SOMETHING IS NOT OUT THERE

Kevin Ryan Peter Greer

In January, 1989, the nation was again rocked by the results of an international study showing the abysmal performance of American Students in mathematics and science. Into our sixth year of education reform in the 1980’s, the results are far from encouraging. Could it be that our efforts to get our students back to work are misplaced? Could it be that helping students become “good students” means helping them to become “good”: to be self-disciplined, responsible, concerned not simply with their own pleasure, but with the good of others and their schools? Could it be that what is at the heart of the poor academic results, deep malaise, drugs, high levels of disorder and vandal- ism, is that our public schools are valiantly, but mistakenly trying to educate students in a moral vacuum? Could it be thatour schools have reduced the meaning of education to the transmission of information and skills?

If the rhetorical inferences above are correct, educators need to recapture what has been the historical role of schools in this country and around the world: to pass on to the young the community’s best values. Our Founding Fathers had a deep appreciation for the need to educate their largely unschooled, fellow colonials and they made edu- cation a major priority for the new nation. The schools they envisioned were not places where the young would simply learn the basics, but where

tage, where they would acquire the moral prin- ciples and sensibilities to be citizens, citizens

citizens able to recognize and, thus, create just

Kevin Ryan is Professor Of Education Uf Boston they would encounter their moral and ethic heri- University and Director of the Center for the Advance- ment of Ethics and Character.

Peter Greer is the former Deputy Under Secretary of the US. Department of Education is currently Dean capable Of in judgment of one another and of the School of Education at Boston University.

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laws. Since coming into being in our young nation, then, schools have been seen as places where the community’s best values werelearnedby the young, where teachers, books and stories engaged the young in the great moral conversation of the cul- ture and where teachers conscientiously did their part in the work of character formation.

What is the Current Situation?

Has the official mission of the school changed in recent years? Do parents want the schools to leave morals and character formation to the home and church? While clearly there are some parents who have lost faith in the schools as moral educa- tors, the overwhelming percentage of Americans support the public school’s traditional role in moral education. Inboth 1975 and 1980,PhiDeltaKappa in its annual Gallup Poll on public attitudes toward education, has shown that 79 percent of American people have been in favor of the public schools teaching morals and moral behavior. In 1987, the Wall Street Journal reported a national poll dem- onstrating similar strong support for the public school’s role in character formation.

For over a decade the authors have queried pre- service and in-service teachers about their role as moral educators and developers of good character. We have polled classes and audiences of teachers, and held numerous small group and individual interviews with teachers and teachers in mining. Whileour efforts havebeen unsystematic andopen to various types of error and distortion, we have come away from these exercises with certain clear impressions.

First, while many teachers are committed to the moral education and character development of their students and see it as a major emphasis of their work, many do not. They have a variety of re- sponses from “My job is to teach content, to teach my subject” to “Who am I to impose my values on students?” to “If I get involved with morals and values and the rest of that, I’m risking getting sued.”

Second, few teachers, pre- or in-service, can recall the topic of their being moral educators or developers of good character or directly teaching specific values ever being raised in their teacher education programs, except for learning some

values clarification techniques. Those teachers who see themselves as having arole in the positive development of character and values report that they brought these attitudes to teacher education and did not receive them or have them confirmed as part of teacher education.

Third, when asked how they actually func- tioned as moral educators, most teachers fell back on two phrases, “role model” and “values clarifica- tion.” Many teachers acknowledged that by the nature of their work, they are examples to students. “I guess I’m arole model.” And ‘‘I consciously try to be a model, a good example.”

Other teachers, clearly influenced by the values clarification movement of the Sixties and Seven- ties, speak about moral education and values clari- fication as if they were one and the same. Very few are aware that the claims of values clarification have been empirically discredited (Scnuen, 1975; Lockwood, 1978) and all but universally dispar- aged by philosophers and educational commenta- tors (Oldenquist, 1986). These teachers, many of whom place a high value on teaching values, have unusual consensus on one tenet of values clarifica- tion in particular: the teacher should be value neutral.

