Are public schools really not allowed to teach ethical values?

Great Debates
1

Lady Spectre and I are the lone leftist black sheep in my otherwise conservative, Republican family. As seems to be typical, my relatives will deprecate the general decline in morals, and my father asserts that public schools are literally not allowed to teach right and wrong. That is, if one kid steals another’s lunch, book, money, or whatever, the school is not allowed to tell him that’s wrong.

To me this has shibboleth written all over it, btu then I know next to nothing about how schools are run these days. Can anyone enlighten me?

I see this as potential debate fodder so I’ve placed it here, but if this is wrong will the mods please accept my apologies and move it.

2

It’s complete and utter bullshit.

The only thing schools are constitutionally prohibited from teaching are religious beliefs, though they can still teach about them.

While I could see some crazy parents screaming some isolated school into submission that the school should not have told their child that pushing or cutting in line is wrong, it’s just pure nonsense to claim that there is any sort of legal bar from telling a kid “killing another innocent person is horrible and wrong.” Heck, public schools very often teach kids values I disagree with, such as the idea that it’s always better to wash a cup rather than throw away a disposable cup. I can certainly complain to the school and get the teacher to stop indoctrinating my kids with this crap, but legally I don’t have much a basis for a suit, let alone a constitutional right to defend.

More likely, these are people who cannot distinguish morality from religious belief. In their world, if you can’t teach a kid not to kill via hitting them over the head with the Ten Commandments, then you might as well just let them kill whomever they please. I.e., it’s not the actual moral values they care about, just religion.

3

Yeah, it sounds like Religionists thinking that they invented morality.

But it sounds even more like whining about generally Republican supported platforms such as school prayer being abolished. In other words, Damn Democrats.

4

This would be news to the professor I had for Moral Prospectives in Modern education. According to that professor and all the books we were forced to read in that class, there is a movement in the US towards teaching children moral, but not regliously so, behavior. I really disliked the class (I signed up “for special issues in education” and had no idea that it was about morals until the first day since topics differ year to year) but there are a lot of books out there, like this one http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0674965906/qid=1057603095/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-0425780-3530262?v=glance&s=books

5

Interesting responses. WRT my family I should point out that they’re not religious conservatives at all, but their attitudes about social morals seem to come from the same cloth.

6

I would argue that there is some truth in what the OP’s dad asserts.

NOT because I think that schools are not stopping bullying or tolerating lying, and NOT becuase I think that lack of religion equates to lack of morality (which I don’t). But schools are pretty much prohibited from teaching any larger conceptual framework of morality; if/when a student asks why exactly lying is wrong and punishible, he is asking a question of moral philosophy for which there is no value-neutral answer.

Schools can and do teach ethical conduct; but thay are not (at least in theory and AFAIK) allowed to teach any cohesive set of ethical values.

7

Just hand the kid some Kant and see if he ever asks why again.

8

Well, the schools here in Tennessee teach a program called Character Counts. Every single week, a different “character” value is talked about, modeled, and encouraged. The kids are awarded t-shirts with different character traits on them.

Unless this program is unique to Tennessee, your family is mistaken. The schools can and do teach ethics. They cannot, however, label them as Christian values.

9

I suppose things could have changed drastically since I was in school, but I really have a hard time believing that. Why don’t you ask your Dad for an example of what he’s talking about. If he says something like, “such and such school wouldn’t let them read prayers over the PA system”, then you’ll have your answer. I would be highly surprised if he were to come up with an example of any school refusing to tell kids that stealing is wrong.

10

Hand the kid some Kant and see if he ever wants to read philosophy again. I’ve read Kant and hated every minute of it.

11

I wonder what the kids really think of it, though. I know I would (and did) see it as a bunch of adults saying “Be good” because they don’t want to deal with kids who break rules that exist for what kids might see as no good reason.

Either they teach the kids to say 1) “Stealing is wrong because of XYZ” or else the kid is just taught that 2) “Stealing is wrong. Teacher said so.” Option number one will quickly lead to proscribing a set of values, whether Theist, Utilitarian, or whatever. Option number two, which I guess more likely, leads any intelligent kid to wonder if all “morality” is just some sort of authoritarian social control (and there are plenty of people who think exactly that).

And before anyone asks, no I don’t have an solution. It is precisely because I think education will always teach certain values (intentionally or not) that I think state-run schools are a bad idea.

12

Which cohesive set of ethical values are you advocating they teach? The problem is, things are not so easy. Is lying always wrong? There are many cases where not lying might cause greater harm than lying. This is not value-neutral, it is just looking a bit more deeply at the problem - probably more deeply than elementary school children have the capacity for.

Seven years ago my daughter’s elementary school principal established a high level set of rules of things you don’t do (like fighting). This was in a very liberal small town, and no one objected. I suspect most people complaining about this want religious based standards that don’t allow anyone to ask questions.

13

No ethical values? Hah. Not only do schools have such things as Character Counts but, hey, literature and history will involve ethical values in the discussion of characters and events.

Now, it is quite so that little grade schoolers will not be able to understand the practical moral philosophy concept of why XYZ behavior is “wrong”… but the thing is, whatever the foundation of the ethics… well, there’s no PC way of saying it… even then * while they are children, we don’t owe them explanation to their full satisfaction before they deign to behave properly.* As their minds develop we must then introduce them to the deeper explanation of actions and consequences, things that are hurtful to others and to society, and of fairness and playing by the rules, and of respect for others’ welfare. Not stealing, not assaulting, not cheating, not lying maliciously, not being a leech – that can all be a part of Societal Ethics, the morality of ordered, organized, by-certain-general-rules play for the sake of a better quality of life for the entire tribe than if everyone is just following their impulses helter-skelter and hitting each other on the head with sticks.

