals is a delicate phenomenon. Nel Noddings’ addresses this idea in her …show more content…

As see states on page 116, “caring at a distance is fraught with difficulties.” (Noddings, 2005) “Finally, when we have the power and desire to act at a distance, it is tempting to initiate and control. We are too impatient or too confident or too puffed up with our own righteous sense of responsibility to listen and encourage initiative from others. (Noddings, 2005) Essentially, Noddings’ is trying to say that we –human beings–are too busy in our lives to worry about the wellbeing of those who are distant from us. It is difficult to care for distant others in Noddings’ sense of care because caring relationships require engrossment from carer to cared-for, and acknowledgement of the engrossment from cared-for to carer. “…we (here in the United States, for example) could not, as individuals, be obligated to care for starving children in Africa because there is no way for most of us to see caring through to its completion. We might sympathetically send $10 to Oxfam or some other relief organization, but we have no reliable method of knowing whether our money will be used to relieve hunger…I still think this is an accurate descriptive account of a major difficulty in trying to care at a distance.” (p.

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