ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Teaching Morals in the Schools

In years past, many public schools shied away from talking about “morals” for fear they might be viewed as violating constitutional guarantees of separation of church and state. In recent years, there has been a move toward reinstituting programs that help students distinguish between right and wrong.

Following in this trend, Irvine Unified School District’s Board of Education last week adopted a list of values it wants its schools to emphasize. The guidelines, developed by a 20-person task force composed of teachers, parents and members of the clergy (including a minister, a priest and a rabbi), are well thought out and provide a worthy model for other Orange County school districts.

The re-examination of education’s role in fostering exemplary behavior has been taking place at nearly every level of teaching--spurred in part by School board member Mike Regele the business scandals in the 1980s and continuing concerns about the interplay of ethics and technology. For example, Harvard Business School now requires students to complete a set of courses emphasizing leadership, corporate responsibility and ethics. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers course work aimed at giving students an ethical context for scientific learning.

The Irvine policy will encourage schools to address eight values important to future citizens of the world: honesty, responsibility, compassion, perseverance, respectfulness, cooperation, courage and citizenship. It’s hard to argue with a list like that. As school board member Mike Regele notes, just acknowledging the significance of values matters.

Any such listing, of course, is only a beginning. Much more important is the process in which students are helped to define their own ethical conduct on a day-to-day level. Schools are important tools in teaching that “morals” and “values” are not merely a set of beliefs that apply only to those who go to a church, temple or mosque. They are part of a much broader set of social principles, goals and standards of conduct necessary for people to live peaceably together.