Moral Education

There has been a growing interest in moral education in the last decade, leading to lengthy discussions on the approaches to teaching moral education in schools. Moral education has experienced a renaissance of sorts by calling attention to teaching and learning values and standards that everyone should have about what it takes to teach our children to be good citizens. While there is a vast amount of research available on moral education, there is a consensus that a specific curriculum involving moral education does not fit every situation. Instead, the majority of research suggests that moral education be integrated into the school community and reinforced in the home environment.

Moral education is a broad term used to describe many aspects of teaching and learning for personal development. It is what the schools do to help students become ethically mature adults, capable of moral thought and action. The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) Panel of Moral Education's definition of moral education states that moral education is whatever schools do to influence how students think, feel, and act regarding issues of right or wrong. This definition leaves room for many different approaches and pedagogies related to moral education. Overall, moral education addresses the ethical dimensions of the individual and society and examines how standards of right and wrong are developed.

The inclusion of moral education in schools is often a point of contention for schools. Questions arise about “whose values” are to be taught. Others cite a national diversity in beliefs and values that make such education a family, rather than an institutional, imperative. Traditionally, three basic approaches were taken in moral education. First, there is the indoctrinative approach, which suggests a justified content (i.e., code of behavior) and proposes to teach that content by a variety of methods. The second approach is the romanticist approach in which the individual is assumed to have an innate tendency to develop into the role of a moral agent. The role of education is to provide the nurturing context in which this nature “flowering” can occur. The third approach is the cognitive-structural approach that focuses on the construction of moral reasoning capacities, which are understood to be a product of the interaction of one's genetic, developmental, and biological endowments with one's experience with the physical and social worlds. Proposed curricula do not endorse specific content; rather, they provide opportunity to apply one's reasoning to a variety of content. Kohlberg's Just Community Schools are examples of this approach. All three approaches have met criticism. However, the critical issue in evaluating the relativism of a moral education approach is not whether or not it relies on a specific content; rather, it hinges on how that content is justified.

There is extensive research on the core values/ virtues that embody a moral person, regardless of religion or culture, that can be taught in schools. Suggested desirable traits are honesty, civility, courage, perseverance, loyalty, self-restraint, compassion, tolerance, fairness, respect for the worth and dignity of the individual, and responsibility for the common good.

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