The Australian Family, November 2002, p. 33
Children and Moral Education
Christina Hoff-Sommers is an American author. This article comes from chapter 8 of her book, The War Against Boys (Simon and Schuster, 2000).
Some 2,400 years ago, Aristotle articulated what children need: clear guidance on how to be moral human beings. What Aristotle advocated became the default model for moral education over the centuries. He showed parents and teachers how to civilize the invading hordes of child barbarians. Only recently have many educators begun to denigrate his teachings.
Aristotle regarded children as wayward, uncivilized, and very much in need of discipline. The early Christian philosopher Saint Augustine went further, regarding children's refractory nature as a manifestation of the original sin committed by Adam and Eve when they rebelled against the dictates of God. Each philosopher, in his way, regarded perversity as a universal feature of human nature.
Aristotle compared moral education to physical training. Just as we become strong and skillful by doing things that require strength and skill, so, he said, do we become good by practicing goodness. Ethical education, as he understood it, was training in emotional control and disciplined behavior. Habituation to right behavior comes before an appreciation or understanding of why we should be good. First, children must be socialized by inculcating into them habits of decency and using suitable punishments and rewards to discipline them to behave well. Eventually they will understand the reasons for and advantages of being moral human beings.
Far from giving priority to the free expression of emotion, Aristotle (and Plato too) taught that moral development is achieved by educating children to modulate their emotions. For Aristotle, self-awareness meant being aware of and avoiding behaviors that emotion dictates but reason proscribes: "We must notice the errors into which we ourselves are liable to fall (because we all have different tendencies) ... and we must drag ourselves in the contrary direction." Children with good moral habits will gain control over the intemperate side of their nature and grow into free and flourishing human beings. As Aristotle put it, "The moral virtues ... are engendered in us neither by nor contrary to nature; we are constituted by nature to receive them, but their full development is due to habit.... So it is a matter of no little importance what sort of habits we form from the earliest age - it makes a vast difference, or rather all the difference in the world.
Aristotle's general principles for raising moral children were unquestioned through most of Western history; even today his teachings represent commonsense opinion about child rearing. But in the eighteenth century, the wisdom of Aristotle was directly challenged by the theories of the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Rousseau denied that children are born wayward (originally sinful), insisting instead that they are, by nature, noble, virtuous beings who are corrupted by an intrusive socialization. The untutored child is spontaneously good and graceful: "When I picture to myself a boy of ten or twelve, healthy, strong and well built for his age, only pleasant thoughts arise.... I see him bright, eager, vigorous, care-free, completely absorbed in the present, rejoicing in abounding vitality."
According to Rousseau, "the first education should be purely negative.... It consists not in teaching virtue or truth, but in preserving the heart from vice and the mind from error." He rejects the traditional notion that moral education in the early stages must habituate the child to virtuous behavior: "The only habit a child should be allowed to acquire is to contract none.... Prepare in good time for the reign of freedom and the exercise of his powers, by allowing his body its natural habits and accustoming him always to be his own master and follow the dictates of his will as soon as he has a will of his own."
Contrary to the received view, Rousseau believed the child's nature to be originally good and free of sin. As he saw it, a proper education provides the soil for the flourishing of the child's inherently good nature, bringing it forth unspoiled and fully effective. In his view, the goal of moral education is defeated when an external code is imposed on children. Rousseau was modern in his distrust of socially ordained morals as well as his belief that the best education elicits the child's own authentic (benevolent) nature. Rousseau emphatically rejected the Christian doctrine that human beings are innately rebellious and naturally sinful: "Let us lay it down as an incontestable principle that the first impulses of nature are always right. There is no original perversity in the human heart."
Although Rousseau was against instilling moral "habits" into a free and noble being, he did allow that a child's development requires guidance and encouragement to elicit its own good nature. He urged parents and tutors to put the child's "kindly feelings into action."
Other Christian and pagan thinkers were convinced that far more was needed. They insisted that virtue cannot be attained without a directed moral training that habituates the child to virtuous behavior. Saint Augustine and the orthodox Christian thinkers were especially pessimistic about the efficacy of putting kindly feelings into action. According to Augustine, not even the most disciplined moral education could guarantee a virtuous child; education without divine help ("grace") is insufficient. By contrast, not only do Rousseau's followers deny the Augustinian doctrine that our natures are originally sinful and rebellious, they go further by regarding "directive" moral education as an assault on a child's right to develop freely.
