Many Want Students to Learn a Lesson in Morals : Values Clarification Approach of Recent Years Losing Favor Among Educators

In the days of the one-room schoolhouse, American children learned their morals from storybooks in which liars always suffered and honesty always paid. Teachers enforced classroom obedience with a flick of a ruler or the crack of a strap.

By the 1970s, however, little remained in the public schools of the age-old method of teaching morals as though they were multiplication. Students were more apt to debate the Vietnam War or the legalization of marijuana as part of a “values clarification” program.

Today, the moral education theories popular in the last two decades have fallen into disrepute, tainted by allegations that they helped spawn a generation that is morally confused.

“Schools adopted programs that essentially said, ‘There is no right or wrong. We are going to throw out all these values and kids can pick and choose between them,’ ” said Marilyn Rauth, executive director of the Educational Issues Department for the American Federation of Teachers.

“Kids came out with no values at all. Kids became very wishy-washy. And the public rightfully complained.”

Bennett Leads Critics

Now, frustrated parents, conservative groups and some educators, led by U.S. Education Secretary William J. Bennett, are calling for a new approach to moral education, one that gives children a grounding in what Bennett describes as “those values all Americans share.”

A small but growing number of school systems that had all but abandoned moral education in the last few years are beginning to integrate the teaching of such virtues as honesty, tolerance and loyalty into their curricula.

“Its time has come,” says Ray Erlandson Jr., executive vice president of the Texas-based American Institute of Character Education, which has developed its own values curricula. “Kids are just hungry to know what’s right and what’s wrong. And since McGuffey Reader time, nobody’s bothered to teach them.”

The resurgence of interest in teaching morals has come about in part because of Bennett, who has repeatedly called for schools to take an active role in “character development” since he took office in January.

“As any parent knows, teaching character is a difficult task,” he said in a speech to the National Press Club in March. “But it is a crucial task because we want all our children to be not only healthy, happy and successful, but decent, strong and good.”

Goal of Research

Ironically, that was also the goal of moral education when it first appeared as a field of research in schools of education during the social upheaval of the 1960s.

Educators, looking for ways to help young people sort through the ethical dilemmas of that tumultuous era, developed programs of moral education based on the notion that schools should not “indoctrinate” students.

Instead, the theorists said, teachers should encourage children to think through ethical problems to formulate their own moral code.

“You just can’t take a big rubber stamp and stamp the Ten Commandments on a child’s forehead and expect a child to understand what those Commandments mean,” said Boston University education Prof. Ralph Mosher, a key theorist in the moral education movement.

“Children can memorize and they can parrot, but until they have constructed for themselves a moral framework, it is as meaningless as memorizing a chemical formula,” he says.

Values Clarification

Perhaps the best known of the moral education approaches of the ‘60s and ‘70s was values clarification, in which students were encouraged to consider and discuss their attitudes about a range of issues. Exercises popular in classrooms across the country had pupils debating subjects as diverse as abortion, homework and their favorite television show. Teachers were cautioned not to pass judgment on what students chose to believe.

Howard Kirschenbaum, a pioneer in values clarification, says the problem with teachers setting forth moral principles is that few of those principles are absolute.

“If it was so true that murder is always wrong then we wouldn’t have wars. If it was so true that honesty is always right, then no one would ever pause and tactfully say something to save a friend’s feelings,” says Kirschenbaum, who continues to try to refine the concept of values clarification at the Sagamore Institute in Upstate New York.

What is more useful to children growing up, he adds, is to help them learn to cope with life’s moral ambiguities and to understand that others may operate under a different set of values.

Different, Valid Views

Asking such diverse questions of pupils as, “What kind of ice cream do you like best?” and “When does life begin?” helps demonstrate that others may have different but equally valid views about the same subject, he says.

What quickly made values clarification controversial, however, was the charge that it promoted moral “relativism” by making no effort to distinguish between “good” and “bad” values.

“There are so many issues on which there aren’t 10 different responsible points of view,” says Christina Hoff Sommers, a professor of philosophy at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., and a critic of the moral education theories of the last two decades.

“Young people today, many of whom are in a complete moral stupor, need to be shown there is an important distinction between moral and non-moral decisions,” she said.

Posing questions to young students about weighty social issues “is like putting kids on the Supreme Court before they’ve finished elementary school,” she said.