Extension
Activities
A Letter for Analysis (for Honor Students)
(This
letter appeared in The Wall Street Journal dated November
15, 1999):
Subject: MORAL INSTRUCTION IS NOT INDOCTRINATION
…The infusion of morality into public-school classrooms
is not a new practice, and, more significantly, it has not always
been advocated by those motivated by religious conviction.
Famed University of Chicago educator Mortimer Adler, educator,
spent the 1930s and 1940s railing against the prevalent teaching
style of the time, which he believed lacked moral certainty. He
feared that relativism-embracing teachers of the day were creating
a generation of students with wish-washy moral fiber. He believed
absolute moral standards were needed to be returned to the classroom,
and that students needed to be taught these absolute standards.
His message is instructive today. I teach an ethics class in a
secular boarding school in upstate New York and am consistently
shocked at my students' inability to condemn obviously horrific
behavior. Adler turns in his grave, I am sure, when my students
defend slavery, female genital mutilation and other atrocities
that are occurring in the world today with the argument: "Well,
it's just the way their culture works." We do not need religion
in our classrooms to teach our children to recognize right from
wrong. But we cannot be afraid to tell them that some things are
never acceptable.
If we continue to fear that moral instruction in any form in classrooms
is simply a guise for religious indoctrination, we will surely
continue to produce morally hollow graduates. As Adler wrote,
"When men no longer have confidence that right decisions
. . . matters can be rationally arrived at . . . the institutions
of democracy are the walls of an empty house which will collapse
under the pressure from without because of the vacuum within.”
New
Lebanon, NY
Discuss
with students whether or not moral issues need to be included
as a fundamental part of school curriculums.
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