Ethics: From ''Values'' to Virtues

BROAD '90s CONCERNS

In 1991, following criticism of an earlier document, the New South Wales Department of School Education published a revised version of The Values We Teach.  The Minister, Virginia Chadwick, announced in its Preface that she was anxious for government schools to "actively promote through the curriculum and throughout the total life of the school those moral values which are shared by the majority of people in our community."  Such values, she added, "should be broadly consistent with the beliefs of the major churches and other religious groups."

Bearing in mind at the time a notable increase in the amount of space devoted to Values Education in newspapers, talk shows, current affairs programmes, and internationally circulated journals, the authors of this document made an obvious effort to be comprehensive as well as inoffensively general.  Announcing from the start that it was important for the school programme to include "a moral and ethical dimension which permeates the whole curriculum", they made it clear that all subjects "can contribute in positive ways to the development and strengthening of students' attitudes and values."  Students, they said, need to "develop their capacity for moral reasoning and judgement" by "recognising the values which are operating in their daily relationships and in the social issues which confront our state and nation."

Dividing their lists of desirable values into those relating to Education, to Self and Others, and to Civic Responsibilities, they endorsed such unexceptionable beliefs as "encouraging and rewarding effort, achievement, and excellence";  demonstrating "a commitment to truth";  "encouraging imagination and creativity";  "seeing education as a life-long process";  "achieving high standards of self-discipline, personal conduct and social responsibility";  being "caring and supportive of others";  "appreciating the place of the family and family values in our society";  "being committed to the rights and responsibilities of living in a democracy";  "supporting the institutions which enhance individual liberty";  "accepting lawful and just authority";  and "actively pursuing the peaceful and just resolution of conflict".

Subsequently, on this broad terrain, dozens of other educators from around the world produced similar documents.  In 1995 alone, no other topic was singled out to the same degree.  A Special Section of Phi Delta Kappan called "Youth and Caring", advertised on the journal's cover, appeared in May.  In the following month the Times Educational Supplement devoted a special Handout to "The Road to Ethics", "If Preaching Won't Work, Try Practice", "Following Up on Everyday Moral Leads", and other kindred topics.  A week later The Sydney Morning Herald devoted a special Agenda feature to "The Schoolyards of Good and Evil."  On the important back page of Education Week, articles with titles like "Character and Coffee Mugs" (17 May) vied for attention with more conventional pieces on the pros and cons of computerised testing, the struggles of Goals 2000, or teenage health.  Since then, a strong emphasis on ethical issues has been maintained. ⁽¹⁾

In one obvious respect, the continuing attention to values is not surprising.  As the sales of former US Secretary of Education William Bennett's The Book of Virtues have shown, there is widespread public awareness in many parts of the world that schools have not been doing the job they once did to promote character formation.  Over the past decade, especially, criticism levelled at the behaviour and the demeanour of school children on trains and buses, in the school playground, at public places once mercifully free of graffiti, on playing fields, and in the home has increased almost exponentially in volume.  "We could never have got away with talking to our parents or our teachers like that!" has been one of the more common cries of people over forty.  In 1985, even The Brady Bunch did not seem altogether quaint to the viewers who regularly watched it.  The word "dysfunctional" did not habitually precede "family".  Nobody had heard of The Simpsons.

Yet the question "What Is To Be Done?", applied to the moral dilemmas which surface every day in schools and homes in the mid-90s, is probably harder for adults responsible for the care of children to answer than it ever has been. ⁽²⁾  The number of cosmetic solutions to serious moral difficulty may be on the rise, but that difficulty itself -- as the popularity of films like Burnt by the Sun, A Few Good Men, or Class Action indirectly demonstrates -- remains ever-present.  It is obviously one thing to support values in the broad way chosen by the authors of The Values We Teach or by the writers responsible for the plethora of journal and newspaper articles on "the drive for ethical education", and quite another to transmit virtue effectually in ordinary classrooms, school halls, lounge rooms, offices, and playing fields.  As Gertrude Himmelfarb points out in The De-Moralization of Society, "one cannot say of virtues, as one can of values, that anyone's virtues are as good as anyone else's, or that everyone has a right to his own virtues."

