ABSTRACT
Why should the public school be concerned with moral education at all? Part of the answer is that parents and society at large consider it extremely important that new members of society behave properly. Their own well-being is affected by the way children are reared and socialized. Usually parents and the public shy away from terms such as ‘moral’ or ‘ethical’, believing these to be too private and controversial for the school to be concerned with. (We shall see below why this is not so). They express their concern more comfortably with terms such as ‘sociability’, ‘good citizenship’, ‘character development’, ‘cooperation’, ‘need for discipline’, and similar expressions. These concerns are often the very ones which below are described as social moral concerns and lie at the heart of moral education. The fact that parents have such a strong concern and that moral education has once again become very topical in educational circles and educational research in the last few decades is only one reason why moral education should be the concern of the public schools. Even if moral education were not popular, it can well be maintained that it has been and cannot but be a central issue in education regardless of popularity or recognition. It is inconceivable that moral values such as truthfulness, fair treatment, thoughtfulness for others and so on could be disregarded or excluded from any social group but particularly groups concerned with rearing children. But there is an even stronger argument for inclusion of morality in education; and that is because morality is, as was argued in Chapters 3 and 4, a form of knowledge without which a well-rounded education, and therefore also fully developed person, is impossible. Assuming that the school’s role is primarily education, it follows that the school must also be concerned with moral education.
