Teaching Virtue: National Disasters in Public Education

 

Conservatives and libertarians often decry elementary public education for its failures to turn out students proficient in reading, writing, math, and science. These criticisms are usually backed up by comparing international test scores of US students to that of students from Japan, South Korea, or Finland, for example.

I’m not a fan of this critique, as I believe these other nations do not educate the average student very well (let alone the intellectually-challenged ones), nor include all of them in the testing on which the comparisons are made. When we use these numbers, we’re comparing their best and brightest with our average students. It’s Einsteins to Oprahs (who is very bright, but not a science or math major, if you get my meaning).

No, I think American public education generally does a serviceable job of teaching the basic academic subjects, given the students it’s working with (which is not to say no improvements should be made). Where it fails miserably – savagely, immorally – is on character education. Like all public policy failures I can think of, the blame for this monumental disaster gets placed directly at the feet of the Left.

Every year for the past several years, I’ve attended my daughter’s Hillsdale-model public charter high school’s parent back-to-school night, where parents run through a condensed version of their child’s school day: meeting teachers, receiving the syllabus for each class, and learning teachers’ expectations. And every year, parents receive a packet containing William Kilpatrick’s article “How Not to Teach Morality.” If you read nothing else this year about the beginning of the end of Western Civilization in the United States, read that.

In brief, beginning in the mid-1960s, educators adopted one of two methods of teaching character to students, and sometimes both: Values Clarification, which focuses students on their own feelings, ideas, and beliefs (versus absolute truths and traditional virtues to be found in art, literature, and history); and the Socratic dialogue method, which presents moral dilemmas to students and encourages them to argue the merits of one position or another (a.k.a., moral reasoning). Both methods have served to detach students from traditional Judeo-Christian Western culture, which just so happens generally to correspond to the values held by their parents.

If we can agree that teaching virtue to children is critically important to the healthy functioning of society (let alone to the good of their little souls), we should also be able to agree that public education’s approach has been, and continues to be, both insidious and invidious. Plato himself said the Socratic dialogues should be reserved for adults, lest children learn to love argument more than they love truth. The results Kilpatrick cites confirm what SoCons have been observing (the tyranny of moral relativism) and predicting all along.

It turns out, if you allow children to band together and devise their own system of morals and ethics, the “society” they form looks something like the closing scene of Lord of the Flies. In the Kilpatrick article, an eighth grade teacher asked her students to list “Twenty Things You Love to Do” as a way of clarifying their “values”; turns out the top four are “sex, drugs, drinking, and skipping school.” Who knew!?

Public education can get this right. It has done so in the past (using the traditional approach of teaching classical and Christian virtues), and it continues to do so in schools of choice, like my daughter’s Hillsdale-model charter. It was the homogeneity of good character education that produced the Greatest Generation — if you believe in that sort of thing — and an electorate that had the good (moral) sense to sweep Ronald Reagan to the presidency in a landslide. One could even argue that Barack Obama’s electoral success is attributable to the Left’s accomplishment of instituting such damaging methods of teaching “character” to our kids. Our nation’s moral compass is smashed beyond recognition, and with it, our nation’s future.

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  1. Gödel's Ghost Inactive
    Gödel's Ghost
    @GreatGhostofGodel

    If I could just draw attention to item #10 on this list

    Karl Marx was many things, but stupid isn’t among them. How precisely it is that we’ve allowed any of the 10 pillars to be implemented in the United States of America is nearly beyond me, and probably would be completely if I were unfamiliar with the effectively global mania for central planning that first brought Bismarckian socialism to the United States, and later established whole cities with names like “Industry” and “Commerce” here in southern California—names and ideas straight out of your (least) favorite Ayn Rand novel.

    So I’m sorry, Western, but if you’re advocating for “fixing” public education, you’re ceding victory to the enemy.

    • #31
  2. Gödel's Ghost Inactive
    Gödel's Ghost
    @GreatGhostofGodel

    Here’s my problem.

    To stick with California, it’s gone from this to what we have now, in the span of about a century. Exactly as Marx predicted.

    It doesn’t matter if public education starts off teaching virtue. It’s public. Marx was absolutely right on this score.

    • #32
  3. Western Chauvinist Member
    Western Chauvinist
    @WesternChauvinist

    I’m advocating fighting back. I’d prefer we get local, independent control of our schools, but in the meantime, I’m trying to draw attention to what the public schools are teaching our kids, and how it’s destroying our society.

    Just throwing our hands up and refusing to deal with what is happening while advocating for something (privatizing education) unlikely to happen in our lifetimes is irresponsible, if not unethical. 

    And, p.s., as we all know too well, public education isn’t “free” education no matter what Marx and Democrats (but I repeat myself) say.

    • #33
  4. user_82762 Inactive
    user_82762
    @JamesGawron

    WestC,

    We are all too sophisticated.  In the classroom with the children it will either be uplifting or they will descend into barbarity.