What emerges from these surveys and contacts with teachers is a picture of a teaching profession at odds with its clients, parents of its students, and the taxpayers of its communities. On the one hand, the parents and taxpayers want educators to teach the community’s best values and have a positive impact on the character of their children. On the other hand, most teachers either reject the role, are unaware of what they can do to promote good values and character, or are pursuing questionable, possibly harmful, approaches, such as values clari- fication.

What are the Consequences?

The philosopher, Andrew Oldenquist, has looked at our current efforts to educate our youth morally. In a 1986 essay pointedly entitled “Moral Education Without MoralEducation,” he has raised the following issues:

If we were anthropologists observing a tribe it would be the most natural thing in the world to expect them to teach their

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morality and culture to their children and, moreover, to think they have a perfect right to do so on the ground that cultural integrity and survival depend on it. In- deed, if found that they had ceased to teach, through ritual and other institu- tional means, the values of their culture, we would take them to be on the way to cultural suicide. Like cultures whose values and traditions wither in the face of technological civilization, we would think them ruined, pitiable, alienated from their own way of life, and on the way out (p. 45).

What is actually happening to teach values in the sixteen thousand school districts and hundreds of thousands of schools in our continental nation is difficult to determine. While the last two decades have seen a vast expansion in our education re- search effort, most of that effort has focused on student and teacher behaviors and various achieve- ment indicators, such as scores in mathematics and levels of literacy. We simply do not have much dataon what values teachers are teaching and what they are doing to promote good character.

On the other hand, we can make some rough judgment of how much the profession is concerned withthisfundamentalaspectofeducatingthe young. For instance, how much time is devoted to the teacher’s role in the moral education and character development of students’ education courses? In the textbooks they read? What emphasis is given to this by the certification divisions of state depart- ments of education and groups such as NCATE? Has a teacher education program ever been denied accreditation because it has been silent about the teaching of values? What percentage of teachers’ in-service meetings, workshops and courses is given over to this subject? What percentage of research reported annually at the American Educa- tional Research Association meeting deals with the fostering of these personal and nation-sustain- ing issues? What part of the annual meetings of the ATE and AACTE are devoted to this topic? What fraction of our educational journals helps teachers to think about this part of their work?

There is, however, another set of questions and issues raised by Oldenquist’s tribal metaphor. What is the condition of American youth? Are they

sturdy andvirtuousandengagedin activities which will make them strong adults, willing and able to contribute to making America the “City on the Hill” envisioned by our forebearers? While meas- uring this, too, is a problem, we have some indica- tors. In the last thirty years, since the mid-l950’s, the rate of male adolescent death by homicide and suicide has increased by 441 percent and 479 percent, respectively panel on Moral Education, 1988). Since 1950, the arrest rate of children eighteen and under has increased eight-fold. Out of wedlock births among teenage girls has in- creased by 621 percent (Fanel on Moral Education, 1988). Aside from the explosion of antisocial behavior among youth, there have been some strik- ing changes in attitude on the part of youth about what they consider is of value and what they will do with their lives. In the ten years from 1976 to 1986, the percentages of high school students rating “having a lot of money” as “very important” four years out of high school almost doubled, while the percentagerating “correcting inequalities” as“very important” almost halved (Bennett, 1988). A re- cent survey of college freshman shows a decline of 83 percent in 1967 to 40 percent in 1986 in those students using college to form a meaningful phi- losophy of life. During the same period, the percentage of students seeing a college education as a means to being well off financially increased from 43 percent to 74 percent. The “Me Genera- tion” appears still to be gathering recruits and to be picking up steam.

While it may seem that we have purposefully concentrated on several of the more frightening statistics about the young, there simply does not seem to be much encouragement. Many long term trends in the society are coming home to roost, chief among them being America’s inability to provide children with stable homes and sustained attention and monitoring from caring adults. And, while some urge that the schools ignore this crisis in values and concentrate on intellectual skills, it is impossible to impart education that is value free. For good or evil, school inevitably affects the values of the young. Moveover, it is in the sheer survival interests of teachers and administrators to stress positive values in their schools. The class- room or school that is infected with me-ism and lack of respect of others quickly becomes ajungle.

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The school in which students and teachers lack civility becomes and antagonistic and oppressive environment. The school where students do not possess some basic sense of self-discipline and re- sponsibility becomes a disordered environment where little is achieved. Said another way, good schooling simply cannot exist without a student body which has been morally educated at home or in the school.

