This article proceeds from the political philosophy of education and interdisciplinary ethics, inscribed in the multi-referential space of education and training sciences. We question the definition of teaching ethics as the art of being in the present. This proposal admits a simple understanding, that is to say a requirement for the teacher to be at what he/she does, and the term is then opposed to distraction or inattention. But this formula is also full of richer potentialities relative to the historical condition of the human subject. We thus work first on the notion of presentism, proposed as a heuristic tool to think the relationship of hypermodern democratic societies to time, in the double prism of individualism and teaching ethics. We then try to outline what could be an appropriate way to ethically consider the relationship to time of an autonomous individual and the ways to contribute to support it through teaching.