kids tend to see things in black and white, very moralisitc and legalistic ways until well into their teens.
i don’t think you CAN teach tolerance and respect.
you can teach kids not to beat each other up, not to interrupt each other, not to use abusive language, etc etc.
you CANNOT teach kids under a certain age the difference between moral thoughts and moral actions.
they don’t get it.
It’s too bad this is so but it doesn’t have to be so. I think many here are in agreement that while teching specific answers to given ethical or moral situations is asking for trouble teaching the ability for students to make good decisions on their own is worthwhile.
As mentioned earlier too many teachers are geared to ‘teaching the test’ but that is a subject for another debate. I think many students, such as you, would enjoy a good class on philosophy sans memorizing who said what and when to be tested on.
Whack-a-Mole
I agree with your statement.
IMHO…
Parents should be raising the children to learn from right and wrong (morals/values/whatever).
Public schools are in place to teach. Yes, it helps if the teachers and administrators have good morals and values as well…but for the most part…it should come from parenting.
I am an atheist, firmly committed to the separation of church and state.
However, I do not have a problem with public schools imparting the most fundamental and most universal moral: the golden rule. (Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.)
Though this precept appears in every major religion in one form or another, I think the rule transcends religion. It is an essential principle of any smoothly-functioning human society, and should be taught as a social responsibility.
Once you apply the golden rule, it is easy for a teacher to address some of the more specific moral issues raised in this thread. Bullying a problem? Apply the golden rule. Want to teach about racism? Use the golden rule. How does it feel when you are on the receiving end of bullying or bigotry?
See how nicely it works? And without injecting religion into the curriculum.
I also think some discussion of civic responsibility is appropriate (that is, the responsibility of a citizen to the society of which they are a part). As an example, American students should leave school understanding why they have an obligation to accept jury duty as a part of the price of citizenship.
Beyond those two general principles, I think schools should stay out of the morality business.
The golden rule scares me senseless. I do not want to have my penis pierced with the implicit consent granted under, “Well, I would want someone else to pierce my penis!”
So, you don’t run around jabbing needles through anyone’s wabbily bits, without their explicit consent.
That’s frightening in what way?
It seemed quite clear to me.
Imagine a person who wishes someone would kill him. Imagine a person who enjoys being beaten. A person who enjoys public humiliation. In short, of all the things under the sun, I don’t want people treating me like they’d like to be treated. This invites every horror under the sun I can think of.
I think looking at the rule that way would be going at it backwards. The relevant part isn’t “I enjoy this, so I’m going to do it to everyone” but “I’m not going to unnecessarily do things to other people that they find unpleasant, just as I would not wish for them to do to me things I find unpleasant, even if we differ individually as to what those things are.”
The relevent part is the complusion to do to others what you would approve of them doing to you. It seems quite plain. Your interpretation seems to be an interesting alternative, though it only seems to be one possible substitution among many, and in fact, its application contradicts others. “Don’t unecessarily do to others what they don’t like.” Well, hey, no kidding. I’m actually not aware of any moral structure that explicitly denies this by sufficiently loose interpretations of “necessary” and epistemological slipperiness of knowing in advance what people you don’t know “like”.
It also makes what people like irrelevant to the government (in a democracy) as everyone cannot know everyone, and so the only criterion available is “necessity”, making the enactment of all laws that aren’t based on practicality immoral. Would you agree with that?
I agreed wholeheartedly until the last part, which I don’t think I would take quite that far. I suppose that the principle could be argued to be at the heart of every ethical system, and the debate lies in proper application: “What is hateful to thyself, do not to another. That is the whole of the law, the rest is commentary”-Hillel.
For example, to me, Kant’s categorical imperative was an attempt to arrive at the golden rule principle by means of reason: act as though by acting you are willing your action into a universal law, treat people as an end to themselves and not simply as a means to an end, etc. etc. He was trying to come up with a system of morality that wasn’t just mystical but could be logically demonstrated. But that’s getting way outside of the scope of the OP, and I don’t want to hijack (well, any more than I just did).
It is not the responsibility of public schools to teach morals. Reinforcing them is another issue.
The public school’s primary duty, though, is to educate – not indoctrinate. Morality, especially since it so often religion-based, should ultimately be taught to a child by his/her parents.
