This past August 21 New Hampshire school teachers completed a three-day ethics seminar at UNH, designed, according to news reports, "to impart values and citizenship to New Hampshire public school students." The participants studied, among other things, Plato, Aristotle, and the Declaration of Independence.
The seminar, and the Board of Education's proposal last November to teach ethics in the schools, seems to imply that ethics aren't being taught in school, or are being taught haphazardly. But that's not true. In addition to the ethics lessons given each day by the behavior and demeanor of teachers and administrators, the system has its own ethics agenda, shown in its separated rooms with straight rows of desks and attention spans fragmented into "class periods." The ethics here are decidedly undemocratic and untrusting, and students learn how to play the game well in order to succeed (or at least survive) in the educational corporation. We want them to act independently and maturely, yet the ethics of where they spend hours of their lives tells them that the real game in town is in being a good functionary of the corporate world.
This is why students are so passive in schools. But they would become excited if ethics teaching aimed to get them to question and criticize their "institutionalization." Then they could learn a lot about decision-making and critical thinking, not to mention sociology, history, and civics. But one of the strongly understood, if understated, limits of the seminar seems to be that ethics, as one participant put it, "doesn't have a lot to do with controversial topics." This is a comment Plato, Aristotle, or Jefferson would find absurd. Ethics embodies controversy, since ethics involves a choice based on beliefs that someone might disagree with. To keep ethics non-controversial means to deprive students of the chance to work out their beliefs on topics that directly affect their non-school lives: AIDS, abortion, war and peace, the job market. Instead, they'll get pabulum about trustworthiness or courage in the form of in-class exercises, hand-out sheets, readings, and episodic discussion. None of it will stick and in two years we'll have another report about the moral looseness of American students.
It's not a matter of money; Education Secretary Lauro Cavasos just told us we spend more on education than the Pentagon spends on war. The problem is we have schools that teach an ethics contrary to the kind of American citizens we say we want. We need schools that enter the lives of students, not curricula designed to pacify. We need a new attitude that embraces ethical controversy as the heart and soul of a good education.
Thornburgh And The Reporters
Midlife