Moral Questions in the Classroom: how to get kids to think deeply about real life and their schoolwork
By Katherine G Simon
Yale University Press pound;14.50

At a time when citizenship, spirituality, faith schools and yobbish behaviour are in the news, it is good to see how these issues can look on the other side of the Atlantic. Katherine Simon’s book started life as a doctoral thesis and was concerned to investigate moral and existential questions within three American high schools: one Jewish, one Roman Catholic and one non-religious.

She has a gift for commentary on the ebb and flow of argument and an insight into what skills and qualities make a teacher who can lead pupils to face morally charged issues. If ultimately you save lives by killing innocent people (Hiroshima, for instance), is it a war crime?

Read more in this week’s TES Friday magazine