The teaching of values in schools is nothing new, but it is as subject to fashion as hemlines and hats. From ancient Greece to cold-war America, educators felt comfortable making absolute distinctions between right and wrong; family, church and school were considered a triangle of moral education, with each corner pulling equal weight. Then came the social revolutions of the ’60s. After that, " if you even mentioned teaching values, people immediately saw it as indoctrination," says Charles Quigley, executive director of the California-based Center for Civic Education. Now the pendulum has swung back-educators are openly in the beliefs business again. “Schools cannot be value-neutral,” says Prof. George H. Wood, coordinator of the Institute for Democracy in Education at Ohio University, Athens.
Some ’60s-era discomfort has remained. “If you [tell] a community that you’re going to teach values, some people go nuts,” says Peter Benson, head of the Minneapolis-based Search Institute, which surveys student attitudes. “What values? Whose values?” Schools try to avoid hot-button issues like abortion, birth control and capital punishment. Some even shy away from race. " Teachers find it kind of awkward to ask an African-American kid to stand up and talk about racism," says Morris Dees, executive director of the Southern Poverty Law Center. They “would rather just teach the ABCs and go from there.”
But many educators say there’s a core of basic beliefs-tolerance, honesty, respect, diligence-that belongs in the classroom, especially in the formative years. Experts say the sooner a school starts instilling those values, the better. “After all, a kindergarten child shows some appreciation of values the first time he says, ‘It’s not fair,’ even if that almost always means ‘It’s not fair to me’,” says Thomas Lickona, author of a recent book called " Educating for Character" and an education professor at the State University of New York, Cortland. Around the country, schools have been implementing programs that provide a moral education, 1990s style. A look at some winners:
After a career spent fighting racism in the courts, Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center decided to try to nip it in the bud. Last year he launched “Teaching Tolerance,” a magazine to teach teachers how to foster racial harmony among school kids. Published twice a year, the magazine provides ideas, resources and tactics. “We can’t simply play a video and have kids like each other,” says editor Sara Bullard. “We must use a lot of tools and techniques–and be mindful that we can’t beat them over the head with it.”
A number of high schools consider volunteer work a prerequisite for graduation. “A student can go through 12 years of school never having helped anybody else,” says Sheldon Berman, president of the Cambridge-based Educators for Social Responsibility. In Atlanta, students must perform 75 nonschool hours of service at approved nonprofit organizations like hospitals, libraries, nursing homes or shelters for the homeless. “Citizenship skills, responsibility and respect are all equally important to a democratic society,” explains assistant superintendent Barbara Whitaker. One impediment: in their eagerness to keep out unpaid workers of any stripe, unions have on occasion overreacted to such programs.
“We’re trying to teach kids the difference between good and evil,” says Margot Stern Strom, executive director of a program called Facing History and Ourselves. Based in Brookline, Mass., the outfit gets students to examine racism, prejudice and anti-Semitism through a study of 20th-century genocide. More than 30,000 teachers have participated in Facing History workshops, exposing some 450,000 students each year to the moral complexities of the Holocaust. It has a tremendous impact because the tragedies actually happened. “You don’t need to make hypothetical dilemmas for kids,” says Stern Strom, who suggests that young people do better when given real ideas to debate.
The Child Development Project, a veteran California program, in effect teaches schools to practice what they preach. Specialists go into select schools and help create environments that promote tolerance, respect and grass-roots decision making. For children to really learn the lesson, says director Eric Schaps, “The school has to be a place where these values prevail… This notion of a caring community is the neglected paradigm in American education right now.”
Even educators who welcome the return to values believe there’s a limit to what classrooms can accomplish-and no end to what’s expected of them. In the face of poverty, family instability and social disorganization, parents want schools to fill what Benson of the Search Institute calls a “values vacuum.” That they cannot do. But as microcosms of society at large, schools offer the perfect setting for ethics in action. “In every school there is a hidden curriculum, which is about the way people treat each other, how teachers treat kids, how kids treat kids,” says Lickona. The lesson for everyone: do as we do, not as we say.