CONTEMPORARY MORAL BARRIERS

Of the obstacles to moral soundness present in ordinary Australian classrooms, perhaps the most striking is Political Correctness.  Despite the increasingly widespread use of the term "politically correct" as a blanket form of abuse, it continues to have genuine cultural meaning.  Since its inception, the home of PC has been the contemporary university, and in particular the social sciences and the humanities.  But the left-wing moral majority associated with its more virulent, neo-puritanical pronouncements has also had a powerful voice in schools.  Through teaching courses, publishing books and articles, producing marketable "resources", dominating media coverage of contemporary issues, conducting political campaigns, securing appointments to influential boards, bullying and denigrating their opposition, the politically correct have tried programmatically to alter the condition of civilisation's real or supposed victims.  The former Dean of Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Donald Kagan, has called their efforts more threatening than the intimidation which was characteristic of the McCarthy era, and which he personally experienced.

Among the more usual manifestations of PC, still, are

• a preoccupation with oppression, particularly those forms of it experienced by blacks, girls, the handicapped, and ethnic or sexual minorities;
• an emphasis on "relevance" which assumes that the present is much more important than the past;
• a hostility towards European history reflected in the belief that its darkest chapters -- Western attacks on indigenous cultures, the enforcement of slavery, imperial conquest, patriarchal suppression of women by men, exploitation of the environment, racism and genocide -- are defining; ⁽³⁾
• a distrust of authority so pervasive, and a commitment to assaults on cherished ideals so imperious, that in many educational settings the traditional distinction between freedom and licence has all but evaporated;
• a punitive stigmatisation of those who frame unpalatable arguments about "persecuted" groups;  and
• a postmodernist insistence that such ancient convictions about enlightened educational practice as objective choice, high standards, and the belief that truth can be discovered and affirmed are the delusions of dreamers.

In more specific terms, PC is revealed in higher education through admissions policies which favour blacks, indigenous peoples, and females, and which discriminate against such traditionally high academic achievers as the Chinese and the Jews; ⁽⁴⁾  curriculum proposals like Leonard Jeffries' at City College in New York, which claim that the "ultimate culmination" of the "white value system" is Nazi Germany;  skewed reading lists in courses covering social justice terrain;  hiring policies requiring the appointment of a fixed percentage of minority applicants;  the systematic public championing of those who speak as if rationality and logic were exclusively male white concepts;  campus protests which result in the discontinuation of courses on the "upsetting" history of racial or ethnic groups;  the perpetuation of academic myths purporting to be facts (for example, the "black Egypt" fallacy);  strident opposition to the idea of a Great Books "canon"; ⁽⁵⁾  and the design of courses on sex, gender, power games, lightweight films and music, and other contemporary, egoistic obsessions.

A recent article in Review, Paul Ross's "Losing Their Faculties", dramatises with chilling clarity the inroads made by PC into university Humanities programmes throughout Australia. ⁽⁶⁾  Courses which reward their takers with BA degrees cover such topics as "Women in the Modern World;  Gender and Frontier;  Sexuality and Power;  Society and Desire;  Gender and Work;  Postures or People: Sexual Roles in the Classics;  Deity and Mother Earth;  Women and Science;  Performing Bodies;  and The Australian Male Author -- Patrick White".  A typical offering at Griffith University, "Class Power and Society", draws on "theories of class, deviance and the family" and "focuses on relations of class power in Australia and the world;  crimes of the powerful and the powerless and the position of women."  At Melbourne University, English students can elect "From Rock to Rap:  Cultural Formations" so that they "understand the broad relation between governments and rock music culture, as it has developed lately, particularly in Australia."

A particularly disturbing consequence of electives of this ilk is that skewed practice filters into other places -- most obviously secondary schools and senior colleges.  The ensuing conceptual and practical problem is not that pupils are encouraged to care about social justice issues:  such issues matter very much. ⁽⁷⁾  The problem is that in ordinary classrooms thought is strangled and authentic caring is discouraged through a disproportionate emphasis on oppression, the flagrant abuse of institutional authority, and "time running out" for the environment;  wide reading programmes with a proliferation of books about moral turpitude, alienation, sexual violation, and other depressing themes;  and "values clarification" exercises based on the relativist assumption that everybody's values are legitimate if students "decide" to appropriate them.  The increasing focus on self-esteem, defined in therapeutic terms, leads young people to believe that whatever soft option they go for is fine so long as it makes them feel "comfortable" and is freely chosen. ⁽⁸⁾

