Abstract
In education, the teacher’s fiduciary duty to their students has been usually considered within the context of legal or ethical studies. In this article, I consider the notion of the teacher’s fiduciary duty from a pedagogical point of view as the obligatory relationship that shapes guidance, advisement, and organization of the educational processes. I discuss what the fiduciary duty in general and the pedagogical fiduciary duty in specific is. I examine the three major arguments against the teachers’ pedagogical fiduciary duty to their students coming from educational paternalism, institutionalism, and self-directed education. Similar to the legal and medical field studies of the fiduciary duty, I bring and analyze several problematic cases of the teachers’ pedagogical fiduciary duty to their students, involving a teacher’s unsolicited guidance, non-fiduciary fiduciary, autopaternalist fiduciary, and legitimatizing the student’s voice. Based on these cases, I abstract five types of self-education. Finally, I contemplate how much the teacher-student pedagogical fiduciary relationship is dialogic and democratic.