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Should Ethics be Taught in Public Schools? |
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What’s wrong with litter and roadrage? What is the purpose of courtesy and respect when dealing with total strangers? Why is whistleblowing and samaritanism preferable to minding our own business? Why should we obey the law when we can get away with breaking it?
Hopefully most of us have ready answers to these questions. However, spend a few weeks in virtually any American city and you’ll learn that most Americans do not seem to have answers, or at least their answers differ significantly from mine. Public schools are the establishment best able to standardize our “learned” knowledge, beliefs, and behavior, and should therefore incorporate ethics into primary and secondary school curricula. Teaching ethics, either in distinct classes or by incorporating them into other areas of study, would provide schools and teachers with a forum for exposing, discussing, and applying “community ethics” — basic notions that we are all here and inherently equal, we are all members of a larger society, and we are all indeed in it together.
The historic reasoning behind free, universal, and compulsory eduction certainly supports an ethics curriculum. Even before the 19th century brought Horace Mann’s “common school” movement, which was largely responsible for launching America’s modern public education system, philosphers and progressive thinkers accepted the notion that in any true free society and participatory democracy the government has an obligation to educate its citizenry – to teach society’s newest membes to read, write, and compute, and to give them a basic understanding of their history, society, and the natural world in which they live, in order that they can access the democratic process and realize their own intellectual and productive potential.
As a diverse society founded on ideas of religious and economic freedom and equality, Americans exclude from this educational package any spiritual or moral instruction, an approach I generally support. But there is a difference between ethical guidance that presupposes the reason for acting a certain way (e.g. a higher power, a book of rules, an Earthly mandate, etc) and that which offers good citizenship as the goal. In this sense, teaching basic community ethics in schools upholds, rather than challenges, the fundamental reasons for having a universal, free, and compulsory education system.
Anthony Tiatoria, an author and 33-year veteran of the Mansfield, Massachussets public school system, is a long-time practictionor and advocate of teching ethics in public schools. He has launched the website Ethics in Education, which provides a forum for teachers interested in including ethics in their curricula. The site “questions the wisdom of pursuing a virtues or character education model for teaching ethics and calls for a history based, critical thinking, approach.” Tiatoria writes of his experience trying to teach ethics in his secondary school social studies classes:
Beginning with a provocative question intended to engage as many minds as possible, I asked: “do you have any absolute obligation to others? Is there any scenario in which you must do good for at least one other person under at least some circumstances?” My students, nearly universally, said no! They did not recognize any responsibility to others of an absolute nature. So, I challenged them with increasingly more severe hypotheticals, probing for bottom: “you came upon a drowning man, a friend, a drowning child, your brother.” Nothing penetrated the conviction that they were free spirits unfettered by any duty….They would do it because they wanted to, not because they had to.
Following these experiences Tiatoria has written and amassed a body of material that he believes will assist teachers in providing their students with a useful ethics foundation. His collection of free workbooks and guides aim to help teachers discuss everything from Manifest Destiny to Hammurabi’s Code from an ethics standpoint. He writes:
To a large extent, ethical behavior, which is simply finding the balance between self-interest and group responsibility, is largely, but not entirely, learned behavior standing in opposition to an instinct…Not surprisingly then, many middle and high school students today will tell you that they themselves determine, as does every other individual, the standards of right and wrong….Students must commit to broadening their own understanding of ethical issues by seeking to better understand the ideas of others….It is necessary to build this into a sense of community within the class, and to encourage each student to participate energetically and cooperatively.
Tiatoria isn’t the only one who considers the lack of ethical discussion in public schools a missed opportunity. Attorney Michael Sabbeth has been collaborating with Denver public schools since 1990 to incorporate ethics training into elementary school classes. The Institute for Global Ethics has also developed materials to help teachers include ethics in their curricula for grades K-5. These developments indicate a growing receptiveness, among both educators and normal citizens, toward including ethics training in the public education system.
The applications of ethics teachings are abundant. For example, imagine the benefits of a widespread discussion of environmental ethics in public schools. How different would our children’s collective sense of environmental stewardship be if they were all exposed to basic environmental concepts in conjunction with ethical notions of communal obligation and responsiblity? (Resources ARE scarce and finite. Humans DO have the ability to exhaust these resources and destroy their own environment beyond habitability. Who, then, is responsible for stopping this from happening?)
How different would their sense of professional, political, and social interity be if history and litterature classes explored ethical questions of just cause, proportionality, intention, and authority? (What was so “wrong” with invading Poland? Could Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov have been me?)
How better prepared would our children be for the medical or technological debates of the future if ideas behind freedom of choice, individual sovreignty, and sanctity of life were discussed in an open, frank manner in science class? (Are we responsible for the consequences of our inventions? How can you justifiably control life-threatening overpopulation?)
