Not Just Read and Write, But Right and Wrong
Townsend, Kathleen Kennedy
Not Just Read and Write, But Right and Wrong Our schools need to teach values, too by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend In a suburban high school's crowded classroom, a group of juniors explained to...
...There was a long silence until one young man came up with an answer: "Cable TV...
...New York had more murders than London, even though New York was only a tiny fraction of the size of London...
...1) If all the couples agree to it, would it be alright for them to change partners...
...The coach shouldn't have the boys justify their actions...
...And to know the public good, you have to study literature, philosophy, history, and religion...
...Our pluralistic society is justly worried about party lines of any kind...
...The meeting was dominated by talk of federal funding and drug education...
...It's a lot easier and quicker than working at McDonald's...
...Sunday schools were started...
...Other answers were more hostile: "Specific training in values is a new development which we do not consider essential," and "A special effort would cause trouble...
...This approach has often been used by people advocating a stringent adherence to white middle-class values—as they themselves choose to interpret those values...
...The following example intended for high school students comes from Hypothetical Dilemmas for Use in Moral Discussions, a 1974 book prepared by the Center for Moral Development at Harvard: "A number of married couples who knew each other were thinking of 'swapping' (changing partners for sexual intercourse...
...Yet I rarely hear teachers asking students to pick up the garbage—or telling them not to litter in the first place...
...Little is said in those books about the deeper reaches of character in Wilson and FDR, their backgrounds, or their political and religious principles...
...Kathleen Kennedy Townsend runs a state program in Maryland designed to get students involved in community service...
...Rather than spending precious school time having the students consider ways to build a community, teachers are having them debate wife-swapping and decide who to kill...
...Only one-third said they could countenance joining the military or working on a political campaign...
...Jefferson fought for public education because he believed that the citizen's virtue is the foundation of democracy...
...With all these problems to be solved, Hamilton is worried because BU's president John Silber wants to emphasize "moral education," a program of teaching students respect, courage, empathy, and integrity...
...The bill was defeated...
...Students come from different backgrounds...
...Schools across America have simply refused to take responsibility for the character of their students...
...That's all been blanded out...
...The public's reaction is very negative...
...These comments are typical of the ideas your children's teachers are trained on...
...Isn't it alarming that the fear of moral guidance for students runs that deep...
...all they can do is help students discover their own...
...You could sell drugs and make $250 in an afternoon...
...And education was influenced by the pragmatism of William James and John Dewey, which rejected metaphysical notions of human conduct...
...The couples lived in the same neighborhood and knew each other quite well...
...A collection of high school interviews quotes one llth-grader as saying, "What one person thinks is bad or wrong, another person might think that it is good or right...
...The guide states, "All of the authors in this volume, the editor, and the National Education Association, have chosen to help students discover their options, envision likely consequences, then make their own choices about what is good and honorable rather than trying to instill certain 'correct' values...
...Values Clarification: A Handbook for Teachers and Students by Sidney Simon—a high-school text that has sold 500,000 copies—has the following exercise: Have the students sit in a circle and pretend that they are on a life raft and that in order for the group to be saved, one of them has to be thrown overboard...
...So deep that it surfaces even where it's obvious the lack of values is having the most miserable consequences...
...We are concerned with the process of valuing and not the product...
...The exercise makes teenagers worry about the value of their lives but abstains from reassuring them about it...
...These days it seems they're all relativists...
...Thomas's promises While it is easy enough to blame this problem on the "me-ism" of the Reagan years, it's time to recognize that it's also the result of deliberate educational policy...
...A recent article by a philosophy professor named Gerald Paske in Educational Leadership, the principal publication of the 91,000-member Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, attacks a proposal for teaching traditional values on the grounds that their application may have little relevance to modern life...
...4) What could some of the negative effects be...
...One principal I know speaks for too many others...
...Why do you think people react this way...
...He did nothing...
...How do they distinguish among patriotisms...
...And it went down insofar as I, or any historian, can tell because this effort to substitute the ethic of self-control for what appeared to be the One widely used teacher training guide states: "The method recommends that no moral judgement be made by the teacher...
...would today be inappropriate, often impossible, and frequently inhumane...
...One or two glances at her textbooks and you can begin to see why she feels that way...
...Until the sixties, schools taught values more because of habits bred in the 19th century than because of conscious intellectual commitment...
...My daughter is the only girl on her soccer team, and recently some of the boys on the team spit at her...
...You'd have to work there a whole week...
...As one teacher training text says, "There is no right or wrong answer to any question of value...
...One of her classmates adds, "Moral values cannot be taught and people must learn what works for them...
...Finally, the kids vote to decide who gets tossed out...