There is much to admire in Rousseau. He argued for humane child rearing at a time when rigidity and cruelty were common. Though his criticisms of the educational practices of his day were valid, his own recommendations have not proved workable. It is, perhaps, worth noting that he did not apply his fine theories to his own life; he was altogether irresponsible in dealing with his own children. His theories, too, were marred by inconsistencies. On the one hand, he was firmly against instilling habits in a child; on the other, he dispensed a lot of sound Aristotelian advice to parents for habituating their children to the classical virtues: "Keep your pupil occupied with all the good deeds."
Despite his celebration of freedom, even Rousseau would have been appalled by the permissiveness we see so much of today. 'The surest way to make your child unhappy," he wrote, "is to accustom him to get everything he wants." All the same, he parted company with the traditionalists on the crucial question of human nature. For better or for worse, Rousseau's followers ignored his Aristotelian side and developed the "progressive" elements of his educational philosophy.
Though we would like to believe him, Rousseau's rosy picture of the child fails to convince. In "Emile," Rousseau states that although children may do bad deeds, a child can never be said to be bad, "because wrong action depends on harmful intention and that he will never have." This flies in the face of common experience. Most parents and teachers will tell you that children often have harmful intentions. In perhaps the most famous description of children's "harmful intentions," Saint Augustine, in his Confessions, describes his boyhood pleasure in doing wrong - simply for the joy of flouting prohibitions:
"In a garden near our vineyard there was a pear tree, loaded with fruit that was desirable neither in appearance nor in taste. Late one night. . . a group of very bad youngsters set out to shake down and rob this tree. We took great loads of fruit from it, not for our own eating, but rather to throw it to the pigs; even if we did eat a little of it, we did this to do what pleased us for the reason that it was forbidden."
Indeed, some parents and teachers might find Augustine's description of children's unruly nature understated. Some may find Golding's Lord of the Flies a more telling description of what children are naturally like than Rousseau's romantic ideal.
Who is right, Aristotle or Rousseau? Aristotle wins the argument in the court of common sense and historical experience. He certainly wins with most parents. Throughout the world, mothers and fathers never cease to work at habituating children to the exercise of self-control, temperance, honesty, courage.
But it is Rousseau who powerfully dominates the thinking of the theorists whose influence pervades modern schools of education. The educational philosophy of Rousseau inspired the progressive movement in education, which turned away from rote teaching and sought methods that would free the creativity of the child. Rousseau's ideas are also deployed to discredit the traditional directive style of moral education associated with Aristotelian ethical theory and Judeo-Christian religion and practice.
The directive style of education, denigrated as indoctrination, was cast aside in the second half of the twentieth century and discontinued as the progressive style became dominant. By the 1970s, character education had been effectively discredited and virtually abandoned in practice.
What happens when educators celebrate children's creativity and innate goodness and abandon the ancestral responsibility to discipline, train, and civilize them? Unfortunately, we know the answer: we are just emerging from a thirty-year experiment with moral deregulation. The ascendancy of Rousseau as the philosopher of education and the eclipse of Aristotle have been bad for all children, but they have been especially bad for boys.
In 1970, Theodore Sizer, then dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, coedited with his wife, Nancy, a collection of ethics lectures entitled Moral Education. The preface set the tone by condemning the morality of the "Christian gentleman," the American "prairie," The McGuffey Readers, and the hypocrisy of teachers who tolerate a grading system that is often the "terror of the young." The Sizers were especially critical of the "crude and philosophically simpleminded sermonizing tradition" of the nineteenth century. They referred to directive ethics education in all its guises as "the old morality." According to the Sizers, leading moralists agree that that kind of morality "can and should be scrapped."
The Sizers favored a "new morality" that gives primacy to students' autonomy and independence. Teachers should never preach or attempt to inculcate virtue; rather, through their actions, they should demonstrate a "fierce commitment" to social justice. In part, that means democratizing the classroom: "Teacher and children can learn about morality from each other."
The Sizers preached a doctrine that was already being practiced in many schools throughout the country. Schools were scrapping the "old morality" in favor of alternatives that gave primacy to the children's moral autonomy. "Values clarification," was popular in the seventies. Proponents of values clarification consider it inappropriate for a teacher to encourage students, however subtly or indirectly, to adopt the values of the teacher or the community. The cardinal sin is to "impose" values on the student. Instead, the teacher's job is to help the students discover "their own values." In Readings in Values Clarification (1973), two of the leaders of the movement, Sidney Simon and Howard Kirschenbaum, explain what is wrong with traditional ethics education: "We call this approach 'moralizing,' although it has also been known as inculcation, imposition, indoctrination, and in its most extreme form, brainwashing."
