ABSTRACT
Time was when teachers and educational thinkers viewed moral betterment as the principal purpose of schooling. A teacher asked to justify his choice of career might appeal to his contribution to the moral development of the young and so to the moral improvement of society. He might have taken his cue from Fichte, who considered it a criterion of proper education that it should make it impossible for a child to prefer, knowingly, the bad over the good; or from Dewey, who insisted that ‘the moral purpose [is] universal and dominant in all instruction-whatsoever the topic’.(1) There are signs, in very recent years, of a renewed emphasis upon this goal of moral betterment. Mary Warnock, for example, includes virtue as one of the three ingredients in her ‘good life’ which it is the aim of schools to promote. ‘Morality, or virtuousness’, she says, ‘should be taught, and can be learned’—though not, she adds, ‘in special lessons’.(2) There has even been a revival of sympathetic interest in Fichte’s views, at least as represented by English philosophers like T.H.Green who were infl uenced by him, and who themselves infl uenced generations of teachers and civil servants by bequeathing to them a lofty moral conception of their professions.(3)
For a considerable period, however, fashions in both educational and ethical thought conspired to produce a climate hostile to this emphasis upon the moral. The ideology of ‘child-centredness’, with its stress upon what the child demands as against what society demands of him, contributed to this climate; as did the well-subscribed view that any attempt to teach virtue must belong to indoctrination, not education. Reinforcement came from infl uential trends in moral philosophy, especially from the ‘Emotivist’ doctrine, and its various offspring, according to which moral judgment cannot express objective, teachable truth, but only the subjective, personal feeling of the person making it.(4) To be sure, there were philosophers, in broad agreement with this outlook, who emphasized that moral judgments must display consistency with one another and with the more general principles guiding them, and who argued that moral judgment, to count as such, must meet certain formal requirements. This allowed for the presence in the curriculum of something that could be labelled ‘moral education’; but this would eschew the teaching of virtue and centre instead upon encouraging consistency and an awareness of the formal, methodological conditions which moral judgment must meet.(5) Nor should one overlook the infl uence of various ‘radical’ educators, for whom ‘teaching virtue’ could only mean either teaching children to share the values of a rotten society or teaching them to reject those values. The former, clearly, would be intolerable; while the latter would not only produce impossible friction with parents and government but, to judge from the events of 1968, results suffi cient to shock even those who had advocated it.(6) Better, then, to leave moral education altogether alone.