...In another article in the same issue, Robert Primack, an education professor, condemns the idea of teaching character in these words: "Assume for the moment that the schools . . . accept the notion of the great tradition in education and they begin teaching patriotism...
...What effect do you think 'swapping' would have on the children...
...The study concluded, "Young people have learned only half of America's story...
...Three times as many selected career success as chose community service—which finished dead last...
...That changed with the civil rights and antiwar movements, which challenged the old values as immoral...
...Among those values were: honesty, acceptance of responsibility, respect for the individuality of others, respect for the responsibility inherent in being a parent or in a position of authority, the role of the work ethic in achieving personal goals, universal values of right and wrong, respect for property, the importance of the family unit, and the importance of respect for the law...
...This is the first of two articles on teaching values...
...Anti-inculcation textbooks are typically stockpiles of classroom questions and dilemmas...
...They wash their hands of the teaching of virtue, doing little to create an environment that teaches children the importance of self-discipline, obligation, and civic participation...
...After the vote, the students discuss the values implicit in the decision...
...Townsend, what if you want a new pair of Reeboks...
...the Boy Scout code...
...Take my wife In 1981 the California State Assembly considered a bill that spelled out values that should be included in public school instructional materials...
...In current educational jargon, this approach is called "values inculcation...
...By 1850, it was down to two...
...North Dakota's is typical in declaring that public schools should "emphasize all branches of knowledge that tend to impress upon the mind the importance of truthfulness, temperance, purity, public spirit, and respect for honest labor of every kind...
...1they] reveal notions of America's unique character that emphasize freedom and license almost to the complete exclusion of service or participation...
...In Triumph of the American Nation, one of the most widely used highschool history textbooks, a text that People for the American Way calls "substantive and well-written," Martin Luther King is described as leading the Montgomery bus boycott in response to discrimination against blacks, but there is no sense of who he is, of how he came to believe in nonviolence, of the profoundly religious and spiritual person that he was...
...He should make sure they know they were wrong...
...What he does is create conditions that aid children in finding values if they choose to do so...
...the teaching of the great tradition by indoctrination characterized the German school system during much of its history prior to the Nazi take-over and certainly during the Nazi takeover itself...
...In the 1830s," he explains, "crime began to rise rapidly...
...One can hardly blame him for wanting out...
...I]t is entirely possible that children will choose not to develop values...
...1t should be increasingly clear that the adult does not force his own pet values upon children...
...Hamilton asks, "Will the Chelsea schools teach unwed pregnant teenagers that abortion is immoral...
...The process was so successful that in the second half of the 19th century, despite urbanization, despite the enormous influx into this country of immigrants from foreign countries all over Europe, despite the widening class cleavages, despite the beginning of an industrial proletariat, despite all those things which textbooks today teach us cause crime to go up, crime went down...
...emerging ethic of self-expression succeeded...
...In one 12th-grade classroom, a young man uncomfortable with the exercise said he'd jump overboard...
...Each student must justify why he shouldn't be the one...
...2) Recently there have been a number of 'swapping' cases reported in the newspapers...
...The introduction of retirement programs and Social Security, the dispersion of family members throughout the nation, and the great advance in medical technology have generated many situations in which the traditional conduct would frustrate rather than promote the honoring of one's parents...
...That means that teaching values in the schools— whether as an integral part of the traditional classes or as a separate course—requires subtle skills and real sensitivity to student and community needs...
...They felt that after being married for so long and having sex with the same person, sex had become quite dull...
...Schools," she says, "cannot impose duties on the students...
...The answers are typical of those found across the United States...
...How have we reached the point where a list of basic values like that is considered unsuitable for schools...
...There were few courses or books in education schools about the teaching of values...
...Little there to engage the student, to disturb, to make her think, to excite her, to make her dream...
...In a recent survey of American students' knowledge of history, one girl's answer to "When was the Civil War...
...Emphasis added...
...A recent article in The New Republic by David Hamilton describes Boston University's takeover of the Chelsea school system, in which the newest building dates from 1910, less than half the ninth graders pass state-mandated tests (as compared to a 79 percent pass rate statewide), and 52 percent never complete high school...
...The method recommends that no moral judgment be made by the teacher...
...Is it any surprise that students tend to agree...
...It was an all-day effort to provide education in morality, education in punctuality, in decency, in following rules, and accepting responsibility, in being generous, in being kind...
...They felt like they would like to have new sexual experiences...
...Do you agree or disagree with them...
...For many years, Jefferson's wisdom about education prevailed...
...Of course, families and churches should play a part, but neither are as strong or effective as they were a generation ago...
...In this book, racial discrimination is described as a legal issue resolved by the 1964 Civil Rights Act...
