Moral Education and the Academics of Being Human Together

Abstract

mor*al. Pronunciation: 'mor-l e.g., agents of diversity, democratic agents, etc. But, as we debated, moving further and further from the possibility of including language in the statement of aims, I began to wonder what was at stake in such a move. What were we losing by discarding the notion of education? Further, I began to consider what it might mean to train someone to become an agent of and ethical change. Not long after this conversation, I became aware of a lawsuit filed by FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education). In a press release by FIRE the following statement was made: A new trend in campus censorship is emerging: this summer, Washington State University used dispositions theory to punish an education student for his political and religious expression.... Dispositions theory, increasingly in vogue in education programs, requires professors to evaluate their students' commitment to concepts such as social justice and in conjunction with their actual scholastic achievement.... Washington State's College of Education threatened 42-year-old student Ed Swan with dismissal for allegedly violating two vague disposition standards. Swan was also subjected to mandatory diversity training--all because of clearly protected speech. 'Diversity' and 'social justice' do not mean the same thing to everyone, remarked David French, president of FIRE. By using such vague and politically charged criteria for evaluating future teachers, colleges all but guarantee that students will be punished for their opinions rather than evaluated on the basis of their abilities. (2) Here we see the fears of those teacher educators at that mid-west university realized. If we are to train our future teachers to be moral agents of change, we must ask which, or perhaps more precisely, whose morals? …