    Over 100 teens swarm Memphis plaza, ‘knocking out’ shoppers

    We need to stop kidding ourselves that more and more sociology will do anything but create ever more elaborate excuses for total moral failure.  Theft & Thuggery has no excuse.  With the advent of the cell phone camera, the police will be forced onto their best behavior.  Meanwhile those who have been getting away with murder, rape, and robbery are going to find the light very bright.  They won’t be so comfortable under their rock.

    Regards,

    Jim

    • #34
  5. Western Chauvinist Member
    Western Chauvinist
    @WesternChauvinist

    James Gawron:

    WestC,

    We are all too sophisticated. In the classroom with the children it will either be uplifting or they will descend into barbarity.

    Over 100 teens swarm Memphis plaza, ‘knocking out’ shoppers

    We need to stop kidding ourselves that more and more sociology will do anything but create ever more elaborate excuses for total moral failure. Theft & Thuggery has no excuse. With the advent of the cell phone camera, the police will be forced onto their best behavior. Meanwhile those who have been getting away with murder, rape, and robbery are going to find the light very bright. They won’t be so comfortable under their rock.

    Regards,

    Jim

     I accidentally watched that video, Jim. Horrifying. 

    • #35
  6. user_86050 Inactive
    user_86050
    @KCMulville

    If government runs public schools,  but government cannot (for fear of lawsuit by an absolutized church-state interpretation) favor one moral perspective over another … then by definition, government cannot promote any moral perspective over another.

    You may think that a moral perspective and a religion are two different things, and that public schools are only barred from promoting religion. But one only needs to look at our current environment to see that they’ve become practically equivalent. Any promotion of any value … except tolerance and equality … is subject to discipline, suspension, and a lawsuit from someone who gratuitously imagines the hurt and exclusion felt by someone who proclaims that they’ve been victimized by any expression or promoting virtues. 

    What public schools teach, inevitably, is that no moral perspective should be promoted over any other.

    Therefore, students are taught relativism by default. That’s a predictable result of public schools run by teachers who are forbidden to promote one moral perspective over another.

    • #36
  7. Western Chauvinist Member
    Western Chauvinist
    @WesternChauvinist

    KC Mulville: Therefore, students are taught relativism by default. That’s a predictable result of public schools run by teachers who are forbidden to promote one moral perspective over another.

     Well, it’s not exactly by default. It’s been intentional since 1966. 

    The libertarian response to the problem is “privatize education!”

    This highlights the libertarian/SoCon divide, imo. While I agree that subsidiarity is the ideal, it is unacceptable to me that we neglect the subject of teaching morality to today’s children while we wait for something better to be done about the system. Even Democrat voters can perceive the degradation inherent in the methods of character education as it exists.

    My position is Both/And. Both agitate for a change back to the classical-Christian approach to teaching virtues and work for school choice.  

    • #37
  8. Sandy Member
    Sandy
    @Sandy

    My position is Both/And. Both agitate for a change back to the classical-Christian approach to teaching virtues and work for school choice.


    I agree completely with your concern about relativism; it is poisonous. But why do schools need to be asked to train in character beyond what is needed for relatively calm, civilized classroom instruction?  We need to get rid of courses on “values clarification” (ugh),  and especially of sex education or family life education or whatever they call that junk now, and teach intellectually challenging material.  So yes, we should agitate for the classical curriculum as an academic matter, because it is a superior curriculum, and it happens that it is not demoralizing, as relativistic curricula are.   But agitating for something called “the classical-Christian approach to teaching virtues” is going to fall on deaf ears.

    • #38
  9. Misthiocracy Member
    Misthiocracy
    @Misthiocracy

    Karl Marx was many things, but stupid isn’t among them.

    The best crooks and liars are highly intelligent. You need to be in order to keep track of all your lies and promises.

    • #39
  10. user_385039 Inactive
    user_385039
    @donaldtodd

    Western Chauvinist: #37 “My position is Both/And. Both agitate for a change back to the classical-Christian approach to teaching virtues and work for school choice.”

    My impression is that if the word “Christian” is rolled out, there will be a plethora of excuses, including multiculturalism and concerns about non-Christian students’ considerations being accounted for.

    If the money follows the student, per the direction of the parent, the schools that exhibit some kind of excellence will do well, and may do better, and the schools that are poor or worse will hike up their bootstraps in an attempt to legitimately earn some of that money.

    One might think of how poorly American-manufactured automobiles were being made in comparison to the Japanese and European cars.  Chrysler, Ford and General Motors had to change in order to remain in business.  (Have they arrived?  Probably a question for a different forum.)  In any case, that is the kind of thinking which might save public education in spite of itself; and save the taxpayers’ money at the same time.  The public schools won’t be able to bamboozle people who are able to count and love their children.

    • #40
  11. Western Chauvinist Member
    Western Chauvinist
    @WesternChauvinist

    Donald Todd: My impression is that if the word “Christian” is rolled out, there will be a plethora of excuses, including multiculturalism and concerns about non-Christian students’ considerations being accounted for.

    The interesting thing is, I think a large majority of Americans still claim the “Christian” faith. But we’ve been cowed by the Left into foregoing any advocacy of our common cultural roots. Well, everyone but Hillsdale educators who are at the vanguard of fighting the Left in the war on our children’s academic, moral, and cultural formation.

