Theology Today - Vol 34, No. 1 - April 1977 - ARTICLE - 'Values Education' in Schools and Churches

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"Values Education" in Schools and Churches
By Edward B. Fiske

There's nothing new about American schools becoming interested in values. Education began in this country as a means of training clergymen and enforcing religious orthodoxy. When universal elementary school education developed in the mid-nineteenth century, it was sold not only on the promise that it would provide the masses with the information necessary for the informed citizen in a democracy but that it would serve the purpose of "Americanizing" a diverse population, including numerous new immigrants whose background, many feared, could undermine the very basis of the republic. "Shall these adopted citizens," asked Benjamin Labaree, the President of Middlebury College during the great migrations of the 1840's and 1950's, "become a part of the body politic, and firm supporters of liberal institutions, or will they prove to our republic what the Goths and Huns were to the Roman Empire?"

More recently the heated, and sometimes violent, debates over the books that would be used in Kiamesha County, West Virginia, are a sign that Americans still see the schools as a fundamental means by which we shape our communal value systems.

What was often an unstated assumption-that schools promote values-is now in the forefront of the minds of American educators and those of the public at large. Elementary and secondary schools across the country are making policy decisions to promote subjects such as "values clarification." The New York State Department of Education estimates that 80 per cent of the state's elementary and secondary schools have some sort of program to help students measure their values. A recent Gallup Poll reported that 72 per cent of Americans favored "instruction in schools that would deal with morals and moral behavior."

At the college level the concept of "general education"-which seeks to identify broad educational and cultural issues and values that cross disciplinary lines-is making a strong comeback after a decade in which it suffered from the excesses of the elective system and confusion on the part of faculties regarding what ties their curriculums together. Needless to say, publishers and audio-visual resource makers have been quick to respond to the new values consciousness.

A member of THEOLOGY TODAY's Editorial Council, Edward B. Fiske was formerly Religion Editor of The New York Times and now serves as its Education Editor.

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Catalogues are now replete with curriculum units with titles such as "Understanding Values." Teachers interested in dealing with value questions have resources at their disposal ranging from filmstrips on "open-ended" moral dilemmas to segments from feature-length motion pictures that raise moral issues.

The reasons for the new consciousness about values in American education are numerous and rather complex. The most obvious direct cause is Watergate, which called into question our whole national value system. "People think that society is going to hell," said Fred Newmann, an educator who is helping to develop curriculum materials on "citizenship training" at the University of Wisconsin. "They have the feeling that if we just get our values straight, it will solve our social problems."

The concern with values, however, began well before Watergate. The scandal gave it a sense of urgency, but this new movement probably constitutes a long-developing response to social and moral changes that have crept up on us throughout the whole post-World War II period. Parents and educators alike tend to think of it as a reaction against moral "relativism" on the one hand and the encroachment of materialism on the other. "We've been through a long period of affluence and materialism, of campus unrest and a low level of public morality," said Ewald B. Nyquist, the retiring Commissioner of Education in New York State, who has made values education one of his major priorities in the last few years. "In this context, it's important to teach kids how to choose between competing values and live with the consequence of their choice."

The changing nature of authority also seems to be a major factor. In the past certain figures-clergy, teachers, some public officials-exercised moral authority simply by nature of their position. Such persons are still in a position to have considerable influence on values and morality, but this influence is no longer inherent in the position and has to be earned anew by each individual. For the teacher this change can be frightening. On the one hand, he or she confronts students who no longer accept traditional patterns of authority. On the other hand, as individuals in a society going through considerable moral flux, they have their own doubts about what to tell their students. "Teachers are scared and caught in the same bind of not having any value structure they can point to," said Jean Gill, a librarian in North Caldwell, N.J., who has worked on values questions with elementary school students. A major factor in the success of some of the new approaches to value instruction is that they impersonalize the process and make it possible for teachers to lead students in moral discussions without taking a firm position themselves.

Finally, of course, a major reason for the new values consciousness is the fear of parents that they have lost touch with their children.

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Sidney Simon, one of the major figures in the field, for example, sees the drug problem and the changing career expectations of young people today as a major spur. "They thought they were bringing up kids to go to a good college and into Dad's business, and they didn't," he observed.

