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Lecture 1.1. Moral Education. I want to start out with two basic observations.
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Lecture 1.1 Moral Education
I want to start out with two basic observations. First, moral discourse is not some abstract, technical or occasional language spoken only by academics and professional ethicists—it is the common tongue of all human beings and it is practiced continually throughout our daily intercourse with one another. It is an implicit feature of nearly all human communication. Just listen to television shows and the conversations you overhear in coffee shops. They are full of judgments and loaded with moral imperatives. We are constantly making moral pronouncements about our actions and our expectations of others.“She said she would . . . but she let me down. I am not going to . . . .blah, blah, and blah! The Ubiquity of Morals
Second, our moral judgments tend to be very firm and quite immediate. We seem to intuitively know right from wrong. When pressed we can offer reasons—although these are not always consistent with our pronouncements. It is also the case that we can amend our views with new facts and further consideration of the situation. But overall, it has to be said that human beings are quite dogmatic in their moral reasoning. Hubris
How do we acquire our moral values? How do they guide our judgments and what is their relationship to our behavior? How is morality related to our nature; how is it reflective of our culture and our religious commitments? What is its place in a professional field such as nursing, especially given the complex problems created by modern medicine and the diverse challenges of life in a global society. We will examine these and other problems in this course. We will also pay attention to our role as moral educators and consider the distinct issue of preparing students—male and female—for a career historically viewed as the moral duty of women. What is the imperative to care? The Origin of Values
Is an individual born with some sense of right and wrong, or is this knowledge that must be learnt from experience? Notice that in the nature-nurture debate biology and culture play a part on both sides. Even the strongest environmentalist accepts that human beings are born with the capacity to learn; while those who look to rich innate powers readily accept the mediating role of culture. Two Perspectives
But two perspectives can be idealized. • Human beings come equipped with some moral sense. • Human beings learn all their values from the society into which they are born. Both positions have a long history with compelling arguments supporting their claims.
Perhaps the most powerful statement of the cultural learning theory stems from John Locke. Inquiring if we have any innate ideas he observes the plurality of different values embraced by the world’s cultures. Where are the universals? Do not the different people’s of the world develop very different values and beliefs?Even if there were common agreement, such as the maxim “thou shalt not kill!” would this prove innateness? His conclusion; all knowledge must through experience. Individual → Society
This Empiricist epistemology funds a an approach to education in which learning must come from experience. In broad terms the child should gain knowledge from things in the world, not from words and books. His key interest however, was the formation of character. Here he provides a detailed account of how a young person’s habits should be trained.
He starts his hugely influential Some Thoughts on Education with a powerful metaphor. Men’s happiness or misery is most part of their own making. . . . I think I may say, that of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education. ’ Tis that which makes the great difference in mankind. He continues: The little, or almost insensible impressions on our tender infancies, have very important and lasting consequences: and there ’tis, as in the fountains of some rivers, where a gentle application of the hand turns the flexible waters in channels, that make them take quite contrary courses; and by this direction given them at first in the source, they receive different tendencies, and arrive at last at very remote and distant places.
Moral education gives us the power to rationally govern our passions. To achieve this we must train a child to deny his or her desires and follow the will of adults. Such discipline with help them develop the ability to manage their impulses as they approach the age of reason. It is this capacity which underlies virtue, the primary aim of all schooling.
Locke’s insight is that the child is not born in sin but in a neutral state. The mind, he famously argued is a blank slate, a tabula rasa or empty closet to be filled by experience. Compare this with Rousseau’s more positive reading of human potential. He opens his equally influential work Emile with the following endorsement of our God given powers—and the corrupting influence of society. Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man. . . . [Man] . . . wants nothing as nature made it, not even man; for him, man must be trained like a school horse; man must be fashioned in keeping with his fancy like a tree in his garden.
For Rousseau, the teacher had to let the child create meaning themselves out of their own experience. In Rousseau's “negative education” the tutor’s job was to manipulate the environment not the child: to keep the mind from error and the heart from vice. All learning, including moral education, came from the lessons of nature not the desires of society. His most vivid image about the distortion of human character is the story of the “baby’s tears.” Born to cry for what we need, society soon teaches us use our emotions and manipulate one another for what we want—a theory that can be tested any Saturday morning in the isles of America’s toy stores. Of course, that is just a nursery for what Rousseau would see as the perverse creatures so modern society.