How would their outlook on crime and citizenship change if when they were taught about government and democracy, they were challenged to consider what elements of right and wrong are legally codified, and why? (Who do laws serve, and why should I obey them? What right have I to violate them, or to try to change them? If something isn’t illegal, why might it still be wrong?) And so on.
Americans have historically opposed teaching ethics in schools, prefering to leave its discussion to families and religious establishments. We assume bringing ethics into public schools violates parents’ rights to structure their children’s moral upbringing themselves, or threatens the ideal that church and state should not only be separated in public schools, but that neither one religion nor secularism should be promoted at the expense of any other belief system.
However, it is precisely because schools represent a distinct, non-familial, non-religious setting that they are the ideal place for introducing community ethics. Public schools are where students from different economic, racial, religious, and family backgrounds come together for conditioning that is common to all of us (excluding people educated in private schools) and thus represents a vital medium for instilling a standardized, collective, universal sense of society-wide ethics.
A society’s collective sense of ethics affects its attitude toward everything from returning incorrect change to global warming. Yet, in a society as diverse and dynamic as ours, instilling any collective ethic will require that we harness the most universal form of public outreach: our public education system. Schools offer us the best means not only of offering our children knowledge, skills, and social conditioning, but of encouraging their transformation into better, wiser, and more righteous players in a vast and everchanging society.
The key to this plan will be effective framing. You can’t get bogged down in where the ethics come from, nor can you get too caught up in the specifics. But I do believe there is room for teaching basic ethics and ethical decision making in public schools. You’ll just have to sell them as the foundation of any ethical personality, not some arbitrary worldview. Universiality is key.
I heard all sorts of religious beliefs resonating in your examples. I’ve been thinking about the trickiness of thinking or saying much of anything at all, while maintaining a strict neutrality towards religion.
All the good teachers that I have experienced– first as a public school student, now as a public school teacher– incorporate strong elements of character development into their teaching practice, especially reenforcing a notion of right and wrong.
Like it or not, public schools are the staging ground for a tremendous proportion of young people’s socialization. Undertaking this task without offering guidance for ethical decision-making would be foolhardy.
If I’m in an 11th grade English literature class and I say “yes, I could see myself as Raskolnikov, doing what he did,” does the school put me under surveillance? do other parents hear about it and worry that I’ll be the next shooter? do they call the school administration to express their concern? do they ask for my expulsion?
What if the teacher asks a 2nd grade class “is it wrong to steal?” and Billy says “No.” “Why not Billy?” asks the teacher, but before he can answer Sally jumps in with “cause it’s a sin.” Billy says “I’m not religious, I don’t believe in sin.” Sally says “then you’ll go to hell.”
From there the discussion goes any number of ways but few, if any, would be productive.
Without a doubt parents would protest against this sort of environment.
I love the idea and the principle but ultimately I don’t think society is mature enough to have ethics taught in it’s public schools.
This is just a quip that popped in my head, but don’t you think that society is immature purely due to the fact that we don’t discuss things like this?
To Mr. Umphrey and LGS, I thoroughly understand and share your disillusionment, but the principle itself still stands. By saying ethics should be incorporated into curricula, I mean into COMPULSORY curricula. Everyone, no matter what their parents say, would be subject to lessons that uphold the general ethics of a free, equitable, and democratic society. Call it the “price” of free education, that parents must accept what is taught or discussed in public schools. (As you point out Umphrey — plenty of people oppose Puritan literature, but that’s just too bad for them. It’s part of our history.)
However, I concede that this would all have to be done very delicately, little by little, with a lot of “group” deliberation, and a carefully thought out(non-punitive) approach to handling Billy, Sally, and young Raskolnikov here. It will be tricky identifying and teaching common ethics, because Americans seem to have so few, but it seems to me that this would be the place to start.
I’m very surprised at what you wrote, Mac. You can say to me that you honestly believe that as Americans will no longer be free to teach their children what they believe to be good ethics. Just because one person defines “good” ethics as this, that, and the other, and that same person defines “bad” ethics as this, that, and the other doesn’t make those ethics “right”. America was created on a foundation of freedom, including a freedom to practice one’s own religion. How would you feel if you followed a religion or religious sect that disagreed with any of the ethics established by the government. The teaching of ethics in public school would cause a Constitutional disaster and a nationwide rebellion. There is no “common ethic”. Everyone’s opinions are different, and in America, we like to entitle everyone to their respective opinions. It would go against every basic freedom that our country stands for to allow this travesty to occur.
The place to start? We’re nearer the end, I would think. Ideas, especially ideas about ethics, are laden with religious assumptions or lead to religious consequences. For example, you won’t be able to discuss in any depth your notion of “the general ethics of a free, equitable, and democratic society” while avoiding religious overtones or drawing on religious insights or advancing or pushing back at religions in some form.
