The Morality of Moral Education

Abstract

E ighteen students, about to embark on graduate work in educational psychology, were asked to state their professional interests. In 1970 most of them would have mentioned open education or de-schooling. In the mid-sixties they would have said compensatory education. And five years earlier it would have been programmed instruction. But now the word is moral education. All the makings of an educational bandwagon are present: foundation grants, books, conferences, research, professional societies, even a Journal of Moral Education. But unlike some other recent bandwagons in elementary and secondary schools, moral education is nothing new. Indeed, it is as old as schooling itself. So why this sudden burst of interest? A reasonable conjecture is that a combination of shock over Watergate, teen-age muggings of the elderly, and alarm over the apparent decline in moral behavior has jolted people out of their complacency about the moral upbringing of youth. But I think another development is equally important for explaining the heightened interest of educators. By virtue of certain innovations in theory and technique, moral education has at last become ideologically respectable to the modern schoolperson. Moral education as it was represented in the New England Primer, say, or in McGuffey's Eclectic Readers, is not about to find its way back into the typical classroom. It goes against the prevailing liberal grain. It is dogmatic. Punishment and intimidation figure too prominently in it. It makes no allowance for cultural or individual differences. It is im-