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Nel Noddings was born on January 19, 1929 where she grew up on the east coast of New Jersey. She used her motivation as a first generation high school graduate to reach for a higher education. Noddings stayed in New Jersey, where she earned Bachelor’s Degree in mathematics and physical sciences from Montclair State College and a Master’s Degree in mathematics from Rutgers University. She then taught mathematics for 17 years at the elementary level to high school level before earning her Ph.D. in Education from Stanford University. However, before all of Noddings educational success, at the age of 20, married her high school sweetheart, James A. Noddings, whom she had ten children with. As of right now, she has written a total of 17 books, all dealing with the concept of education.

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Dr. Noddings discusses critical lessons in both high school and elementary school. She pointed out troubled efforts in teachers at school and how it has become difficult to include controversial topics and questions that don’t have an absolute answer into children’s education without setting off the wrong intentions. Noddings claims that a lot of events and situations that are deemed too ‘problematic’ to young students are being heavily neglected, which ends up shifting their education to only one single mindset and denies them of their own voice and opinions. Throughout her book Critical Lessons: What Our Schools Should Teach (2006), she discusses the morality seen in teachers and students and making the conscious decisions to make good choices. One of the most recognizable ideologies from Nel Noddings is  what she calls a Care Theory. Her care theory embraces what she describes as “a fundamental human need”: “to care for and be cared for”. She argues that caring should be the foundation for ethical decision-making and morality. Promoting her theory, one of Noddings most important contributions was her thinking on ethics and caring through her groundbreaking book, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984). This book to stresses the importance of what it means to be a good person, emotionally and morally, with rules regarding our acts of caring, equity, and our own personal values.

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Critical Lessons: What Our Schools Should Teach (2006)

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As true as Dr. Nel Noddings words and works sound, there still are a few flaws within them. One critique was based on her work on critical lessons in school and education, disagreeing with her thought process on how teachers are not able to reveal controversy to mainly the elementary level audience due to the fact that they will simply not understand it. Andrea Libresco argues that it can be fairly easy to explain troubling events to young children and easy for them to comprehend it through the help of different perspectives and even books. Further it is interpreted that teachers face immense self-pressure due to current events socially, culturally, and sometimes politically, making it difficult to include topics that may or may not go against their own personal opinions. Another critique is the possible disruption between the teacher and student relationship when discussing such events, and Noddings claims these relationships to be vital to a morally correct education. However, I think in current times today's youth is about to differentiate between facts and personal opinions brought up to them by their educators.

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One way Nel Noddings contributions were put to use was through the severe times in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit the southeast part of the United States. Margaret Smith Crocco highlights Noddings work in critical lessons when teachers used this tragedy as a way to teach children about the different types of natural disasters and what they can do to prepare if they found themselves caught up in one, like Hurricane Katrina. These lessons slowly create questions in children’s minds about why things happen and how people react to them and through the student-teacher relationships, allows them to ask these questions to other school or non school related topics. This is what Noddings claims as moral interdependence, which pays mind to how teachers choose to respond to the questions they are asked. This gradually ties back into her care theory and ideas on moral ethics, where it is up to the educator to be responsible for what information they give out to the youth because of how it may affect them morally.

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Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984)