What is Needed?

We need a public school system that helps children become morally mature people. The curriculum should immerse them in the lives of people who clearly have demonstrated moral val- ues and personal traits which have contributed to the common good. Likewise, they should come to know the lives of those whose weakness and evil have ruptured social life or injured others. the study of moral life should be rich in examples of people with virtues and personal traits described by Jon Moliere as: hearing both sides of an argu- ment; avoiding hasty decisions, where possible; seeking advice in decision making; considering how others have treatedequivalentproblems; trying to deal with the pressures of self interest; avoiding displays of emotion which conflict with our better judgement; giving special weight to the opinions of more experienced persons; and having the intel- lectual courage to stick to one’s principled choices in the face of resistance. Another way to describe what education needs to do is this: to aid children to think well, love well, and act well.

What We Need in Teacher Education

Although people in schools and departments of education need to take leadership here, we are addressing teacher education in its largest context: in-service and pre-service.

Pre-service: The faculty of schools and col- leges of education need to take the lead in examin- ing their curriculum to see if their pre-service teachers are being prepared for their work as moral educators. Where there is little or no attention given to this crucial part of the teacher’s work, immediate attention needs to be focused. In their efforts to rebuild a curriculum for future teachers

that addresses the morality, school of education faculty should realize that there arc many people whocan help them, fromparents to working school administrators and teachers. Their job, though, is to put in place the experience that students need to take on this part of their work.

Much of the preparation of teachers is in liberal arts courses. These courses in our history and lit- erature and philosophy should teach much of our culture’s moral heritage. We need, therefore, to work with our colleagues in the liberal arts to identify that heritageand teach it in such a way that it is useful to teachers. Perhaps the current move- ment on many American campuses toward devel- oping a core curriculum can be a vehicle for this reform. If not, teacher educators need to take the lead so as to insure that school teachers know their moral heritage.

The ethos of an institution, its moral climate, has a sLrong impact on the people involved in it. Schools of education, therefore, ought to place special emphasis on the kind of ethos they create. Are they places where kindness and fairness reign? Do students and faculty feel respectcd and held to high standards of conduct? Do they have honor codes, service programs, and codes of ethics?

In-Service: Moral education and character formation is a new priority for American society and while it is a traditional mission of the school, many educators are unfamiliar with what they should do. Schools of education have a great opportunity to play a leadership role in this res- pect. While they may not “have all the answers,” schools of education can provide the forum to ask the right questions and to work with the field toward solutions. And once answers begin to emerge, they can offer the needed courses and workshops.

The education faculty should try to involve their liberal arts colleagues in the moral education prob- lems of the elementary and secondary schools. For one thing, they have the subject matter knowledge and can most directly aid teachers to see how moral ideas and lessons are embedded in the curriculum they are currently teaching. In addition, our sub- ject matter specialist colleagues can be a resource to the teachers’ own reawakening to their moral heritage. Many teachers are starved for the serious reading and discussion of books and ideas, and

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would appreciate the chance to read an important work with a scholar from that field they are teach- ing.

Conclusion

The mission of preparing children to be morally mature belongs to everyone, but especially to those of us in education. New social conditions, such as the weakened family strucme, and new forces in the lives of the young, such as television, large amounts of free time and drugs, suggest an even morecentralrole for teacher sin the future. Schools

of education must aid teachers in this task. Few universities, schools or departments of education that the authors know are making a frontal attack on this issue. We are beginning to engage this topic and we would like to join with others of similar interest. Recently, we joined with our College of Liberal A r t s and formed the Center for the Ad- vancement of Ethics and Character, which will be a university-wide effort with outreach to schools and universities interested in this work. We hope to give special attention to our teacher education programs and to be of service to others.

References

Lockwood, A. (1978). The effects of values clarification and moral development curricula on school-age subjects: a critical review of recent research. Review ofEducationa1 Research, 48,325-364.

Oldenquist, A. (1986). Non-suicidal society. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Panel on Moral Education, (1988, April). Moral education in the life of schools. Alexandria, V A

Scriven, M. (1975). Cognitive moral education. Phi Delta Kappan, LDI (lo), 689-694. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

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