For Locke, however, character has to be shaped from the outside. Even so he shared some of Rousseau’s progressive insights. The most effective form of instruction, he argued, is to make learning pleasurable. If lessons are enjoyable then children will be intrinsically motivated. Learning should be sport and play, never a task or a duty. Locke also supported extrinsic rewards. Pivotally, for future educators, he notes that praise and blame (psychological reinforces) are the most effective means of controlling students—certainly far more effective than physical punishments.
Locke’s soft pedagogy stands in stark contrast to the hard line methods of many Calvinist teachers. Convinced that the child was born into sin, they set out to break the their will and teach submission to external authority, the word of God as revealed by the divine truths of the Bible. Morality had to be forced on the child from the outside. Society → Individual
"Train up a child in the way wherein he should go: And when he is old, he will not depart from it." Prov. 22:6. Here are John Wesley’s thoughts on this essential task Thus may we counteract, and, by the grace of God assisting us, gradually cure, the natural Atheism of our children. But what can we do to cure their self-will? It is equally rooted in their nature, and is, indeed, the original idolatry, which is not confined to one age or country, but is common to all the nations under heaven. And how few parents are to be found even among Christians, even among them that truly fear God, who are not guilty in this matter! Who do not continually feed and increase this grievous distemper in their children! To let them have their own will, does this most effectually. To let them take their own way, is the sure method of increasing their self-will sevenfold. But who has the resolution to do otherwise? One parent in a hundred!
He continues Who can be so singular, so cruel, as not, more or less, to humour her child? "And why should you not? What harm can there be in this, which everybody does?" The harm is, that it strengthens their will more and more, till it will neither bow to God nor man. To humour children is, as far as in us lies, to make their disease incurable. A wise parent, on the other hand, should begin to break their will the first moment it appears. In the whole art of Christian education there is nothing more important than this. The will of the parent is to a little child in the place of the will of God. Therefore studiously teach them to submit to this while they are children, that they may be ready to submit to his will when they are men. But in order to carry this point, you will need incredible firmness and resolution; for after you have once begun, you must never more give way. You must hold on still in an even course; you must never intermit your attention for one hour; otherwise you lose your labour.
The idea that enculturation within society is the basis of an individual's value system was given its most articulate expression by the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim. For Durkheim all societies create rules, traditions, and value systems to maintain order and fulfill economic needs. Morality is particular to these specific forms—it has no independent or universal existence. Morality then is a social construct and exists only for individuals who live within the group. In this context moral rules are embedded in authoritative structures—including state and religious institutions—that exert a power over individuals, obliging them to fulfill social duties. As the child develops into an adult they are gradually internalized and the individual acts autonomously according to their own moral conscience.
More specifically, facing the problem of establishing social solidarity in an industrializing nation marked by an increasing division of labor, Durkheim believed that schools must teach children the discipline to constrain their desires; attachment to the group; and a sense of individual responsibility. These three elements are the moral foundation necessary for individuals to function in society.
Durkheim’s sociological arguments also proved popular with American social scientists during the first decades of the Twentieth century. Influenced largely by behavioral psychology and the notion that experience was all important, a generation of anthropologists sought to demonstrate how different cultures gave form to human experience.
For example, in Patterns of Culture Ruth Benedict argued that all moral values are relative. Morality is culture dependent and cannot be applied to people in other situations. She supported this relativistic position with examples of extreme variations in customs, manners, taboos, habits, and attitudes of the world’s many peoples. Just consider changing attitudes toward homosexuality in our own country and others. The US Supreme Court has determined that same sex marriage should be legal, while historically and in many countries around the world it was a crime punishable by years of imprisonment. One compelling lesson from this diversity is the imperative not to impose our values on others; Western society cannot claim to be the standard for all life. This was a powerful corrective on the fervor of 19th Century missionaries and their zeal to spread civilization by Christianizing the world.
Today, Americans have a much greater appreciation for cultural diversity and the right of individuals to their own views—to religious freedom and freedom of thought. We don’t impose our views on others, and expect that others respect the integrity of our opinions. This also goes along with the basic belief that we get our values for our social and religious upbringing—from the lessons received in the home, the church, and the broader community. Don’t you share these values with friends and family? If we are products of enculturation then—logically at lest—we cannot expect what seems so good and true to us to apply to others with very different social and religious backgrounds. We thus embrace a principle of tolerance. But for many such tolerance is another name for moral apathy.
