ABSTRACT

The quotation by Alfred North Whitehead at the head of this chapter sardonically expresses the conventional view of morality. It is an interpretation of morality de ned by the norms of society that has tacitly guided traditional approaches to character education (Ryan, 1989) dating back to the seminal work of Emil Durkheim (1925/1961). This view of morality carries with it an implicit theory of socialization that places morality outside of the child, and calls upon agents of socialization such as parents and teachers to imbue the child with “moral values” through role modeling, emotional attachment to groups, and appropriate uses of rewards and consequences. While this inculcation perspective has a long history, and continues to have advocates (Kilpatrick, 1992), it sits in direct contrast with current understandings of educational processes in virtually every academic subject area from reading (Shanahan, 2000) to mathematics (Carpenter, Fennema, & Franke, 1996; Schoenfeld, 1994). These contemporary research-based accounts of learning view the child as an active interpreter of information and general experience and advocate constructivist approaches to teaching. Ironically then, traditional character education would be advising those teachers who pay attention to educational research to engage in practices of socialization that would contradict the methods of teaching that they would employ with every other aspect of instruction.