Just MHO.
agroof
Doh. That should read “especially since it is so often religion-based…”
Of course it is. The sciences are taught dispassionately, on basis of fact. Why should the social studies be any different?
You can discuss any set of facts without revealing or imposing your own biases in the process. For example: elective abortion is the induced termination of a pregnancy; homosexuality is a preference for intimate contact between persons of the same gender; birth control is any one of several methods used to evade pregnancy. These are the facts. Describing them isn’t tantamount to advocacy.
They already have the final say, don’t they? If you don’t like what Johnny is learning in public school you move him to a private one or you pull him out and educate him yourself. Education is compulsory; the choice of school is yours.
I would have to disagree. It sounds to me like you’re trying to push the appearance of morality as opposed to the substance, which isn’t the same thing. In fact it’s the opposite thing, if one takes your examples at face value. Consider:
1, 6, 8: Charity is a theological virtue, not a platonic one, and is therefore inappropriate to secular education. School is the place young people should learn prudence, temperance, courage and justice because opportunities to illustrate and reinforce these values occur every day. Faith, hope and charity on the other hand are Sunday school cirricula that should be left to parents and clergy to inculcate.
I believe it’s a violation of the church-state separation doctrine for you to teach theological values of any description in a public school classroom, no matter how uplifting or worthwhile those values may be.
Slang comes and goes all the time. The word “nice” for example used to mean “stupid” but now it’s understood as “agreeable.” The word “gay” as a derogative will either (a) lose its currency within a few months of South Park’s last episode, or (b) be added to the dictionary as yet another of that word’s subsidiary definitions. But so long as it’s used in a grammatically correct manner (i.e., without breaking the syntax) I don’t see your problem with it.
If you don’t like the term you don’t have to use it and you certainly don’t have to accept it in an oral or written report, but the philological objection is pointless, ain’t it?
6: You have to be 17 to donate blood, I believe, and several religions prohibit the practice altogether. Surely you’re not sacrificing time that could be spent discussing gerunds and dangling participles advocating “moral” activities that could be illegal and/or sacrilegious in nature?
8: Publicly praising someone for an act of volunteerism (street-cleaning, say) seems reasonable because it acknowledges the selfessness inherent in mortgaging a Saturday afternoon for the benefit of the community. Giving someone a gold star and hanging their picture on the noticeboard for a week because they dropped a 39-cent can of string beans into a collection box does not.
KoalaBear
I don’t know how to prove this, but I’ve never thought of charity as a theological thing–I, myself, am completely secular and still feel like it is important. It gets bundled up, along with voting and paying your taxes, with “citizenship”.
“Nigger” for trashy/messy is also a comon slang construction in some parts of the country. Do you think I should let my kids say “Man, this room looks like a nigger room!”? I don’t see “gay” as being any different–sure, my kids are just meaning it as “stupid”, but the fact that it is logical in their minds for gay to equal stupid says a great deal about how they view homosexuality in general. If they’ve never once thought about “gay” as being hurtful to homosexuals, then maybe it’s about godamned time someone pointed it out to them.
Furthermore, statistically speaking I almost certainly have gay kids in my classes who are not out, and a large part of why they are not out is because they fear the reaqctions of their cohorts and teachers. If they see me let “gay” or “faggot” go by without a word, I’m just confirming the idea that what they are is an insult to everyone–teachers and students.
A great many of my kids are 17 and 18–I teach high school. How much time do you think I am talking about? When the red cross comes to our school, I say “Hey, remember to sign up to donate blood on Tuesday if you can.” If a child says “Oh, miss, I can’t, I’m afraid of needles,” then I say “Oh, it’s not that bad. give it a shot!”., and then drop it. When kids come into my class with a “I donated blood” sticker, again I say “Good for you! You feeling ok?” All this takes out maybe 90 seconds of a 90 minute period, and is usually done while about 3 other things are going on simutainously.
Anyway, I’m late for school now.
Public schools should teach logic, debate, and political history, comparative religion and religious history, sociology and psychology and philosophy, legal principles and the core components of the nation’s laws and criminology.