If we are not one people, and do not aspire to be, we cannot have such schools.
It may mean schools will move to the other side of the wall some have imagined between church and state, operated by churches rather than secular governments.
That I don’t agree with. You can talk about ethics without talking about religion. Religion has no monopoly on right and wrong.
“Religion has no monopoly on right and wrong.” That is a religious belief, of course.
Huh? How is that a religious belief?
I must agree with J-Ro on that. My first reaction to Mr. Umphrey’s response was since when did religion monopolize the idea that we are equal, and in a collective society we have obligations to one another — respect and tolerance, at the very least?
To the extent that any of this could be dismissed as having religious overtones, so could the rest of any public school curricula. All literature, history, science, and health classes could be written off, if we were to observe such a low threshold for religious bearing.
I didn’t suggest “dismissing” anything because of religious overtones.
The idea of human equality grows out of religion, most notably in the West from the Genesis story of creation, which has humans created in the image of God. It’s hard to see how atheism (another religious point of view) would sustain a belief in human equality and dignity, since. In what sense are humans equal, since by most empirical measures they are not. The historical record suggests to me that atheistic systems, such as Mao’s, tend toward seeing individual humans as not too important in the great schemes they dream up.
It’s true that if we aren’t careful with our objections to religion in school, much of the curriculum could not be taught. That was, in fact, my point.
This is the tenth plank of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Communist_Manifesto#10_Planks_of_the_ Communist_Manifesto
I don’t think that is such a good idea. We all know where that leads (USSR, China, Cuba).
As the first of many who taught Philosophy in the High Schools under the program by the great Professor Matthew Lipman I am surprised you didn’t mention him in this article at all..
I urge any of you to Google Professor Lipman and learn he wrote books and contributed so much, had the leadership of Montclair states Philosophy debt. not been such anal elitist little dicks as it is still today, this program would have been heralded by all educators in the nation..
Now the proof is in the pudding the classes we ran were elective and the students had to stay after school one hour to attend them..
Now I taught at the Montclair NJ High School alternative school and my first class had 8 students by the end of the classes I had 34 students attending the word of mouth of the kids themselves drew such attendance and interest and success..
Let’s remember that any who think these young people are not up to such material Aristotle taught his pupil Alexander the great until approximately 13 and look at the effect of such an education..
Of course we Philosophy we taught, I taught was Ethics not so much Metaphysics..
This is when their minds are most fertile and open and can learn the quickest even in Jr. High School..
Had there not been and still are such insecure elitist pricks at Montclair State, our nation would be a different place and America not now suffering as it is and education in American would have moved forward rather than backward so terribly..
I pray you all look into just how important Ethics and humanist philosophy is for these young minds to be exposed to..
Hegel said: “The one thing history teaches, is that man learns nothing from history..!”
So true…
I taught Ethics in school, only in Spain :). At the same time I also taught Catholic Religion (both are electives) and I see no difficulty at separating both matters.
I think that we as students should be able to help decide what we learn…what we are taught in school. All school officals, parents, and just the U.S. as a whole doesnt understand what us teenagers are interested in learning these days. Not to mention they do not even take the time to ask what we are interested in, they just assume that we are interested in the same things they are. Well I as well as my friends sitting next to me while typing this agree that the people that are so dense to not even ask us what we are interested in need to wake up and smell the newly freshed brewed coffee, we are not in Kansas anymore Toto!
If you take interest in what I have to say and offer my e-mail address is paulmorales_1@yahoo.com
Hmm…. It kind of takes all responsibility of teaching anything from the parents. Ethics should be taught in household, not in the classroom.
I certainly agree that everyone today (children, adolescents, and adults) should be encouraged to look more closely at the way they are living their lives. It is dangerous, however, to include ethics in PUBLIC education.
What happens when “not questioning the government” is an included principle in the national curriculum? Maybe the language would not be so blatant, but the government should not be charged with molding the morality of young people. The government, like any institution, is looking after its own benefit. It is made up of people looking after their own benefit.
i fell like ethics are just as important as math and science .. if not more …
It is my job and responsibility as a parent to teach my child ethics; not the state’s, i.e. government. The government’s role is not to take care of us, nor is it to dictate our morals (or lack thereof).
I think that we need to get back to teaching the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Perhaps if our young people had a better grasp on what the documents actually say, we would not be in the position we are in now. We, as a people, have had too many of our rights eroded and taken away by both parties. Quit concentrating on touchy-feely stuff and get back to basics, people.
Gosh. The 60’s hippies were all anti-establishment and against The Man interfering in our lives. And now they are Them. Funny, that.
Our children need to learn early the importance of staying true to ethical guidelines. If we get them thinking about these issues early on, they will be more likely to stick to them.