How can we write the seemingly heinous moral practices witnessed around the world as just so many different moral practices each with their own internal integrity? Are so called honor killings really moral imperatives? Can we turn a blind eye to the oppression of women and brutal treatment of minorities in third world countries? If society justifies racism and slavery, does that make it right?
One popular answer to the moral skeptic is the assertion that every normal individual has the power to determine the difference between right and wrong: that we are born with a moral sense to tell us good from bad, even if we do not choose to use it. From this perspective individuals cannot escape responsibility for their actions by blaming others or the situation into which they were born—although these may be mitigating circumstances.
The moral sense doctrine also has a long history. Most notably it was invoked by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence to justify the emancipation of America from British rule. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Here is the clearest statement that rights exist independently of society and that government may, indeed must be held up to moral evaluation.
Interestingly, Jefferson was influenced by a school of Scottish philosophers who reacted against the development of Empiricism after Locke. Hume is famous for arguing that since all our ideas come from the senses we cannot claim knowledge of the world beyond appearance. He also argued contrary to Locke, that reason cannot be the cause of moral behavior. Our actions arise from feelings, desires and sentiments, not the force of facts. Indeed, he famously argued that “reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.“ Reason can inform us of the means to a desired end (how we might promote pleasure or avoid pain), but it cannot motive us to action. That is the role of the emotions. For Hume, the sentiments provide feelings of approval (esteem and praise) and disapproval (blame and disgrace) which determine our sense of the good. Witnessing a cruel act generates a feeling of injustice and this, not abstract principles of right underlies our moral judgments. Hume avoids relativism by suggesting these feelings are common to all men and women, part of our human nature.
As Hume puts it in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, “morality is nothing in the abstract Nature of Things, but is entirely relative to the Sentiment or mental Taste of each particular Being; in the same Manner as the Distinctions of sweet and bitter, hot and cold, arise from the particular feeling of each Sense or Organ." The opposite path to morality—based upon the dictates of reason—was taken by Immanuel Kant.
The moral sense theory was particularly influential among Nineteenth Century educators who wanted to teach children—especially those of the poor—to exercise wise and moral judgment so that they could participate as independent citizens in a modern market economy. The moral sense was the basis of enlightened self-interest, personal responsibility and productive work.
Consider the ideas of Horace Mann, so called father of the Common School. Mann argued that God had given men and women the innate powers necessary to life. These included instincts such as sympathy, love of children, and benevolence. It also included a sense of religious veneration. The problem was that—as Rousseau argued—society corrupted these powers. The job of education then, was to correctly train the mind to act as God intended through pedagogic practices that developed rather than frustrated our innate powers. For Mann this demanded knowledge of the brain and the best way to strengthen its distinctive organs.
Perhaps the best introduction to Mann’s viewpoint is to read what he had to say about Laura Bridgman, the deaf-blind girl educated by his close friend Samuel Gridley Howe. "According to Locke's theory," Howe observed, the narrow range of stimuli reaching Laura's mind (i.e., tastes and touch) seemed to imply "the moral qualities and faculties of this child should be limited in proportion to the limitation of her senses." But her intellectual development, in addition to her "remarkably acute . . . moral sense" demonstrated the existence of "innate intellectual dispositions; and moreover, innate moral dispositions; not derived as many metaphysicians suppose, from the exercise of intellectual faculties, but as independent in their existence as the intellectual dispositions themselves." In short, Laura's immediate and wide comprehension of emotions was clear evidence that each "child has dormant with his bosom every mental quality."
Here is what Mann told the teachers of Massachusetts in the Common School Journal The world has been infested with a school of philosophers, so called, one of whose dogmas it was, that there is no rule of right; that there is no fixed principles of duty .. . . that all our notions respecting equity, and justice, and honor, and compassion, were conventional, arbitrary, capricious; that there was no original faculty in the human soul which preferred truth or falsehood, fidelity to perfidy . . . that each generation may makes its own laws of benevolence or duty . . .and that the great obligations which are acknowledged by all to exist in some form, have no inflexible, immutable, immortal standard, in the moral constitution of the soul. But out of the living reality of this child's nature God has perfected praise. She exhibits sentiments of conscientiousness, of love of truth, of gratitude, of affection, which education never gave her. She bestows upon mankind, evidences of purity, and love, and faith, which she never received from them. It is not repayment, for they were never borrowed. They were not copied from the creature, but given by the Creator.
