A Preliminary Examination of the Concept of Altruism as an Aim of Education Liz Jackson, University of Hong Kong Presented at the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia Conference, 2013. (lizj@hku.hk) Today there is a growing sense in diverse countries that education should prepare young people to react to effects of globalization, good and bad. In Hong Kong, globalization is a major facet of secondary social studies, and textbooks focus on perspectives critical and skeptical about the implications of cultural, economic, and political globalization. The Australian curriculum similarly focuses on “global conflicts” and developing students’ skills “to participate in contemporary debates” (ACARA, 2013). Kathy Hytten (2008) argues relatedly that philosophers of education should focus on concepts related to education for “critical democracy” and “compassionate citizenship,” amidst a sense of hopeless in global anarchy, and against an overly simplistic globalization-as-free-trade model. She likens compassion to “caring about others,” and argues for a conception of critical, “justice- oriented” citizens, who focus on foundational problems, organizing food drives rather than merely contributing to them, and attending to structural injustice worldwide and not merely its most colorful symptoms. Words like “compassion” and “caring” are worth scrutinizing in relation to formal education, however. They are normally understood to refer to emotional states. Though developing of appropriate emotional expressions may be within the domain of schooling, particular emotions cannot be taught or assessed in a reasonable way. Multicultural educators are conscientious about such attempts to foster feelings, attitudes, and dispositions via schooling, because it often seems such attempts backfire (Applebaum 2008; McCarthy 2003). Students may disengage from or more actively resist education which is seen to have an affective component, which asks students to feel particular ways about others in society. Moral education more generally is a messy domain. As Martin Buber has noted, teacher instructions about morality can seem like a joke to students, who need not see their educator as a moral authority in their lives (1955). Though Eamonn Callan views moral education more optimistically, he too argues that teaching from the right sense of moral conviction or distress can be difficult, as there are issues of morality about which people can hardly agree to disagree (16997). Furthermore, whether greater sensibilities of compassion and caring should be developed in a society also remains worth questioning. From a liberal theoretical view such as Kantianism, personal autonomy and reason are seen as sacrificed when one is swayed by emotion. For instance Immanuel Kant has written that, “It is not possible that our heart should swell from fondness for every man’s interest and should swim in sadness at every stranger’s need; else the virtuous man…with all this goodheartedness would become nothing but a tenderhearted idler” (1965, p. 58-59; Blum, 1980, p. 153). Consequentialists similarly see little value in the development of emotional states apart from actions. As I have argued elsewhere in relation to