In other words, the public school should be an environment in which the students are constantly exposed to the issues and content of moral debate, and are encouraged to understand and argue for or against many different sides of many different arguments, and to recognize a bad argument when they see one.
That should cover the ground, and yet it’s the complete opposite of indoctrination.
As several posters have already suggested, it’s not possible to have human beings, albeit young ones, in a given setting without some reference to morality.
That said, I think there are two aspects of morality that need to be taught in public schools, and several that ought not be.
The ethics of interpersonal relationships – based loosely on the Golden Rule, "you don’t do to him what you wouldn’t want him to do to you – are essential. And the ethics of self-respect and integrity of personal behavior are essential – this covers things like cheating, challenging yourself to do the best you can, that sort of thing.
What one ought to do or ought not to do in a given situation, whether it be a food drive for the poor or one’s personal standards as regards homosexual acts, are to be the product of the home and any religious institution or equivalent that the child happens to be affiliated with through his family, not the province of the public schools.
I agree with you, however a movement is beginning to teach morality in school, to pick up the parents’ slack. While studying for my (unused) English-Teaching degree, I was required to take a number of broad education classes in addition to the ones specifically about teaching English. One of the ones I ended up in was billed as “Special issues in Education,” with the focus to be announced the first class; I hadn’t wanted to sign up for such a vague class, but it was all that was left that fit into my schedule. To my dismay the topic turned out to be " teaching moral perspectives." :eek: I wasn’t able to change classes since there were no openings in other classes, so I was stuck with it. The professor talked a good game about educating rather than indoctrinating, but it didn’t feel as though we were expected to be doing anything but indoctrinate. It was one of the hardest classes for me to endure because I found so little about it not to be repugnant.
If my college was teaching this class in 98-99 you can be sure that others are too.
This seems to assume children will learn exclusively from their public school teachers. Why would the public school educational experience have to be all-encompassing? Certainly children could learn some of the other facets of life from other sources.
I don’t believe it is, or should be, the public education system’s duty to handle ALL aspects of a child’s education.
Enjoy,
Steven
I agree with you, but I’m afraid it’s only practicable for students who are above the age of consent. If you’re old enough to drive, have sex, vote, watch NC-17 motion pictures, sign contracts and assume bank debt, you’re old enough to discuss abortion, homosexuality and birth control no matter how much these topics might make your mother cringe.
I see. Assuming they both vote and pay taxes, the rich man who supports charity is a better citizen than the poor man who receives it?
I don’t think you have a choice. Public schools are an organ of the state, therefore students remain in possession of their constitutional freedoms. The sentence “Man, this room looks like a nigger room!” is offensive, but it’s also protected: you cannot legally stop them saying it.
In what way are your student’s views on homosexuality – pro or con – relevant to their competency in English grammar and composition?
In that case, you can kill two birds with one stone if you’re cunning. You can have them write an essay about their feelings toward homosexuals, grade them according to course objectives, then bring the papers that reveal heretical tendencies to the attention of district administration.
Let me give you some insight on this “coming out” thing: it’s an ordinary, inevitable, mostly harmless rite of passage into adulthood. It’s unquestionably stressful but rarely fatal, otherwise it would be a hell of a lot easier to find an affordable flat in the artsier neighborhoods of a hundred major cities. It takes a certain amount of courage to assert your true identity, but the jeopardy is front-loaded: once you’ve avowed yourself as a homosexual, atheist, Stalinist, or admirer of alternative medicine, the relief of no longer having to live a lie makes the brief period of turmoil you suffer as a consequence of that decision tolerable.
If your students don’t have the courage to live authentically, perhaps that’s a finer moral value to teach them than self-censorship disguised as compassion?
At what age you can vote, see NC-17 movies and the like are all arbitrary lines. I know 30-somethings who can’t manage bank debt and I know 13 year-olds who can easily handle discussions on abortion.
I agree with Ahunter3 that the tools for debate and critical thinking should be taught in high school and beyond. Heck, much of this can start being taught in elementary school. “Why do you feel it is ok to shove Timmy on the playground.” You might not get an eloquent answer from a 5[sup]th[/sup grader but you can start the wheels spinning when the child begins to realize he simply can’t come up with a convincing reason on why shoving people is a reasonable thing to do.