I cannot resist continuing Our belief is, that it has been the blessing of this child to have lost those senses and organs, through which, in the case of other children, the follies and vices and errors of the world find and inlet into the soul. We say blessing, for though we acknowledge she lost much in being deprived of the outward world, yet we believe she has had a thousand fold compensation in having all that was innocent pure and lovely, in the inner temple, kept from desecration and sacrilege by that loss.. . . She was saved until, at last, it was her happy fortune to come under the care of one of those master-minds . . . under [whose] parental . . . skill, she has at length been acquainted with much of what is good in life, without being corrupted by its evil . . she has tasted the exquisite, divine pleasures of affection, benevolence, duty, instead of being seduced away to live and riot in the coarse pleasures of appetite, of sense, and of the lower propensities of our nature.
With the demise of Behaviorism and the rise of the Cognitive sciences psychologists Mann’s view that the brain is prefigured with moral and intellectual intuitions has gained new adherents. Only now it is not God’s handiwork that tells us right from wrong, but the inherited instincts of our evolutionary past. The current trend is to test people’s spontaneous judgments when presented with ethical dilemmas in order to find psychological universals embedded in the neural structures of the brain.
The foundation of the modern American school—its organizational structure, its curriculum, its pedagogy, and its distinctive physical and cultural spaces—was forged during the Progressive Era. Designed to address the social and economic concerns of a rapidly urbanizing and industrializing nation, the high school, in particular, faced daunting problems. Schools were charged with teaching skills for a new kind of work and values for a new kind of life. Moral Education in the Twentieth Century
According to Lawrence Cremin two overarching concerns characterize the era: a search for community and a faith in science. While historians have explored these problems in the development of administration, curricula, and pedagogy, comparatively little attention has be paid to the issue of moral education. Yet this was one of the most important concerns of the day. How could values essential to the American way of life be instilled in the diverse population of the modern metropolitan and industrial nation? As the social structures of Victorian life shifted, the religious foundations of moral order crumbled. There was no more pressing problem than to establish a new sense of meaning and purpose within modern society.
America was moving away from tight-knit rural communities where individuals understood their social duties and where behavior was closely monitored by family, community, and church. Work, traditionally seen as a source of character training was also changing radically. What meaning and sense of social purpose could be found in the routine activities of the factory operative? Indeed the mechanistic labor of the shop floor seemed to breed a kind of materialistic individualism—work was for money and personal pleasure rather than creative engagement and the social good.
Americans were starting to live, work, and play in differential and discrete spaces. As such traditional modes of social control no longer governed the activities of youth. As money and leisure time increased, parents had to battle the influence of modern music, film, popular literature, commercialism, and the dangerous freedoms introduced by the automobile. Individualism and the pleasure principle were here to stay!
Perhaps the biggest problem was generated by the new wave of immigration from Southern Europe. Speaking with unfamiliar tongues and introducing new cultural traditions, political values, and religious beliefs, immigrants embraced different norms and challenging social mores. How could this disparate sea of humanity be taught to accept and live by American values?
Assimilation was the goal. Like biological assimilation, the diverse mass of immigrants who entered the United States were seen as raw material to be processed for the good of the community. In an industrial metaphor apt for the age, America was seen as a melting pot that would recast individuals in a mold shaped by liberal values and republican ideals. The school was the primary site of this cultural transformation.
Modernization and industrialization demand standardized and socially acceptable behaviors. For the Progressive, roads and communication were also recognized as agents of moral reform for the new prosperity and intelligent expectations they spread across the country. Indeed, in cities the community center—often located in the school, with baths, night classes, and advise on all things American would rise to the challenge of adapting the population to the expectations of the new world.
Science and democracy were heralded as the best way of building a better, more moral and just society. While there were many different interpretations of what this might mean, educators faced the problem of teaching them to the young. Many religious theorists embraced the new attitude toward solving the problems of life and promoted a conception of what might be called practical Christianity. The kingdom of heaven would be built here on Earth with the help of public spirited leaders who understood their Christian duty to work for the good of the community.