III

The recent fascination with the teaching of values in schools has its roots in the work of Louis Raths, a professor of education at New York University who is now retired. In 1966, along with two of his pupils, Merrill Harmin and Sidney Simon, he published a book entitled Values and Teaching. Since then Raths' ideas have been developed and given national prominence by Simon, who operates out of his position as a professor of education at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Simon is an effective teacher who has developed dozens of games, exercises, and other techniques designed to foster "values clarification." He may, for example, ask students to discuss whether it is worse to smoke heavily or to drive recklessly. An experienced teacher would then use the discussion to bring out the difference between endangering yourself or other people. Many of his exercises are designed to foster a strong self-image. In one, for instance, he asks children to sit in a circle and then throws a sponge at the group. Whoever catches the sponge then sits in the middle of the circle, and each of the other children are asked to suggest things that the spongecatcher does well. Still others are designed to make children less inhibited about expressing their needs. The first 10 minutes of a workshop on values clarification might be devoted to finding out if anyone has any needs. If one hasn't had breakfast, then this is provided. Does someone have a sore neck? Then a massage is in order. If there is an unsettled argument, then this is a chance to talk about it.

Simon is not only an effective teacher but an accomplished showman. He travels widely, speaking about his techniques, and his books have sold more than half a million copies. His exercises are used in literally thousands of American elementary and secondary schools.

In Simon's exercises the point is to elicit students' views and avoid adult judgments. "There is no right answer for every human being under any circumstances to any of these problems," he explains. This prompts the frequent criticism that his approach to "values clarification" is essentially "relativistic." This he denies on the ground that a frank expression of one's thoughts and feelings is the prerequisite for the formation of mature independent values.

There is no such objection to the writing of the other major figure in the field, Lawrence Kohlberg of Harvard University. If Simon is the popularizer of values education, Kohlberg is its egghead. A genial scholar with the slightly frazzled look of a mad scientist, he has been conducting pioneering studies of how people assimilate values for more

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than 20 years. His studies provide unquestionable evidence that the process is both orderly and understandable.

Kohlberg is a developmental psychologist who has done for values what Jean Piaget, the great Swiss psychologist, did for cognition. Piaget, it will be recalled, discovered that children go through specific and universal stages in their cognitive development. Kohlberg has come up with a similar development and "map" in the area of word reasoning.

More than two decades ago he began to give a series of "word dilemmas" to a group of 75 subjects of different ages. For example, he posed the situation of a young husband confronted with the dilemmas of whether to steal a newly-developed miracle drug that might save his ailing wife and then asked them to say what they thought the husband should do. In these exercises he was interested not so much in the answer as in the reasoning behind them. The subjects have been periodically retested, and Kohlberg has found that, while some have evolved much more than others, the evolution in all cases followed certain stages through what he calls "levels of moral reasoning." The same pattern has held true in other cultures, including Mexico, Turkey, and Malaysia.

Kohlberg describes these stages in terms of six levels, each of which represents a less self-centered worldview than the previous one. For example, Stage 1, the most primitive, is simply the young child's calculation of what will please a parent or other authority and avoid punishment. The highest, Stage 6, is fidelity to universal principles and an exalted sense of respect for the dignity of human rights. It is rarely seen except in the occasional Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. In between is Stage 2, where the individual discovers the advantages of reciprocity ("you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours") and Stage 3, where the individual is willing to sacrifice his or her own interests for the esteem of a small peer group, such as a team or gang ("good boy" or "good girl" conformity). Stage 4 is marked by a sense of law and order, where the individual subsumes his or her own interests for the good of society, while Stage 5 shows a willingness to challenge this sense of order in the name of "higher" principles. The U.S. Constitution is a Stage 5 document because it asserts that laws (Stage 4) are created to protect and promote individual rights.

