Navigating the Ethical Landscape: Teacher-Student Relationships
The ethics of teacher-student relationships have long been a topic of discussion, especially when these interactions venture into romantic or sexual territory. While most of the literature deals with the ethics of romantic/sexual relationships with students and/or the ethics of teacher-student friendships, relatively few articles and books focus on what the ideal relationship should be. This article aims to address this gap by reviewing some basic concepts pertaining to the ethics of relationships and highlighting some pitfalls that plague our reasoning about them. Then it will look at the standard arguments offered against teacher-student romantic relationships and the more tentative arguments for and against teacher-student friendship.
The Foundation of Ethical Relationships
Humans engage in countless relationships, and these interactions play a crucial role in shaping our moral conscience. Philosophers and social scientists argue that relationships are where our moral compass is formed. Stephen Darwall emphasizes the importance of taking the second-person perspective, while Michael Tomasello highlights the understanding of duties associated with different social roles. Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory suggests that empathizing with others in social relationships fosters moral reasoning.
Ethical rules govern all relationships, such as avoiding harm without good cause. However, specific relationships have unique moral codes. Lawyers and doctors, for example, have a duty of confidentiality. The teacher-student relationship is just one of many, and understanding its ethics requires considering its purpose.
A simple way to think about the ethics of our social relationships is to focus on the purpose or telos of the relationship and to use that to determine what the respective duties of the parties to the relationship might be. Many relationships have a function or goal associated with them. The purpose of the doctor-patient relationship, for instance, is to improve the patient's health, requiring honesty from the patient and competence from the doctor. Similarly, the teacher-student relationship aims to educate the student. A teacher should not do something that subverts or undermines it, and nor should a student. Given the asymmetry of power between the teacher and student, the burdens are higher on the teacher than they are on the student.
Complexities and Challenges
However, this initial understanding of teacher-student relationship ethics has some problems.
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The purpose is vague: To say that teachers should educate their students isn’t to say much since people disagree about what education is really about. Is it about knowledge transfer? Providing credentials? Developing the capacity for critical thought and self-reflection? Producing better citizens for a democracy? Helping students find themselves? Each of these has been proposed as legitimate goal for education over the years and each of them might warrant a different mode of relating to students. Furthermore, some people have, no doubt in a self-serving way, argued that the eroticisation of the teacher-student relationship is part of the educational mission.
There are some problems with this initial take on the ethics of teacher-student relationships. The purpose is vague. To say that teachers should educate their students isn’t to say much since people disagree about what education is really about. Is it about knowledge transfer? Providing credentials? Developing the capacity for critical thought and self-reflection? Producing better citizens for a democracy? Helping students find themselves? Each of these has been proposed as legitimate goal for education over the years and each of them might warrant a different mode of relating to students. Furthermore, some people have, no doubt in a self-serving way, argued that the eroticisation of the teacher-student relationship is part of the educational mission. Relationships often overlap or nest: Humans often pursue multiple different kinds of relationships with people and often have different relationships types thrust upon them due to social circumstance or necessity. For example, many people are friends with their work colleagues; it is not uncommon for parents to teach their children (not just in homeschooling but in mainstream schools too); and some university professors teach friends or colleagues (because they enroll in their courses). This nesting or overlapping of relationships makes their ethical analysis more complicated. Is it always wrong to pursue different kinds of relationships with people at the same time? Relationship analogies are common: Humans often use analogies between relationships to determine the ethical rules that apply to them. We analogise between friendship and intimate partnership, for example, to figure out how we should relate to friends and lovers, respectively. Of course, analogical reasoning is common in human life, but it creates challenges when it comes to the ethics of relationships. If someone thinks a teacher-student relationship is like the relationship between a parent and a child, then they are likely to reach a different conclusion about how they should relate to their students than someone who thinks it is more like the relationship between a boss and an employee. This isn’t a purely hypothetical example either. There are other complications but these will suffice for now. In practice, the overlapping of different relationship types, and how this might bear on the purpose of the teacher-student relationship, is probably the most problematic issue and the one that has generated most debate in the literature on teacher-student relationship.
The Case Against Romantic/Sexual Relationships
The ethics of teacher-student sexual relationships has tended to dominate writing in this area. Teacher-student sexual relationships are a major problem. Recent revelations of rampant sexual harassment and assault of students by well-heeled professors, coupled with institutional misdeeds in covering up these affairs, highlight how rampant it is. In tandem with the #MeToo movement, and the broader societal activism against the sexual mistreatment of women and children, the academy is having to reckon with its history of abuse and misconduct.
