The elementary schools of Amherst, N.Y., provide good examples of an unabashedly directive moral education. Posters are placed around the school extolling kindness and helpfulness. Good behavior in the cafeteria is rewarded with a seat at a “high table” with tablecloth and flowers. One kindergarten student was given a special award for having taken a new Korean student under her wing. But such simple and reasonable methods as those practiced in Amherst are rare. Many school systems have entirely given up the task of character education. Children are left to fend for themselves. To my mind, leaving children alone to discover their own values is a little like putting them in a chemistry lab and saying, “Discover your own compounds, kids.” If they blow themselves up, at least they have engaged in an authentic search for the self.
Ah, you may say, we do not let children fend for themselves in chemistry laboratories because we have knowledge about chemistry. But is there really such a thing as moral knowledge? The reply to that is an emphatic “yes.” Have we not learned a thing or two over the past several thousand years of civilization? To pretend we know nothing about basic decency, about human rights, about vice and virtue, is fatuous or disingenuous. Of course we know that gratuitous cruelty and political repression are wrong, that kindness and political freedom are right and good. Why should we be the first society in history that finds itself hamstrung in the vital task of passing along its moral tradition to the next generation?
Some opponents of directive moral education argue that it could be a form of brainwashing. That is a pernicious confusion. To brainwash is to diminish someone’s capacity for reasoned judgment. It is perversely misleading to say that helping children to develop habits of truth-telling or fair play threatens their ability to make reasoned choices. Quite the contrary: Good moral habits enhance one’s capacity for rational judgments.
The paralyzing fear of indoctrinating children is even greater in high schools than it is in elementary schools. One favored teaching technique that allegedly avoids indoctrination of children-as it allegedly avoids indoctrination of college students-is dilemma ethics. Children are presented with abstract moral dilemmas: Seven people are in a lifeboat with provisions for four; what should they do? Or Lawrence Hohlberg’s famous case of Heinz and the stolen drug. Should the indigent Heinz, whose dying wife needs medicine, steal it? When high school students study ethics at all, it is usually in the form of pondering such dilemmas or in the form of debates on social issues: abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment and the like. Directive moral education is out of favor. Storytelling is out of fashion.
Let’s consider for a moment just how the current fashion in dilemmas differs from the older approach to moral education, which often used tales and parables to instill moral principles. Saul Bellow, for example, asserts that the survival of Jewish culture would be inconceivable without the stories that give point and meaning to the Jewish moral tradition. One such story, included in a collection of traditional Jewish tales that Bellow edited, is called “If Not Higher.” I sketch it here to contrast the story approach with the dilemma approach in primary and secondary education, but the moral of the contrast applies to the teaching of ethics at the college level as well:
There was once a rabbi in a small Jewish village in Russia who vanished every Friday for several hours. The devoted villagers boasted that during these hours their rabbi ascended to heaven to talk with God. A skeptical newcomer arrived in town, determined to discover where the rabbi really was.
One Friday morning the newcomer hid near the rabbi’s house, watched him rise, say his prayers and put on the clothes of a peasant. He saw him take an ax and go into the forest, chop down a tree and gather a large bundle of wood. Next the rabbi proceeded to a shack in the poorest section of the village in which lived an old woman. He left her the wood, which was enough for the week. The rabbi then quietly returned to his own house.
The story concludes that the newcomer stayed on in the village and became a disciple of the rabbi. And whenever he hears one of his fellow villagers say, “On Friday morning our rabbi ascends all the way to heaven,” the newcomer quietly adds, “If not higher.”
In a moral dilemma such as Kohlberg’s Heinz stealing the drug, or the lifeboat case, there are no obvious heroes or villains. Not only do the characters lack moral personality, but they exist in a vacuum outside of traditions and social arrangements that shape their conduct in the problematic situations confronting them. In a dilemma, there is no obvious right and wrong, no clear vice and virtue. The dilemma may engage the students’ minds; it only marginally engages their emotions, their moral sensibilities. The issues are finely balanced, listeners are on their own, and they individually decide for themselves. As one critic of dilemma ethics has observed, one cannot imagine parents passing down to their children the tale of Heinz and the stolen drug. By contrast, in the story of the rabbi and the skeptical outsider, it is not up to the listener to decide whether or not the rabbi did the right thing. The moral message is clear: “Here is a good man-merciful, compassionate and actively helping someone weak and vulnerable. Be like that person.” The message is contagious. Even the skeptic gets the point.
Stories and parables are not always appropriate for high school or college ethics courses, but the literary classics certainly are. To understand “King Lear,” “Oliver Twist,” “Huckleberry Finn,” or “Middlemarch” requires that the reader have some understanding of (and sympathy with) what the author is saying about the moral ties that bind the characters and that hold in place the social fabric in which they play their roles. Take something like filial obligation. One moral of “King Lear” is that society cannot survive when filial contempt becomes the norm. Literary figures can thus provide students with the moral paradigms that Aristotle thought were essential to moral education.
I am not suggesting that moral puzzles and dilemmas have no place in the ethics curriculum. To teach something about the logic of moral discourse and the practice of moral reasoning in resolving conflicts of principles is clearly important. But casuistry is not the place to start, and, taken by itself, dilemma ethics provides little or no moral sustenance. Moreover, an exclusive diet of dilemma ethics tends to give the student the impression that ethical thinking is a lawyer’s game.
If I were an educational entrepreneur, I might offer you a four- or five-stage program in the manner of some of the popular educational consultants. I would have brochures, audiovisual materials. There would be workshops. But there is no need for brochures nor for special equipment nor for workshops. What I am recommending is not new, has worked before and is simple:
1. Schools should have behavior codes that emphasize civility, kindness, self-discipline and honesty.
2. Teachers should not be accused of brainwashing children when they insist on basic decency, honesty and fairness.
3. Children should be told stories that reinforce goodness. In high school and college, students should be reading, studying and discussing the moral classics.
I am suggesting that teachers must help children become acquainted with their moral heritage in literature, in religion and in philosophy. I am suggesting that virtue can be taught and that effective moral education appeals to the emotions as well as to the mind. The best moral teaching inspires students by making them keenly aware that their own character is at stake.
