Agreed… but I submit that teachers, and school generally are role models and powerful imparters of values. 1000+ hours a year in school adds up.
Absolutely.
(deep breath, and…)
Schools and teachers (parents, too, but this thread isn’t about them) create a “moral ecology” in which children learn. Formal lessons may be a part of it, but they are only a part. The anecdote j.c. relates exemplifies what I mean by this. The kids in the class got a very clear lesson in values: namely that regardless of what they say, the people in charge think that order is more important than justice (“I don’t care who started it, you’re all punished”). I suspect that the lesson those children learned trumps a hundred lectures about the importance of playing fair.
You can’t not teach moral lessons. If you teach history at all, you are reflecting a moral judgement that it is right and good to study the past. Well, we’re probably all on board with that … but which history? In covering the Civil War, do we pay any attention at all to the fact that millions still see it as a “war of Northern Agression?” Do we talk about Sally Hemings? Do we skim over the Spanish-American War, or present it as the pivotal moment when a isolationist nation became an imperial power?
You can’t just say “cover all of it” or “present all views.” There are only so many days in the year, and often the most important choices you make as a teacher are the things that you leave out. Which three books are you going to use for the World Lit class? Do you focus on teaching the basics of scientific literacy, or do you emphasize the method? Something is always going to be less emphasized, and something will always be left out, and someone’s parents will always be pissed. But whose?
And always, the most powerful lessons will not be what we teach, but how we teach it. Is there a clear sense of authority in the class, or does the teacher make themselves a “co-discoverer?” Is there a fixed curriculum, or does it bend to meet the students’ interests and wishes? Are there tests and grades? Do students have to “pass” in order to “move up” and finally “graduate?” These are all highly value-laden questions, but you cannot begin to structure an educational program until you answer them.
I am a huge believer in the Socratic method … but that is because I have the firm belief (based in my religion) that truth exists, that human beings can find it, and that in doing so they can make their lives more meaningful. Yet is not hard at all to find fundamentalists who insist that Truth is only found in divine revelation, and it is even easier to find professional educators that believe that the whole idea of “Truth” is a fiction, consciously or unconsciously devised to enshrine specific power structures. There are lots of very intelligent people (many of them professional educators) who believe that the very ideas of “objectivity” and Aristotelian logic are European Male constructs, and that their place at the center of education amounts to institutional sexism and racism. Whether they are right or wrong is irrelevant (I actually think they have some points). Nor is it important that they are a small minority; they are merely the extreme version of someone who wishes schools spent more time on art and music and not so much on maths.
“But math is useful. Schools should focus on giving students the skills they need to succeed.”
I ask all my students to write an essay about why they are in college. The clear majority answer with something about getting a good job and having careers and making money (the other popular answers are “to party” and “I dunno”). That is their definition of “success,” but it is not mine. I quite frankly don’t give a rat’s ass how much money they make after they leave my class.* I sure as hell don’t live on McDonald’s wages just so I can have the great privilege of helping them become millionaires. But I will and do give myself ulcers worrying about whether or not my lessons are good enough and stay up until 4 a.m. grading papers because I believe passionately that education can make them better human beings.
It quite frankly sickens me that so many of them have such a shallow conception of what it means to be a human and what the value of an education is. But it shouldn’t surprise me, because that is exactly what they are taught.
Every kid knows that the purpose of Fourth Grade is to prepare for Fifth Grade, which prepares you for Junior High and then High School and finally College, after which you will be an Grown-Up and have a Job. If you don’t do well in school, you won’t get a Good Job, which means you are a Failure. Yes, there are good teachers; but the lesson of the whole system in which students are segregated by age and graded is that your purpose is to advance, that there is shame in failure and falling behind, that education is something to be gotten through until you finally arrive at your real destination and can be done with it. The strictly utilitarian and economic view of education that my students have is exactly the one that their school experience has taught them.
Which is not to say that I’m advocating a touchy-feely system with no judgement or structure or rules or consequences, where every child knows in his heart that he is God’s Special Sunflower. I think most kids need to be smacked hard in the ass occasionally and told that they are in fact not a beautiful and unique snowflake.
I am not advocating a system at all. What I am pointing out is that any system, any teacher, any lesson will teach specific values, and that in comparison to those, any attempts at directly teaching “ethical values” are frosting. But addressing the larger sort of moral education that happens in a school would necessarily involve asking the altogether troublesome question of why we think kids need educating anyway, and what our purpose for the whole thing is. We can’t/won’t do that because we fear we won’t reach a consensus, and we’re right.
We end up with a system in which kids stumble along without any clear purpose, with no organizing principle to lend order to all these facts they’re getting, no connection between disciplines, no way to place any relative value on the intellectual currency dumped in their lap. And of course this is itself a moral lesson: the obvious implication is that there is no connection, that life is some stuff followed by some other stuff and that there is no plan or design or structure to it all. Teachers may try to give kids a sense of purpose, but since the economic reason is the only one that teachers can give kids without offending anyone (who doesn’t like money?), that’s all they can fall back on.
Thus it is that when you ask a graduate of our system what the purpose of an education is, all you get is “I dunno. To get a job and make money, I guess.”
And I think that is very sad.
*(unless of course they plan to cut me in on it).