Parents as Moral Educators

In the graduate courses I teach, I have shared with teachers what I naively thought they would receive as good news: namely, the Gallup Poll's finding that four out of five United States citizens favor “instruction in the schools that would deal with morals and moral behavior.” Teachers, I quickly discovered, are not overjoyed at this finding. “Parents are copping out,” they say. “They want schools to do a job which they ought to be doing themselves.”