    I’d like to see a poll of actual parents with actual children in the school system who are opposed to these: prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope, and love. My kids’ charter discusses these virtues in the historical/cultural context without actually advocating for any particular “faith,” while employing teachers who model these virtues in their own lives. It’s amazing. And it’s publicly funded, although there would be more objections from the Left I’m sure if they weren’t so successful in turning out literate, accomplished graduates.

    • #41
  12. Misthiocracy Member
    Misthiocracy
    @Misthiocracy

    Western Chauvinist: I’d like to see a poll of actual parents with actual children in the school system who are opposed to these: prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope, and love.

    That sort of treatment of virtue works great in private or charter schools, but how does one devise a way to prevent “equality”, “diversity”, “tolerance”, “safety”, “security”, “self-esteem”, “healthcare”, “welfare”, “food security”, etc, from being added to the list, or “social” being added just before “justice”, in public schools which rely on federal funding?

    • #42
  13. Western Chauvinist Member
    Western Chauvinist
    @WesternChauvinist

    Misthiocracy:

    Western Chauvinist: I’d like to see a poll of actual parents with actual children in the school system who are opposed to these: prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope, and love.

    That sort of treatment of virtue works great in private or charter schools, but how does one devise a way to prevent “equality”, “diversity”, “tolerance”, “safety”, “security”, “self-esteem”, “healthcare”, “welfare”, “food security”, etc, from being added to the list, or “social” being added just before “justice”, in public schools which rely on federal funding?

    I actually don’t think it’s that hard. Who has the greatest interest in how kids are formed? Their parents. Ask them what virtues they want their kids to learn.

    If I happened to be one of the parents asked, I would object to all of the above, and I would ask for original source materials for those “values” as they pertain to our American/Western heritage. 

    I’m baffled that so many right-wingers have fallen into the Left’s trap. So many commenters on this thread seem to be saying, “You can’t do that! You can’t teach classical values in literature and history class!!”

    Why not?

    • #43
  14. Misthiocracy Member
    Misthiocracy
    @Misthiocracy

    Western Chauvinist: I actually don’t think it’s that hard. Who has the greatest interest in how kids are formed? Their parents. Ask them what virtues they want their kids to learn.

    And when the parents in a particular school district desires virtues that the federal government abhors and the feds withhold funding as a result?

    Basically, all I’m saying is, good luck finding a public school “virtue curriculum” that you can abide unless the federal government is removed from the equation.  THAT should be the priority, rather then trying to get concessions for “our side” out of the education establishment.

    • #44
  15. Western Chauvinist Member
    Western Chauvinist
    @WesternChauvinist

    Misthiocracy: Basically, all I’m saying is, good luck finding a public school “virtue curriculum” that you can abide unless the federal government is removed from the equation.  THAT should be the priority, rather then trying to get concessions for “our side” out of the education establishment.

    I totally disagree. You’re dooming our nation to failure. Hillsdale is fighting the fight in public charter schools right now. People who agree with you have already surrendered.

    • #45
  16. Misthiocracy Member
    Misthiocracy
    @Misthiocracy

    Western Chauvinist:

    Misthiocracy: Basically, all I’m saying is, good luck finding a public school “virtue curriculum” that you can abide unless the federal government is removed from the equation. THAT should be the priority, rather then trying to get concessions for “our side” out of the education establishment.

    I totally disagree. You’re dooming our nation to failure. Hillsdale is fighting the fight in public charter schools right now. People who agree with you have already surrendered.

    I think we’ll have to agree to disagree then. I do not see how parents can compete against unions, lobbyists, and billionaires in the halls of Washington D.C.

    Also, I earlier wrote that I agreed that the virtue education you describe was feasible in charter schools.  Hillsdale College isn’t working to change the Washington D.C. establishment.  It’s trying to get around that establishment.  I think that supports my thesis.

    • #46
  17. Sandy Member
    Sandy
    @Sandy

    Western Chauvinist:

    Misthiocracy:

    Western Chauvinist

    I’m baffled that so many right-wingers have fallen into the Left’s trap. So many commenters on this thread seem to be saying, “You can’t do that! You can’t teach classical values in literature and history class!!”

    Why not?

    I must have missed that.  As I have mentioned a couple of times, these issues come up naturally in literature and history and can be discussed in that context without a specific “virtues curriculum.”   In fact these subjects cannot be taught without entering into questions of morality.   This is why conservatives need to push for curricular changes.  The issues also come up in the area of student behavior, so conservatives need to press for high standards of behavior, too.  Does anyone disagree with this?  

    • #47
  18. Trink Coolidge
    Trink
    @Trink

    Just talked to a teacher who said that a Phd. from the state education system informed them last week that they are now required to teach argumentation across the curriculum.  We’re talking grade school. S he also showed me the lesson in her “Wonders” reading program that in the first paragraph announces that ” . . . automobiles are clearly destroying the planet.”   The kids have to read this cra# and then work on the comprehension sheet at the end of it.   Reinforcing the brainwashing.

    • #48
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