For instance, the older version of the Golden Rule – Do NOT do to others what you wouldn’t like done to you – is a strong ethical statement AND need not be referential to any “higher authority”, yet it can be taught at an elementary level. (“That hurt him. How would you like it if someone hurt you?”)

Now, if the educational system and/or the teachers are unprepared for this and allow the kids to totally flummox the teacher by merely asking “why?”, well, sure the kids will conclude we’re making it up just to be contrary. That’s another story.

In the absence of mature reasoning, we pretty much have to start by conditioning children on that some things Are Not To Be Done, THEN we slowly explain the cost-benefit analysis, simply at first and later in a more sophisticated manner. Basing the “values” on a religious foundation could be seen as the ultimate “because Authority said so, so shut up” scenario --because you would never have to justify the rules even to adults! (BTW, At least from my POV, when I was 6 “because teacher says so” and “because mom says so” would have carried far more weight than “because Jesus said so”. Mom and the teacher, after all, were THERE.)

14

Quite obviously. My point is not that schools don’t teach values, but not in any organized way, and not always the ones we think we’re teaching them.

This is a statement of moral value. I happen to share it, and I suspect that we both have similar ideas about what it means to “behave properly.” But our values are by no means a universal. Very many parents hold a very (IMO) naive view of the purity of children, and react very strongly to what they see as authoritarian crushing of a child’s spirit when we tell them that they must learn to sit still for six hours a day.

To expand:

This is establishing a specific moral philosophy, one that claims not only which actions are right and wrong, but how right and wrong are determined. I would not really want people that believe that right and wrong are determined wholly on the basis of “the Bible says so” teaching my children; but still less would I feel comfortable with someone teaching them that the rightness and wrongness of an action is determined solely (or even primarily) by personal or social consequences or by a cost-benefit analysis. Simply because a utilitarian moral code doesn’t have a God doesn’t make teaching it any less of an exercise in moral indoctrination.

I submit that it is not beyond a six-year-old to think to himself that “do it to them before they do it to you” is a better answer, even if he hasn’t the nerve to say it, and that most teachers would be utterly flummoxed if he did. Without resorting to an ethical code of some sort, religious or secular, the question is unanswerable.

15

This was clearly a statement made by someone who has never set foot in a public school. As a teacher in a public school, I have heard some wild statements in my time about what we can and cannot do, but to claim that we can’t tell a student that lying or cheating or stealing or killing is wrong is just ludicrous. I teach history and my students and I are constantly examining the morality of what has happened in history. Where I try to be sensitive is in dictating what the “correct” answer is. Believe it or not, the students generally have a very high sense of morality. They frequently comment that some action isn’t right or isn’t fair. They tend to get incredibly upset when they learn about some of the dirty tricks that the Nixon White House pulled on his political enemies, for example.

16

School prayer has never been abolished. State sponsored school prayer has been abolished.

A good teacher would not try to answer the question. Rather, she or he would question the students and inspire classroom discussion. Teaching is not so much “in put” as “drawing out.”

Exactly!

BTW, during the twenty years that I taught, not once did I ever have an administrator discuss with me whether I could or could not teach values. There were places on the report cards, however, where we could check that students needed improvement in such things as “borrows without asking.”

I did have to sit through daily Bible readings, sermons by tel-evangelists with diamonds on their pinkies, group prayers lead by administrators in faculty meetings, and teachers leading students in group prayer. All of it was unConstitutional.

At a faculty meeting, one teacher complained to the principal about his daily Bible readings over the intercom. I never saw that man so angry. He slammed down his fist and said that he would not stop until he go a court order telling him not to.

That was the wrong thing to say. Her husband was an attorney for the ACLU. :smiley:

17

In my two years working in public schools I certainly saw ethical values being taught. There was no problem with sayin that stealing was “wrong.”

Spectre did your father reveal the source of his information? Is he a big talk radio fan? Well rest assured he is completely misinformed.

18

I agree … which is to say that I share your values in regards to the sort of education we give and what sort of teachers we aspire to be. But historically speaking, we are very much in the minority; for most of human history, a teacher’s job was exactly to “put in;” and I’m not quite confident enough to say that they were all wrong and I’m all right.

I do a thing in my freshman writing class on this very subject. When we discuss how values are often subtly embedded in a text, I have them analyze my syllabus and teaching style and surmise what my values are as a teacher. Then I have them analyze my willingness to be analyzed and what that says … it all gets very meta-.

19

The idea that teacher’s should draw knowledge from the dark recesses of the students’ minds is not a new one. Plato believed, 2500 years ago, that people were born knowing nearly everything and education was only about getting them to realise it.

The problem is that this is entirely false for some fields. Language classes, for example, must deal with imparting knowledge to the students because no one is born already knowing Greek or Spanish or whatever without realising it. Same for computer science, a university student doesn’t know, say the API for XML in Python deep in his soul. And because there is so much to learn in this modern world, students should not be expected to be able to figure it out on their own over time through experiments like in the ancient world. Education must be about taking what your teacher is telling you. Learning on your own can be done after school hours or in grad school.

UnuMondo

20

Based on having several teachers in the family, I can see a round about way that schools can’t teach ethics. One of the largest complaints for my family teachers is that they do not have the power to back up any disciplining. If a child steals, and the teachers attempts to punish him, a majority of the time (from my relative’s telling) the child’s parents will simply storm the school and defend the child, not allowing the school to punish him in any way. Thus negating any “learning” of ethical behavior the teacher attempted to instill.

Then again, I don’t think it’s the school’s place to teach ethical behavior anyway. Sure they could be a backup, but a kid should get it from home.