...The consensus of the high school teachers and administrators participating in a curriculum workshop I ran last summer said it all: "Values—we can't get into that...
...Not Just Read and Write, But Right and Wrong Our schools need to teach values, too by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend In a suburban high school's crowded classroom, a group of juniors explained to me why drugs are difficult to control...
...We believe that each person has to wrest his own values from the available array...
...What could be more destructive than that...
...they fail to perceive a need to reciprocate by exercising the duties and responsibilities of good citizenship...
...What could some of the positive effects be...
...What he actually did tells you a lot about the schools today...
...The underlying valuelessness of American education—an obstacle to the intelligent use of scarce resources and a root cause of drug problems—really didn't come up...
...The major criticism of not teaching values is very simple: There are some values that teachers should affirm...
...That's what he should do...
...Surveys and bestsellers have alerted us to the shocking inadequacies of American students' basic knowledge...
...The importance of teaching values in the schools was barely mentioned last fall at the education summit presided over by George Bush at the University of Virginia...
...One widely used teacher training guide, Values and Teaching by Louis Raths, makes no bones about this: "The idea that we should use all the resources available to us to produce a certain kind of character is repulsive...
...Science emphasizes testing, experience, reliance on what works, not abstract notions of right and wrong...
...The inculcation consensus started to break down around the start of the 20th century...
...He should have them stop...
...Parents are for Nazis A teacher's guide put out by the National Education Association favors values clarification over character inculcation...
...A survey recently conducted for People for the American Way asked just over 1,000 Americans between 15 and 24 what goals they considered important...
...You see, Mrs...
...It condemns "attempts to inculcate a set of given virtues, e.g...
...In addition, the establishment of college departments of cultural anthropology and the publication of studies of distant cultures by Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict popularized the idea that all values are culturally determined and hence relative...
...For example, Paske argues that the value of "honoring elderly parents" may have bad consequences because "such things as taking them into our homes, providing for their economic support, and preserving their lives...
...And textbooks describe the Pilgrims as "people who take long trips...
...Many respondents were indifferent, simply stating that values education is "inherent" in teaching...
...I don't think morals should be taught because it would cause more conflicts and mess up the student's mind...
...They were people in their late thirties or early forties...
...The flavor of this 19th-century approach to education is preserved today in many state constitutions...
...Why or why not...
...was "I don't know and I don't care...
...In 1830 the average American drank 10 gallons of distilled liquor a year...
...In fact, according to Paul Gagnon, a University of Massachusetts history professor, in every one of the five most popular high-school history texts, more space is given to Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller than to Abraham Lincoln...
...Moral education could well become a euphemism for instruction in [Silber's] particular brand of moral conservatism...
...One immediate consequence was the rise of a new theory of moral development, called "values clarification": It's wrong for teachers to endorse any values...
...However, rather than relying on police forces or other government programs, the citizens concentrated on education...
...Such a curious oversight at Thomas Jefferson's school...
...When operating with the values theory, it is entirely possible that children will choose not to develop values...
...In our public schools, the atmosphere of confused neglect fostered by values clarification turns this factual ignorance into a moral wasteland...
...Not all values are the same...
...Only virtuous citizens, he knew, would resist private gain for the public good...
...But too many lack a sense of duty to a larger community...
...Twice since 1982 the Maryland Department of Education has sent out questionnaires to local education departments soliciting opinions about values education...
...Science gained greater respect on one hand, and on the other hand Catholic bishops and conservative evangelists denied that moral instruction could be carried on apart from religion...
...Do we really want our kids to revile the Boy Scouts, abandon family ties, and believe that character-building is for Nazis...
...They have different standards...
...In my work helping teachers, I've walked into countless high schools where I could have filled a garbage bag with the trash in the halls...
...James Q. Wilson attributes America's low level of crime during the 19th century to the efforts of educators to instill self-discipline...
...Give reasons...
...In other words, 'Whatever gets you through the night, it's alright.'" Now, it's obvious that the public schools are a ticklish arena for instilling values...
...During one focus group interview for the study, some young people were asked to name qualities that make this country special...
...3) If the couples had children, would this make any difference...
...the system has one of the highest student pregnancy rates in the state...
...It must be pointed out that...
...One highschool textbook finds it fit to spend two pages on the use of water rights during the Civil War, but offers no analysis of Lincoln...
...There is little there of historical controversies, conflicts, glories, or tragedies...
...Of course, many students obey the law, stay away from drugs, and perform selfless acts: they tutor, work with the elderly, or run antidrug campaigns...
...Only the schools are guaranteed to get a shot at kids...
...That's why their current fumbling of anything smacking of right and wrong is so disastrous...
...Equally disturbing is the short shrift such books accord George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt...
Vol. 21 • January 1990 • No. 12
