When Mentoring Becomes a Moral Act: Rethinking Teacher Care in Sri Lanka

A new conceptual study argues that teacher mentoring should be understood not as a professional duty or a set of techniques, but as an ethical practice rooted in care, trust, and moral responsibility. Writing in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, researchers Sivaselwam Arulnesan, Benny Thomas, and Deviga Subramani of Christ University in Bengaluru, India, present a philosophical framework that places student flourishing at the center of the mentoring relationship. Their work, published on 14 October 2026, is grounded in the particular realities of Sri Lankan classrooms, yet the authors contend that the framework they construct travels well beyond that island nation’s borders.

The paper addresses what the authors identify as a theoretical gap in the mentoring literature. Much existing scholarship treats mentoring as an empirical matter, examining what mentors do, how often they meet with students, and what outcomes follow. The new study instead interrogates mentoring philosophically, asking what kind of moral enterprise it actually is. Through a method the authors describe as conceptual decomposition and comparative synthesis, they break mentoring down into its constituent ethical elements and then rebuild it into a coherent cross-cultural model. The result is a framework built on three interconnected cornerstones: relational trust, moral responsibility, and student flourishing.

To construct this model, the researchers deliberately bridged intellectual traditions that rarely appear in the same conversation. On the Western side, they draw on the care ethics of Nel Noddings, whose relational account of education holds that caring is completed only when the cared-for receives and responds to that care, and on Aristotle, whose virtue ethics frames moral development as the cultivation of character through habituated practice within a community. These frameworks supply the vocabulary of care and ethics that dominates much Anglophone educational theory.

But the authors insist that Western frameworks alone cannot capture the moral texture of Sri Lankan schooling. The study therefore synthesizes Eastern and religious moral traditions into the same architecture. Buddhist teachings on Karuna, or compassionate action, provide an account of care as active benevolence toward suffering beings. The Hindu Guru-Shishya tradition frames the teacher-student bond as a sacred relationship of transmission, devotion, and mutual obligation. Islamic conceptions of responsibility emphasize the mentor’s accountability before God for those entrusted to their guidance. Christian teaching on Agape, unconditional love, contributes a vision of care extended without expectation of return. By placing these traditions in dialogue with Noddings and Aristotle, the authors produce a pluralistic ethical foundation that mirrors the multi-ethnic, multi-religious composition of Sri Lankan society itself.

The Sri Lankan context is not incidental to the argument. The country’s classrooms are shaped by decades of ethnic diversity and by the continuing work of post-conflict reconciliation following its long civil war. In such an environment, the authors argue, the moral character of the teacher carries weight far beyond individual academic outcomes. A mentor who embodies trust and responsibility can model the very dispositions, patience, fairness, compassion across difference, that social cohesion requires. Education, in this view, is not merely a delivery system for credentials but a mechanism for the holistic well-being and social renewal of the nation. Mentoring becomes one of the most intimate sites where that renewal either happens or fails to happen.

The first cornerstone of the proposed model, relational trust, is treated as the precondition for everything else. Trust in this framework is not a vague sentiment but a relational achievement built through consistency, vulnerability, and demonstrated concern over time. When a student trusts a mentor, the student becomes willing to disclose difficulties, take intellectual risks, and accept guidance, all of which are necessary for growth. The authors position trust as the relational infrastructure on which the other components depend: without it, expressions of responsibility can feel like surveillance, and aspirations toward flourishing can feel like pressure.

The second cornerstone, moral responsibility, reframes what a mentor owes to a student. In the authors’ account, responsibility is not simply accountability for tasks completed or curricula covered. It is a sustained ethical commitment to the student’s whole person, their intellectual development, certainly, but also their emotional, social, and moral formation. This is where the religious traditions in the synthesis do distinctive work. The Guru-Shishya tradition and Islamic notions of guardianship both treat responsibility for the learner as something close to sacred, an obligation that does not lapse when the school day ends. The framework thereby pushes back against thin, contractual understandings of the teacher’s role.

The third cornerstone, student flourishing, supplies the model’s telos, its ultimate purpose. Drawing implicitly on Aristotelian eudaimonia and on holistic conceptions of well-being found across the traditions the authors survey, flourishing here means more than achievement. It denotes the development of a person capable of living well, acting ethically, and contributing to community. The paper’s central claim is that mentoring achieves this aim only when it is practiced as ethical care: trust makes flourishing possible, responsibility directs it, and flourishing in turn justifies and motivates the entire enterprise. The three components are presented as mutually reinforcing rather than sequential.

Perhaps the study’s most provocative assertion is that mentoring is essentially a moral act rather than a professional one. That distinction matters for how teacher education is designed. If mentoring is merely professional, it can be packaged into training modules, checklists, and evaluation rubrics. If it is fundamentally moral, then teacher preparation must cultivate ethical sensibility, self-understanding, and the capacity for genuine relationship, capacities that resist reduction to competencies. The authors argue that their framework provides a strong foundation for teacher education reform and school policy in Sri Lanka, calling for institutions to take seriously the formation of teachers as moral exemplars rather than as technicians of instruction.

Because the study is a theoretical work that synthesizes published literature and established educational theories, it involved no human participants, animals, or primary data collection, and the authors note it received no specific grant funding. Its contribution lies in the architecture it offers rather than in new measurements. Even so, the implications reach outward. Any education system serving plural societies, whether divided by ethnicity, religion, or language, faces the question of whose moral vocabulary should shape its classrooms. The Sri Lankan framework suggests an answer: not the imposition of a single tradition, but a deliberate synthesis in which Western care ethics, Buddhist compassion, Hindu discipleship, Islamic responsibility, and Christian love are treated as complementary resources. If the authors are right, the future of mentoring may depend less on new techniques than on an old idea, that to teach is to care for another person’s flourishing as a moral obligation, and that schools which forget this do more than fail their students; they forfeit education’s power to renew society.

Subject of Research: A conceptual framework theorizing teacher mentoring as ethical care for student flourishing in Sri Lankan education

Article Title: Mentoring as ethical care: trust, responsibility, and student flourishing in Sri Lanka

Article References: Mentoring as ethical care: trust, responsibility, and student flourishing in Sri Lanka. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41599-026-09287-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41599-026-09287-1

Keywords: teacher mentoring, ethics of care, Sri Lanka, student flourishing, relational trust, moral responsibility, care ethics, Nel Noddings, Aristotle, Buddhist Karuna, Guru-Shishya tradition, post-conflict reconciliation