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Philosophy & Children

The Challenge of Moral Education

Wendy Turgeon on ways of getting children to think about values.

If you ask any group of adults, from 18 through 80, whether kids today are worse than kids in their time, they will usually insist that they are. Teachers can offer terrifying examples of elementary school children cursing at them, middle school youngsters engaged in promiscuous sexual behavior, high school students selling drugs, and a pervasive acceptance of bullying, cheating, lying, and general bad behavior. What has happened to the world, that young people today appear so bereft of values? Are parents too busy? Is the media, from video gaming to television to movies, creating a selfish me-centered citizenry? Has moral relativism [as advocated in Issue 81] destroyed any notion of good? Or is this simply a case of misremembering what angels we all were when we were their ages? But regardless of such comparisons, we can consider ways in which education could offer our young people opportunities to learn better values, and live them.

In the nineteenth century one of the prime functions of public education was to prepare a moral citizen. Basic Christian values were integrated into the curriculum, and taught as truths alongside reading, writing and arithmetic.

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