Book Excerpts
This book explores why moral
education must be a purposeful and
integral part of the life of every
school. It is essential reading for
educators, parents, and all those
concerned about the values of the
next generation and the future of the
country.
Table of Contents
Preface
- Realities and Challenges
- The Pervasive Presence of Values in Schools
- A Framework for Implementation
- Contentious Issues
- A Brief Look at Colleges
- The Fruits of Change
Acknowledgments
Endnotes
Preface
To give context to what follows, I offer some initial
comments about how and why I came to write this book.
Certain experiences were crucial in the development of my
interest in the moral domain and moral education, and almost
led me step-by-step to this project as a culmination of my
work as an educator.
Readers will find the first of those experiences briefly
mentioned in Chapter One: my education in ancient Greek
and Latin languages and literature. I will admit to falling in
love with Greek literature, attracted particularly by how it so
frequently highlighted issues of what constitutes a
worthwhile life. It started in the Iliad, with those ferocious
epic heroes seeking the only kind of immortality open to
them: recognition and fame for their bravery and leadership
that will live on after they die.
Think of Achilles, letting Greeks die without his lifting
a finger to help because the commander-in-chief had taken
away a prize that was a token of the recognition he was due.
Centuries later a tragedy pictures the epic hero Philoctetes,
who was also dishonored unfairly during the Trojan War,
being portrayed by Sophocles as abandoning his hatred and
rejoining society in recognition that the only immortality
open to human beings is participating in the holiness,
nobility, or moral goodness that outlives our individual lives.
This is just one of so many examples of Greek writers
raising questions about the components of a good life, issues
which are, of course, traditionally raised in a liberal arts
curriculum. At bottom, teachers work to nurture students
who will lead a worthwhile life, but I felt particularly
gratified that my teaching area was so conducive to such
nurturing.
These questions about the worthwhile life eventually led
me to the study of philosophy, particularly Greek
philosophy. I marveled at how the early Greek thinkers
managed over time to identify and argue about the domain
and content of what is moral, good, or noble, despite their
struggle to do so without the benefit of an any of the abstract
vocabulary that later philosophers could take for granted.
This interest eventually moved me to choose a dissertation
topic that involved reconstructing the arguments of three
early pre-Platonic Greek thinkers on the relationship
between morality and self-interest.
In our world, we have largely come to regard that
relationship as completely oppositional. Morality requires us
in certain relevant circumstances to sacrifice our self-interest
to avoid harming others. But the Greek thinkers, rationalists
that they were, struggled to find self-regarding reasons for
why we should be moral—they wanted to know what good
it does for the doer, the agent who acts morally. Plato aimed
to find a compelling enough reason that we would act
morally even if we had a magic ring that could make us
disappear at will and remove any worry that our actions
would be discovered. That is quite an astonishing quest,
which they pursued with no appeal to religion.
Suffice it to say that over time they developed
increasingly stronger arguments in showing morality as
compatible with self-interest, but, in the end, they were
unsuccessful in what really is an impossible quest. The
search, however, adumbrated the more plausible idea that
acting morally is a constituent part of our good as human
beings.
What I took away from all of this is that the moral
domain is central to life, focusing as it does on what makes
a life worthwhile, what best fulfills that which constitutes
our good—a view of morality that is particularly apt in an
educational setting. However, this take on morality clearly
differs significantly from the common perceptions we are
used to, which tend to view it reductively as a set of rules
and principles or do’s and don’ts that we have a duty to
observe. That understanding always sounded so onerous to
me, and even more so when there was a threat of punishment,
even eternal damnation, for not observing these rules.
In any case, while the broad sense of what is moral
played a significant role in my teaching, I did not reflect on
the role it might have for a school or education as a whole.
But in the 90’s, I was inspired by reading Thomas Lickona’s
Educating for Character. He provided arguments for why it
is important for a school to take on this role and how to
implement it.
That prepared me for the most crucial experience that led
to this book: my time in a PS – 12 Quaker school in
Brooklyn, N.Y., where I served for the final 15 years of my
career in education, 10 of which as the school’s headmaster.