Lawrence Kohlberg, a Harvard moral psychologist, developed cognitive moral development, a second favored approach. Kohlberg shared the Sizers' low opinion of traditional morality, referring disdainfully to the "old bags of virtues" that earlier educators had sought to inculcate. Kohlbergian teachers were more traditional than the proponents of values clarification. They sought to promote a Kantian awareness of duty and responsibility in students. They were also traditional in their opposition to the "moral relativism" that many progressive educators found congenial. All the same, they shared with other progressives a scorn for any form of top-down inculcation of moral principles. They too believed in "student-centered teaching," in which the teacher acts less as a guide than as a "facilitator" of the student's development.
Kohlberg himself would later change his mind and concede that his rejection of "indoctrinative" moral education had been a mistake. But his admirable recantation had little effect. In the final decades of the twentieth century, the traditional indoctrinative (directive) approach to moral education had fallen into desuetude in most public schools and the negative views prevailed.
Ironically, the next fashion in progressive pedagogy, student-centered learning, was soon to leave the Kohlbergians and the values clarifiers far behind. The new buzzword was "self-esteem." By the late eighties, self-esteem education had become all the rage. Ethics was superseded by attention to the child's personal sense of well-being: the school's primary aim was to teach children to prize their rights and self-worth. In the old days, teachers would ask seventh-graders to write about "The Person I Admire Most." But in today's "child-centered curriculum," they ask children to write essays celebrating themselves. In one popular middle school English text, an assignment called "The Nobel Prize for Being You" informs students that they are "wonderful" and "amazing" and instructs them to "create two documents in connection with your Nobel Prize. Let the first document be a nomination letter written by the person who knows you best. Let the second be the script for your acceptance speech, which you will give at the annual award ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden." For extra credit, students can award themselves a trophy "that is especially designed for you and no one else."
Throughout most of human history, children learned about virtue and honor by hearing or reading the inspiring stories of great men and women. By the 1990s, this practice, which many educators regarded as too directive, was giving way to practices that suggested to students that they were their own best guides in life. This turn to the autonomous subject as the ultimate moral authority is a notable consequence of the triumph of the progressive style over traditional directive methods of education.
It's hard to see how the Harvard theorists who urged teachers to jettison the "crude and philosophically simpleminded sermonizing tradition" of the nineteenth century can defend the crude egoism that has replaced it. Apart from the philosophical niceties, there are concrete behavioral consequences. The moral deregulation that the New England educators called for took hold in the very decades that saw a rise in conduct disorders among boys in the nation's schools. No doubt much, perhaps most, of this trend can be ascribed to the large social changes that weakened family and community. But some of the blame can be laid at the doors of the well-intentioned professors who helped undermine the schools' traditional mission of morally edifying their pupils.
Few thinkers have written about individual autonomy with greater passion and good sense than the nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill. But Mill makes it clear that he is talking about adults. "We are not speaking of children," he says in On Liberty. "Nobody denies that people should be so taught and trained in youth as to know and benefit by the ascertained results of human experience."
Mill could not foresee the advent of thinkers such as the Sizers an the values clarificationists, who would glibly recommend "scrapping" the old morality.
In recent decades, the courts have done their share to erode teachers' and school officials' power to enforce traditional moral standards and discipline. In 1969, in Tinker v. Des Moines School District, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Iowa school authorities had violated students' rights by denying them permission to wear protest armbands to school, Justice Abe Fortas, in the majority opinion, found the action of the school authorities unconstitutional: "It can hardly be argued that students shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate."
Justice Hugo Black dissented. Though a great champion of First Amendment rights, he pointed out that schoolchildren "need to learn, not teach." He wrote, presciently, "It is the beginning of a new revolutionary era of permissiveness in this country fostered by the judiciary... Turned loose with lawsuits for damages and injunctions against their teachers ... it is nothing but wishful thinking to imagine that young, immature students will not soon believe it is their right to control the schools."
Abigail Thernstrom, a political scientist at the Manhattan Institute, cites Tinker as the beginning of the end of effective school discipline. She also sees it as an unfortunate example of Rousseauian romanticism in the courts. According to Thernstrom, "[Fortas's majority] opinion was a romantic celebration of conflict and permissiveness, even within the schoolhouse walls - as if the future of democratic government and American culture could be placed in jeopardy had the students been told to stage their demonstration elsewhere."
In 1975, a second case that would further diminish the authority of school officials to correct student behavior reached the high court. In Goss v. Lopez, the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional for schools to suspend students without due process. Justice Byron White, who wrote the majority opinion, strongly favored extending students' rights. Justice Lewis Powell opposed the ruling, fearing that it would ultimately be harmful to students. Thernstrom has aptly characterized the two opinions: "White had raised the specter of schools as institutions with potentially 'untrammeled power.' Suspension - even for just one day - was a 'serious event' that deprived students of their right to an education. Justice Powell believed precisely the opposite; he assumed that suspension created the conditions under which children could learn."
