The Character to Seek Justice: Showing Fairness to Diverse Visions of Character Education.
1998; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 79; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1940-6487
Autores Tópico(s)Religious Education and Schools
ResumoShowing Fairness to Diverse Visions Of Character Education Overall, Alfie Kohn fails to address the deeper issues influence our understanding of morality, Mr. Glanzer maintains. Dennis Prager, a Jewish author and talk show host in Los Angeles, tells of having asked U.S. high school seniors what they would do if their dog and a stranger were both drowning. In the 15 years he has been asking the question, two-thirds of the seniors have said they would not save the stranger first. He gets different answers at religious schools. Secular students say they love their dogs but don't even know the stranger. They have been raised on love as their only value, says Prager. religious [people] . . . believe humans are created in God's image and dogs are not. Therefore, even though I do love my dogs more than strangers - I admit - I would save a stranger before either of my dogs. That is how I would behave because l have a value system.(1) Prager tells this story to illustrate the importance of world views when discussing moral questions. His simple tale reveals students' beliefs about humanity and the world around them will deeply influence how they understand and apply virtues such as love. While educators may believe it is a fairly straightforward task to teach a list of virtues, in fact, it is not. As Warren Nord, a philosopher from the University of North Carolina, points out, character education is influenced by a whole host of other beliefs connected to our world view: Morality is very much bound up with our identities, with our place in a community or tradition, with our understanding of nature and human nature, with our convictions about the afterlife, with our hopes and our fears, our feelings of guilt, our experiences of the sacred, our assumptions about what the mind can know, and our understanding of what makes life meaningful. We make sense of what we ought to do, of what kind of a person we should be, in light of all of these aspects of life - at least if we are at all reflective.(2) Nord's list includes a number of highly controversial and contentious issues. Sadly, most packaged curricula I have read and most character education conferences I have attended avoid such topics, although they are directly connected to character education. Alfie Kohn's article in the February 1997 Kappan brought a refreshing change to the discussion by raising five questions about the world views behind the character education movement.(3) The questions touched upon the level, goals, choices, assumptions about human nature, and theory of learning influence certain types of character education. Yet Kohn's analysis disappointed me for a variety of reasons. Some of his criticisms, especially of habit formation,were misdirected or demonstrated some faulty assumptions. Most problematic of all, Kohn merely offered to place another controversial worldview behind his own brand of character education program instead of offering a proposal for how justice can be done to the variety of world views parents and children hold. In what follows, I will outline my disagreements with Kohn's overview of these five basic questions. In addition, I want to suggest some important steps could be taken by character educators would help them do justice to the diversity of families in our public schools. 1. At what level are problems addressed? According to Kohn, people who think immoral behavior is primarily dependent on bad values must also believe that political and economic realities are irrelevant and need not be addressed.(4) i know of few proponents of character education (in Kohn's narrow sense) who would draw such a sharp distinction. I would actually agree structural injustices, as well as the character of the people within those structures, should be considered when pursuing moral development. Yet Kohn makes the stronger case attempts to the kids (which Kohn equates with teaching children virtuous habits) ignore the evidence from social psychology demonstrating a prior need to fix the kid's environment. …
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