Here’s what I wrote when I announced my retirement to the
school’s community:
When I first arrived as head of the middle
school, it probably didn’t even take a week
for me to realize I loved this school…I came
with the strong belief that education had to
have a moral dimension to it, and what was
immediately clear to me was that this
dimension was woven into the fabric of the
institution in a way that I had never
experienced be
Included in its mission and core valued were respect for
others, integrity, a commitment to be guided by such
principles of truth and peaceful resolution and conflict, and
an institutional purpose of offering each student “a
challenging education that develops intellectual abilities and
ethical and social values to support a productive life of
leadership and service.” While it certainly helped to have
such clearly stated values and goals in line with what is
broadly moral, what really made the difference was the
consistent, purposeful commitment on the part of the school
community as a whole to ensure that they be woven into the
fabric of the institution. I then understood that while
individual faculty members can weave moral messages into
their classrooms, moral education becomes more powerful
and effective when it is a coordinated schoolwide effort.
As a result, the values of the school were, so to speak,
part of the conversations that occurred in the hallways,
classrooms, faculty rooms, and administrative meetings. Of
course, this did not mean that the school or its students were
perfect. Institutions remain subject to human error and
failings, and certainly students present similar challenges
everywhere as they struggle to learn and identify who they
are. A school can nurture certain values, but ultimately it is
the individual student who chooses his or her own path. I
would say, though, that the school’s graduates by and large
chose careers in which they could make a positive difference
in the world.
What became increasingly clear to me was that students
in any type of school—be it public, independent, charter, or
religiously-affiliated—would be tremendously well served
by moral education crafted with intelligence and purpose.
Upon retirement, that belief drove me to research and reflect
more on this dimension of education and eventually to write
this book—to use my experiences as an educator, my
research, and my background in moral theory to promote
more national attention to the role of education in helping
the younger generation become decent human beings and
choose attitudes and behaviors that represent our better
selves. Beyond national attention, though, it is ultimately at
the local level that decisions are made; and it would be up to
each school to design an approach to moral education that
best accommodates its community and circumstances. There
is no one size fits all.
At the moment, this role for education admittedly
receives little public acknowledgement, and it certainly is
not on the national agenda. There are a number of reasons
for this, which are discussed in the book; but here I merely
allude to three of them: our divisiveness that eschews finding
common ground on just about anything, our increasingly
restricted view of education as mastery of subject matter in
preparation for employment, and narrow conceptions of
morality. However imposing the obstacles, it seems to me
worth the effort to try to overcome them: the kind of
education we provide our children has a significant impact
on the future.
In any historical period, there will always be a need for
efforts to close the gap between what is exemplary and actual
in the spheres of personal and public morality. That
perspective is useful to keep in mind to avoid the trap of
imagining one’s own age as the worst of times.
Nevertheless, I must admit that in the course of working
on this project, I have felt an increasing sense of urgency. In
the United States and elsewhere, moral values like civility,
compassion, and a commitment to the common good were
being openly challenged and undermined. It had seemingly
become acceptable for political leaders and citizens to adopt
attitudes and behaviors that reflected our worst selves. At
play were a growing willingness to distort the truth even in
simple factual matters, the belittling of those who think,
look, or talk differently, and the dismissal of the value of
learned opinion and research. This provides our children
with terrible lessons, lessons that undermine the value of
education.
Although of importance and value at any time, I think we
can agree that moral education is clearly needed now. My
focus is on the United States, but the broader message of the
relevance and content of moral education has no borders. My
hope is that this book can help engender dialogue among
parents, educational policymakers, school administrators,
teachers, and concerned citizens and reconfirm the
transformative potential of education to make ourselves, our
nation, and our world better. On the broadest level, I am
hoping this book can make some contribution to a movement
to establish a common sense of decency that will guide our
body politic.
Seal Beach, California
2021
From Chapter 2
The Pervasive Presence of Values in
Schools
In reality, however, an analysis of what goes in schools,
as we shall see, leads to the conclusion that they are
necessarily awash in values, including moral ones. One
significant reason for this is that they are group settings
which exist to promote learning. So much of what goes on
in schools consists of interactions between students, between
teachers and students, between teachers and teachers,
between administrators and teachers. This makes schools
strikingly fertile ground for developing moral behaviors and
attitudes: how individuals treat each other or are expected to
treat each other represents a major aspect of the moral
domain. And certainly the messages schools and teachers
convey to students about their expectations regarding
interactions with others are moral messages. Such messages,
for example, can be implicit, or explicit, or emerge from
example and role-modeling.