Justice White prevailed, and the judiciary thus joined the progressive educationists and many parents in holding that "students' rights" trump the traditional prerogative of teachers to require compliance with school discipline. The Goss ruling helped bring on the era of permissiveness that Justice Black had warned about. From the loftiest of progressive motives, the educational system was robbed of the ability to enforce its codes and rules.
By the mid-1970s, we were on our way to becoming the first society in history to use high principle to weaken the moral authority of teachers. Soon, local officials throughout the county, such as Principal Maltman at Glen Ridge High and Mayor Titel of Lakewood, would be powerless in the face of delinquent students and litigious parents.
The purpose of moral education is not to preserve our children's autonomy but to develop the character they will rely on as adults. And as Aristotle clearly showed, children who have been helped to develop good moral habits will find it easier to become autonomous adults. Conversely, children who have been left to their own devices will founder.
Those who oppose directive moral education often call it a form of brainwashing or indoctrination. That is sheer confusion. When you brainwash people, you undermine their autonomy, their rational self-mastery; you diminish their freedom. But when you educate children, teaching them to be competent, self-controlled, and morally responsible in their actions, you increase their freedom and enlarge their humanity. The Greeks and Romans understood this very well; so did the great Scholastic and Enlightenment thinkers. Indeed, this is a first principle of every great religion and high civilization. To know what is right and act on it is the highest expression of freedom and personal autonomy.
What Victorians had in mind when they extolled the qualities of a "gentleman" are the virtues we need to inculcate in all our children: honesty, integrity, courage, decency, politeness. These are as important to the well-being of a young male today as they were in nineteenth- century England. Even today, despite several decades of moral deregulation, most young men understand the term "gentleman" and approve of the ideals it connotes.
To suggest that we place more emphasis on instilling a sense of responsibility and civility into children than on alerting them to their civil and personal rights under law may sound quaint, quixotic, or even reactionary. It is, however, practical and achievable. The fact is that despite appearances to the contrary, most children respond to and respect civility and good manners. If their own manners are wanting, it is because so little is expected (much less demanded) of them.
Far from being oppressive, controlling, or constricting, the manners, instincts, and virtues we recognize in decent, considerate human beings - in the case of males, the manners, instincts, and virtues we associate with being a "gentleman" - are liberating. To educate, humanize, and civilize a boy is to allow him to make the most of himself. As for the community, manners and good morals benefit it far more than even the best of laws.
When parents and teachers fail to instill the gentle qualities in a boy, they fall short in their duty both to him and to society. Some historians and philosophers have skeptically dismissed bourgeois manners and virtues as a means by which an aristocratic elite oppresses the middle and working classes. But that, as political scientist James Q. Wilson points out, is perversely wrong: "Bertrand Russell would ... sneer that 'the concept of the gentleman was invented by the aristocracy to keep the middle classes in order,' but in truth the concept of the gentleman enabled the middle classes to supplant the aristocracy."
The historian Gertrude Himmelfarb took up this theme in a remarkable book-length historical essay, The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values. "If, as some historians maintain, Victorians succeeded in 'bourgeoisifying' their ethos," writes Himmelfarb,
"to that extent they also democratized it. In attributing to everyone the same virtues - potentially at least, if not in actuality - they assumed a common human nature and thus a moral ... equality. Even the "gentlemanly" virtues - honesty, integrity, courage, politeness - were not above the capacity of the ordinary person.... In an aristocratic age, only the exceptional, privileged individual had been seen as a free moral agent, the master of his fate."
The great eighteenth-century conservative political philosopher Edmund Burke argued that in human affairs, a sense of the proprieties is even more important than fidelity to laws: "Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there and now and then. Manners are what vex and soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us by a constant, steady uniform insensible operation. Like that of the air we breathe in."
Common sense, convention, tradition, and even modern social science research all converge in support of what I have been calling the Aristotelian tradition of directive character education. Children need standards, they need clear guidelines, they need adults in their lives who are understanding but firmly insistent on responsible behavior. But a resolute adherence to standards has been out of fashion in education circles for more than thirty years.
An Aristotelian education is still a child's best bet. Unfortunately, our era is characterized by the ascendancy of Rousseau and a decided antipathy toward the directive inculcation of the virtues. It is no coincidence that the romantic turn in education has been accompanied by a marked decline in the fortunes and prospects of boys in our country.