While some "successful" romantic relationships may begin in this form, there are compelling reasons to view sexual relationships between teachers and students as inherently risky.
Power Asymmetry
First, the power asymmetry between the parties casts a shadow over any alleged consent to such a relationship. Teachers are the more powerful parties within such relationships, at least within a certain institutional context. They have some knowledge or skill that the student lacks and is supposed to learn from them. Even if the student is highly competent and intelligent in their own right, the default assumption is that this asymmetry exists. Furthermore, the teacher often has power over the future of the student, both in terms of their testing and evaluation, and their access to future opportunities (e.g. through reference writing). It’s a complicated question as to whether this power-asymmetry necessarily undermines any consent that might given to a sexual relationship. But you certainly could argue that there is a lingering, implicit threat inherent in the relationship. Even if this shadow doesn’t place the relationship within the realms of illegality or crime, it may, at the very least, place it within the category of what Ann Cahill has called ‘unjust sex’.
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Cahill argues that in certain contexts, there are less powerful parties whose sexual agency can be hijacked by more powerful parties. The result of this hijacking can be subtle and insidious. The weaker party may be encouraged to signal consent and approval of what the more powerful party desires in order to accredit it, even though they themselves appear to have limited choices. Cahill’s point is that these cases of unjust sex are not equivalent to rape or sexual assault but, rather, lie in a gray zone between rape and ethically permissible sex. Their moral character is tainted, even if it is not completely reprehensible.
Potential for Harm
Second, there appears to good evidence to suggest that these relationships are often harmful to the weaker party in the long-term. Fredrik Bondestam and Maja Lundqvist recently published a systematic review of the empirical research on the prevalence and consequences of sexual harassment in higher education. They found that it is linked to a number of harmful outcomes for both students and staff, but particularly students. Exposure to sexual harassment in higher education leads to physical, psychological and professional consequences for individuals. Examples such as irritation, anger, stress, discomfort, feelings of powerlessness and degradation are recurrent in research literature. Evidence-based research confirms more specifically that sexual harassment in higher education can lead to depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, physical pain, and eating disorders.
High School Context
Teacher-student relationships present a distinct ethical and moral challenge in high schools, where students are minors or just reaching adulthood. This issue is not only about age differences; it also involves the inherent power imbalance and the teacher’s duty of care. Teachers hold authority in the academic environment; they assign grades, enforce rules, and are expected to act as role models. Conversely, students are in a vulnerable phase of personal and intellectual growth, making them susceptible to influence and pressure. Teachers are also bound by a duty of care, which is their ethical and often legal obligation to prioritize the well-being and development of their students. This duty does not end at the classroom door but extends to all aspects of their students’ welfare, including their social, emotional, and psychological health.
Most high school students are under 18, making these relationships illegal in many regions. Even in cases where both parties are of legal age, a significant age gap can raise concerns about emotional maturity and potential exploitation. Public perception and the potential for perceived exploitation often mean these relationships are widely criticized.
Legally, once a student has left school and reached adulthood, relationships with former teachers may be permissible, but ethically, there’s still a grey area. The teacher-student relationship is ultimately rooted in trust, guidance, and care. Given the risks of emotional harm and exploitation and the potential to erode public confidence in educators, it is generally considered unethical to pursue romantic relationships in high school settings.
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The Murkier Waters of Teacher-Student Friendships
The ethics of teacher-student friendships are more contested. Some argue that these friendships can be beneficial, fostering mentorship and support beyond the classroom. Others worry about the potential for bias, favoritism, and the blurring of professional boundaries.
Maintaining Professionalism
Physician teachers, possessed of both instinct and intellect, are required to be respectful exemplars of professionalism and interpersonal ethics in all environments, be it the hospital, classroom, or outside the educational setting. Sometimes, even while protecting the sanctity of the teacher-student relationship, they may surreptitiously find themselves in the throes of consensual intimacy, boundary violations, student exploitation, or other negative interpersonal and/or departmental dynamics. One may question how an academic can consistently resolve this tension and summon the temperance, humility, charity, and restraint needed to subdue lust, pride, abuse, and incontinence in the workplace. One important answer may lie in an improved understanding of the moral necessity of social cooperation, fairness, reciprocity, and respect that is constitutive of the physician-teacher role. Although normative expectations and duties have been outlined in extant codes of ethics and conduct within academic medicine, to date, few training programs currently teach faculty and residents about the ethics of appropriate pedagogic and intimate relations between teaching staff and students, interns, residents, researchers, and other trainees.
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