As an example, Kohlberg notes that a moral principle such as the Golden Rule may be perceived by an individual in different ways at different stages of his or her moral development. The three-year old, at Stage 1, for example, might see it as a warning to "be nice to people or you might get hurt." A slightly older elementary school youngster might grasp the idea that "being nice will sometimes get you nice things in return," while the same child five years later might see it as containing the insight that mutual self-respect is necessary for the harmonious functioning of a circle of friends (Stage 3) or even society as a whole (Stage 4). If perceived as a religious principle, the Golden Rule would probably be Stage 5. Kohlberg, incidentally, notes with

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some amusement that during the Watergate trauma the country as a whole seemed to absorb a moral lesson. The initial reaction of a majority of Americans to incidents such as the break-in at the office of the psychiatrist of Danial Ellsberg, the Pentagon papers figure, was that it was justified by the needs of law and order-a classical Stage 4 line of reasoning. By the end of the Watergate period, however, public opinion had shifted to a Stage 5 recognition that the principles of constitutional government and individual rights are a higher good than law and order.

The relevance of Kohlberg's model of moral development for teaching lies in his discovery that individuals progress in their own moral reasoning through exposure to arguments that are one stage-but no more than one-higher than their own. Progress from one stage to another is natural, if not inevitable. On the other hand, no one regresses any more than a child who has learned to walk goes back to crawling. The goal of the teacher is simply to listen for the highest level of reasoning-not the "right" answer-and draw out the child who is operating at the highest level. In his research he has found that, over the course of a semester, anywhere from a fifth to half of students will most likely move up a stage in their levels of moral reasoning.

Implicit in Kohlberg's theory-and here be contrasts sharply with Simon-is the assumption that some answers are better than other ones. A Stage 5 argument is better than a Stage 4 argument, he maintains, not only for the individual but because the higher a society pushes its collective thinking along the scale of moral reasoning, the more just that society will be.

Not surprisingly, Kohlberg's ideas are now making themselves felt in religious education. The effectiveness of a Sunday School teacher can obviously be enhanced if he or she keeps in mind that a 13-year old may not be ready to grasp the deepest spiritual meaning of a teaching that "it is more blessed to give than to receive" but takes care to explain it on an appropriate level. The technique of teaching to one level above the average in the class can be easily and effectively applied to most Sunday School settings.

Religious educators, however, should keep in mind exactly what it is that they are embracing. It is clear that the rapid growth in the teaching of values in schools is at least in part a response to the lack of moral authority elsewhere, notably in the family and in the religious community. Theologians should recognize that Kohlberg is, for better or worse, putting forth a secularized "moral law"-if not in Thomistic terms then in the neo-Kantian terms of Harvard philosopher John Rawls, who has had considerable influence on Kohlberg's thinking. Much of the appeal lies in the fact that, despite the moral flux that characterizes our age, there are certain rights and wrongs built into the universe. Kohlberg is telling people that, despite the apparent

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chaos of today's world, there are certain underlying laws. People grow morally in the same way that they grow physically.

The churches, however, must ask themselves whether they are fully prepared to accept this surrender of moral authority to the educational system. For one thing, there is a fine line between the "neutral" monitoring of the level of moral discussion in a classroom that Kohlberg advocates in theory and indoctrination. It is a rare teacher who is always able to resist the temptation to push the discussion toward the "right" answer, even if the level of reasoning is lower than that of another child with the "wrong" conclusion.

More important, once you reach the "post-conventional" levels of reasons, Stages 5 and 6, you are right up against religious principles. Kohlberg sees these as flowing rationally, though by no means inevitably, from the lower stages, but from the point of view of revealed religion they also have another source. What is the source of the "principle" by which the Stage 5 reasoner judges the "conventional" concept of law and order? This becomes especially complex at the level of Stage 6, where Kohlberg, frankly aware that he is into a somewhat mystical area that is likely to turn off his secular peers, tends to retreat into vague generalities and acknowledge the limitations of definitive research. In his most recent writings he has even discussed an avowedly mystical Stage 7.

A basic tenet of Christianity is that people, as human beings and through the capacity of reason, cannot perceive the entire truth of their being. We are ultimately thrown back on faith and revelation. The mystery of the Incarnation ultimately transcends human rationality. There is much that religious education can and should learn from Kohlberg and others operating in the field of moral development, but Christian ethics must ultimately be understood on a level that transcends moral logic. Where do you put the Easter story on a scale of moral reasoning?