Education as a Moral Enterprise
We trust that it is uncontroversial to say that schooling is unavoidably a moral enterprise. Indeed, schools teach morality in a number of ways, both implicit and explicit.
Schools have a moral ethos embodied in rules, rewards and punishments, dress codes, honor codes, student government, relationships, styles of teaching, extracurricular emphases, art, and in the kinds of respect accorded students and teachers. Schools convey to children what is expected of them, what is normal, what is right and wrong. It is often claimed that values arecaught rather than taught; through their ethos, schools socialize children into patterns of moral behavior.
Textbooks and courses often address moral questions and take moral positions. Literature inevitably explores moral issues, and writers take positions on those issues—as do publishers who decide which literature goes in the anthologies. In teaching history we initiate students into particular cultural traditions and identities. Although economics courses and texts typically avoid overt moral language and claim to be “value free,” their accounts of human nature, decision making, and the economic world have moral implications, as we have seen.
The overall shape of the curriculum is morally loaded by virtue of what it requires, what it makes available as electives, and what it ignores. For example, for more than a century (but especially since A Nation at Risk and the reform reports of the 1980's), there has been a powerful movement to make schooling and the curriculum serve economic purposes. Religion and art, by contrast, have been largely ignored (and are not even elective possibilities in many schools). As a result, schooling encourages a rather more materialistic and less spiritual culture—a matter of some moral significance.
Educators have devised a variety of approaches to values and morality embodied in self-esteem, community service, civic education, sex education, drug education, Holocaust education, multicultural education, values clarification, and character education programs—to name but a few. We might consider two of the most influential of these approaches briefly.
For the past several decades values clarification programs have been widely used in public schools. In this approach, teachers help students “clarify” their values by having them reflect on moral dilemmas and think through the consequences of the options open to them, choosing that action that maximizes their deepest values. It is unjustifiable for a teacher to “impose” his or her values on students; this would be an act of oppression that denies the individuality and autonomy of students. Values are ultimately personal; indeed, the implicit message is that there are no right or wrong values. Needless to say, this is a deeply controversial approach—and is now widely rejected.
The character education movement of the last decade has been a response, in part, to the perceived relativism of values clarification. According to the “Character Education Manifesto,” “all schools have the obligation to foster in their students personal and civic virtues such as integrity, courage, responsibility, diligence, service, and respect for the dignity of all persons” (Boston University, 1996). The goal is the development of character or virtue, not correct views on “ideologically charged issues.” Schools must become “communities of virtue” in which “responsibility, hard work, honesty, and kindness are modeled, taught, expected, celebrated, and continually practiced.” An important resource is the “reservoir of moral wisdom” that can be found in “great stories, works of art, literature, history, and biography.” Education is a moral enterprise in which “we need to re-engage the hearts, minds, and hands of our children in forming their own characters, helping them `to know the good, love the good, and do the good'” (Boston University, 1996).
Finally, we note what is conspicuous by its absence: although all universities offer courses in ethics, usually in departments of philosophy or religious studies, very few public schools have such courses. Unlike either values clarification or character education programs, the major purpose of ethics courses is usually to provide students with intellectual resources drawn from a variety of traditions and schools of thought that might orient them in the world and help them think through difficult moral problems. As important as we all agree morality to be, it is striking that schools do not consider ethics courses an option worth offering.
Moral Values for students
What the advantages of good moral values in education are? Why moral education should be taught in the schools? Why school teachers should have to teach moral lessons to the students? Actually man is a social animal and he have to live and react within the society. He has to learn different social habits like helping the people, gentleness, respect the elders and teachers and so many. These good habits make his a good social creature and he is known as a good person for others. When a student attains these qualities he becomes a responsible and a good students and he is able to behave gently within the society. When he learn these qualities within the school time, his homework and preparation become good.
Many schools have been searching the reasons of depreciation in moral values and they have been working for developing good moral values among the students. However moral values are integrated part of the education and it is great emphasized in almost all countries. Generally Moral Education is not a specific subject for schools but it is taught under different subjects like languages, literature, supplementary reading books etc. Moral Education is taught as a separate subject like Moral Science in a few schools.
Schools have been doing several efforts to manipulate the moral values among the students. The syllabus is designed such type to combine many moral values by stories, poems and by many lessons. Sometimes textbooks include many inspirational lessons about the great persons so that students may learn by their life.
It is true that textbooks and syllabus fulfill the needs of moral values but when a teacher wants to teach moral values he needs some other things also. Sometimes he uses moral sayings, moral stories, and different type’s cultural activities to enhance the level of moral education. Cultural activities are very useful to manipulate and to teach the moral education lesson.