For John Dewey training in fixed character traits was poorly adapted to needs of the day. Children needed flexible skills to make moral decisions in diverse and changing contexts. The ability to make wise and informed judgments was as central to the morality as it was to all other human endeavors. It too had to be regulated by science; subject to experimentation and the consequences of action. Dewey’s writings not only influenced philosophers and educators, they also shaped the ideas of several key Christian progressives. The Civil War and the rise of the factory system challenged faith in religious absolutes. No longer guided by God’s moral ordinance intellectuals and religious leaders sought values imminent in experience itself.
However, as we will see, without a set of foundational truths, the goals of character education were quickly secularized by expert professionals—teachers, social workers, pediatricians—who substituted scientific knowledge of healthy growth and a well adjusted personality for the religious imperatives of the good life. Removing worship of a deity from the center of religious life, the new psychology offered practical Christianity in the manuals of parenting. Rather than inculcating children into a body of religious truths the focus was on scientifically informed actions.
Indeed, the wisdom of the professional seemed to undermine everything recommended by the Church as bad and threatening to the mental health of the child. This was clearly part of a power struggle for authority over the social that the new educated professional class was determined to win—science had to conquer superstition. The well adjusted child, with harmoniously adapted social feelings and cooperative attitudes became the goal, rather then the traditional reified traits of obedience, neatness, perseverance, and the like.
Recognizing the temptations of the modern world for restless youth, many religious groups attempted to fill the spaces between home, school, and work with organized activities that taught Christian values together with lessons of purpose and leadership. Alert to the social development of the adolescent, emotional bonds were forged that committed boys and girls to expected codes of behavior, often laid out in explicit oaths of loyalty and fidelity. Such codes were also incorporated into schools—as they are today.
The gradual secularization of the public school forced churches to find new ways to instill religious values in the next generation; values that spoke of moral leadership and community service. The almost spontaneous emergence of so many youth organizations bent on developing the child’s character marks an interesting response to the perceived loss of meaning indicative of the modern era.
The YMCA and the YWCA were thus “character factories” designed to promote physically strong, healthy, and socially responsible citizens committed to progressive Christian values. Like the scouts and numerous other youth organizations the goal was not entertainment or social advancement but meaningful activities that spoke to the social bonds many saw undermined by the changing family and mechanization of work. For Juliette Low the purpose of the girl scouts was to promote the virtues of womanhood by training girls “to recognize their obligations to God and country, to prepare for the duties devolving upon women in the home, in society, and the state, and to guide them in ways conducive to personal honor and the public good.”
Educators realized they would use peer pressure to force compliance to adult goals if traditional virtues were an accepted component of the group’s activities. Thus, over the next two decades, clubs started to emerge within the curriculum and in extra-curricular activities to define the character traits of the virtuous citizen. This was particularly influential in student government and in sports. Particularly interesting were the ways extra-curricula activities served to assimilate and Americanize immigrant children. Using the power of peer pressure and the desire to fit in, mainstream ideals and images served to normalize behavior.
As American inched toward the First World War more attention focused upon patriotism and social feeling. Moral educators looked around for the best codes of conduct. What would train up the most serviceable, loyal, and civic minded Americans? Where previous moral educators had attempted to find codes anchored in traditional virtues, character educators suggested that virtues be determined through the process of activity analysis that is a list of specific, practical actions that characterize good civic behavior.
In place of abstract and ideal traits, the character educator would provide a list of expected behaviors—often quite exhaustive—for each kind of social situation. This process of codification lent itself to standardization, behavioral training, and strict supervision. Hutchins proposed ten laws of right living that would make students useful to their nation. They included the traits of self-control, duty, self-reliance, good workmanship, loyalty, kindness, good health, reliability, clean play and teamwork.
These traits were not picked out of the sky, but derived from discussions with “the best citizens in America”—code words for the professional class of managers and businessmen exalted by the progressive era reformers. Today we can easily see this as a normalization of middle class and corporate values. For David Sneddenthese general traits had to be pushed further into specific actions—extensive lists of actual activities were needed. For example, what does courtesy mean? He proposed measureable behaviors for school students such as opening doors for teachers and guests, coming to the building on time, acting in an orderly manner, and the like.
