Moral Education: Five Lectures PDF
Preview Moral Education: Five Lectures
MORAL EDUCATION / FIVE LECTURES Moral Education Five Lectures JAMES M. GUSTAFSON / RICHARD S. PETERS LAWRENCE KOHLBERG / BRUNO BETTELHEIM KENNETH KENISTON / With an Introduction by Nancy F. and Theodore R. Sizer Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts © Copyright 1970 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Second Printing, 1973 Distributed in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, London Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 74-128149 Printed in the United States of America CONTENTS INTRODUCTION / Nancy F. and Theodore R. Sizer / 3 EDUCATION FOR MORAL RESPONSIBILITY James M. Gustaf son / 11 CONCRETE PRINCIPLES AND THE RATIONAL PASSIONS Richard S. Peters / 29 EDUCATION FOR JUSTICE: A MODERN STATEMENT OF THE PLATONIC VIEW / Lawrence Kohlberg / 57 MORAL EDUCATION / Bruno Bettelheim / 85 YOUTH AND VIOLENCE : THE CONTEXTS OF MORAL CRISIS / Kenneth Keniston / 109 NOTES / 133 MORAL EDUCATION / FIVE LECTURES Brought to you by | provisional account Unauthenticated Download Date | 1/3/20 1:06 PM INTRODUCTION / Nancy F. Sizer and Theodore R. Sizer Brought to you by | provisional account Unauthenticated Download Date | 1/3/20 1:06 PM Morality is embedded in all formal education. The experience of schooling changes all children, some for the better, some unhappily. Often the changes are hardly the ones planned by the teacher or even apparent to him. Nonetheless, teachers must carry a major burden, along with the family, in helping children to meet and deal justly with moral problems. There was a time when "moral problems" were recognized as the core of formal schooling. These problems were cast in sectarian religious molds, and youngsters were "taught" moral conduct. Oliver Twist got his moral lessons from Mr. Bumble, as did the boys at Rugby from Thomas Arnold and Wilhams men from Mark Hopkins. There was an appealing simplicity to their task : "right" and "wrong" were clear and undisputed and were to be learned directly. If one could recite righteous precepts, one would practice them— or so the crude pedagogy of the day implied. The nine- teenth-century teacher sermonized, and his charges listened (sometimes) and learned (some things). Crude and philo- sophically simpleminded though the sermonizing tradition may be, it had its effect. The Christian gentleman ideal in England had and still has a profound effect on a sector of British and Commonwealth society, particularly its leadership. And the moralisme of the prairie have a strong hold on the large remnant of Middle America. Nixon's "forgotten American" learned much from simple sermonizing. For a class of people it worked; it took hold. But was it moral? The answer is a qualified no; sermonizing denies individual autonomy, which, with justice, lies at the heart of a new morality. While abstract morality is surely no more or less complex than it has always been (God knows that Dickens' slums were no better than ours), teaching toward it in any profound way is far more complicated than earlier schoolmasters may have believed. It was to explore the various deep problems within "moral education'" that five essays were given as a lecture series at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in the spring of 1968. They make the point of complexity all too well : The prevailing impression for 3 Brought to you by | provisional account Unauthenticated Download Date | 1/3/20 1:06 PM Nancy and Theodore Sizer / Introduction the schoolteacher who reads these essays is that the attempt to teach morality must be made by teachers, that they must approach their task vigorously and yet carefully, aware of all its intricacies and dangers, and that, considering the state of the world we are in, where immorality can carry such a high price tag for us all, all teachers of morality had better be successful—very soon. The "morality" to be taught is more than a litany from McGuffey and infinitely more subtle and complex. While the essays give many reasons to point up the complexity and difficulty of "teaching" morality, they all agree that it must be taught nonetheless. There is no "morality- free" school, no valueless teaching. Any interpersonal experience contains a moral element, virtually by definition, and a classroom is no exception. The authors all appear to agree that the old "bag of virtues" approach, to use Pro- fessor Kohlberg's phrase, is discredited; no longer can we list a group of desirable qualities within a person or objective moral "truths" about the world and expect children to take them over intact. The fear—whether of an unjust God, a harsh father or king, or a life of want unless one worked terribly hard—which underlaid that "old morality" is no longer a large part of life in America. But the need for some sort of morality is with us still. Moral autonomy, the independent arrival at a conviction of one's own accountability toward one's fellow men, the rational and emotional acceptance of justice as the most proper atmosphere in which all individuals can flourish, including even one's secret self—this is the "new morality" toward which we are to guide ourselves and other people. The stress on eventual autonomy and independence is what has confused matters for many of us. For we tend to regard childhood as a time of pleasure, of freedom, of "doing one's own thing"; and many of us regard the "real" world, the world of adulthood, as aplace where "reality" can prove very repressive indeed. Yet the road to more sophisticated moral thinking, according to Professors Kohlberg and Bettelheim in particular, is precisely the opposite: 4 Brought to you by | provisional account Unauthenticated Download Date | 1/3/20 1:06 PM
The list of books you might like