Unfortunately, these messages can sometimes in practice
conflict with what is normally regarded as appropriate moral
action. Precisely because situations involving the moral
realm are so ubiquitous in educational settings, the school
and its faculty must consciously exercise care in what they
say and do. Theodore and Nancy Sizer provide educators a
list of probing questions about their actions in this regard:
Say, for example, a teacher grades unfairly or allows a
student to insult a classmate. These examples, in effect, send
the moral message that it is permissible to so act, even
though these actions are not morally permissible. Avoiding
inappropriate moral messages does not happen as a matter of
course, but requires reflection and purposefulness.
To understand in more detail how moral messages are
necessarily present in abundance, I will discuss in turn a
number of components that go into the process of learning
in a group setting, with some attention to how these
components may change as students grow older. My focus
here will be on grades PS/K-12. Among the components
discussed will be how teachers and the school make learning
possible, motivate a commitment to it, define its nature and
content, measure it, and attend to activities and spaces
outside the classroom such as hallways, cafeterias, and
athletics.
From Chapter 3
A Framework for Implementation
What we have seen so far is a myriad of examples and
ways the moral dimension broadly understood plays an
important role in the life of schools, not only emerging from
what is necessary for a school to fulfill its purposes, but also
simply arising naturally out of the interactions and situations
that commonly occur in schools on a daily basis.
However, the means for attaining or moving towards a
satisfactory approach to moral education are by no means
simple or straightforward. If there is no right way to teach all
students to read or write or be motivated to learn, there is
certainly no one right way to educate morally. Not only do
individual students differ, but the makeup and culture of
each school is different, and so what may work in one school
or community will simply not be effective in another. What
I will do in this chapter is to lay out some considerations and
strategies that will be helpful for schools in implementing
this aspect of education.
Identifying the scope of moral education
This is, of course, a crucial first step; and the clearer and
more succinct such an understanding is, the more it will be
likely to set the stage for successful implementation and
provide clarity of purpose. The language commonly
employed in discussions of moral philosophy is a good
framework for this task. All the examples and contexts of
moral education I wrote about in the last chapter ultimately
come down to a combination of what are called self-regarding
and other-regarding behaviors and attitudes. In
regard to the former, we have behaviors, attitudes, qualities
that enable the agent, that is the individual student as doer,
to have a worthwhile productive life or, as it is sometimes
described, a flourishing life. Examples of such qualities are
resilience, perseverance, courage, integrity, respect for one’s
body and mind and personhood, and the drive to do one’s
best. Also included in this category are intellectual virtues;
for example, the pursuit of knowledge and understanding
guided by truth, openness to new ideas, and willingness to
challenge one’s own views.
As for other-regarding behaviors, these involve
respecting others, treating them with dignity and fairness.
This is the domain with which morality in the narrow sense
is most commonly identified. In the broader sense,
worthwhile other-regarding behavior also involves actively
pursuing the good of others through compassion, kindness,
generosity, service, civic engagement, stretching ultimately
to a life, as they say, of making a difference or making the
world a better place.
From Chapter 6
The Fruits of Change
In the schools I have pictured, teachers will not just be
acknowledged as subject-matter conveyers, but also be
recognized for the kind of role they have in a child’s life—a
dedicated caregiver, a role model, an encourager, a builder
of character, a helpmate on the student’s path to a
worthwhile life. While many teachers I have talked to see
themselves in this way, we have unfortunately gotten away
from openly acknowledging such notions; and this has led to
a diminishment of the importance attributed to teachers and
education.
Hence, we have seen less and less willingness among the
public at large, as well as among politicians, to ensure that
all schools have adequate resources and facilities and all
faculty receive competitive wages. Reversing that trend
would be an important potential benefit to arise from the
acknowledgement of the larger purposes of education. And
that public acknowledgement will ideally be shared by
parents. I have suggested they not only be aware of the
mission statement and core values of the schools their
children attend, but periodically be involved in their
evaluation and revision.
I would also hope that as a byproduct of the acceptance
of the larger purposes of education, the voices of educators
would be more frequently heard and valued. I remember a
time when it was considered worth considering what college
presidents had to say about public matters. Certainly those
in charge of schools are likely to have given much thought
to what works in educating children and how we best guide
students to want to lead worthwhile lives as adults. We need
to give public space to these voices.
At the end of the day, the kind of education I have argued for
will continue to further what education has always
accomplished at its best. It changes lives. It gives children a
sense of the possible, a sense of what it means to be the best
one can be….