The practical difficulty evaded by proponents of the feel-bad-about-the-world and feel-good-about-yourself ideology basic to PC is that "free choice" in every setting depends upon opportunities which coddle neither the intellect nor the will, and which make available a balanced encounter with good and evil in the human heart and in society.  Since vague syllabus formulations give teachers enormous freedom to choose their own "resources", since teacher training programmes do not normally provide rigorous instruction in text selection, and since teachers themselves take the kinds of courses savaged by Paul Ross, much of what school students are actually offered in the name of choice in subjects like health and personal development, social studies, and English is biased and dispiriting.  The last thing they experience is the exhilaration which follows naturally from immersion in disciplines worthy of that name.  More commonly, they feel a bewilderment which they try to disguise by parroting clichés about sex and power, class and society, with almost no relation to any scenario which gives meaning to existence.

The overall sense of life -- the "sub-text" -- provided by PC, instead of liberating the young from oppressiveness, generates anxiety about the universe and fear or dread of the future:  not least, as Ken Baker has pointed out, because children and youth see life in relatively simple terms, and often allow their passions to blind them to the complexities and ambiguities of the world.  Programmes of study which encourage such blindness by distorting reality through a self-deceived and myopic narrowness of focus produce a population that sees no good reason for being alive.  The disjunction between self (Rah!) and world (Hiss!) which underlies views purveyed by politically correct course offerings breeds an anarchic confusion responsible for suicidal hatred and despair.  Its antidote is the belief that the self is fulfilled by a deep love of the possibilities offered by the world.  But such a belief cannot be honoured unless these possibilities are richly present to young minds.

One of the more interesting observations in a letter sent to me by a lecturer in English at one of Australia's oldest universities is that faculties in which PC thrives enforce a criminal imperviousness to goodness by denying instructive voices a hearing.  Because lecturers who control the curriculum in these departments disparage writers of unmistakable integrity who might otherwise be recognised as our culture's wisest counsellors, undergraduates acquire the envious, cynical, postmodernist habit of belittling anything and everything of genuine value.  On the grounds that nobody is trustworthy, wisdom non-existent, history a biased hypothetical, and literature a purely self-expressive, aesthetically pleasing, imaginative construct rather than an affirmation of reality, ⁽⁹⁾ an entire generation has been taught to submit work reflecting current critical or political positions in which they do not believe so that it will receive the high grades which foster entry into the corridors of power.

In Anne Manne's words, many of today's young men and women are "hermeneutically sealed in bubbles of resentment" which are the natural legacy of a recurring exposure to nihilism during the most impressionable years of their lives. ⁽¹⁰⁾  Unwittingly, they take on board the only view regularly purveyed in the classroom either as text or sub-text:  that people are liars and hypocrites, almost everybody is going to rip them off, and there is no point in exposing themselves to the unfamiliar since nothing new or different can be relied upon.  The self-centredness, verging on solipsism, which relentlessly follows from this rigidly misanthropic ideological stance induces a misery from which it is very hard for young people who have been given nothing to admire, nothing to imitate, to escape.  Because their teachers are impervious to entreaties to alter their programmatic insistence on endemic corruption, they do not encounter either the theoretical or the practical alternatives which could expand their horizons and renew their faith in life. ⁽¹¹⁾

One of the distinct advantages of liberal arts programmes at politically incorrect colleges like St John's Annapolis and Santa Fe is that set authors are "contextualised" in "a tradition of admiration and influence". ⁽¹²⁾  Although some required Great Books rest on the assumption that human nature is fundamentally weak and wicked, the course of study as a whole balances works of this type with others that take a very different view.  Included in assigned seminar readings are writers who believe that people are good at heart and others who are convinced that all of us manifest goodness and wickedness in mysteriously varied ways.  Because the quality of thought and style in assigned texts is so impressive and wide-ranging, and because everything taught is shown to be worthy of respect, students emerge from four years of undergraduate study with world views earthed in genuine discovery.  Since they immerse themselves in opposing ideas, purveyed by men and women whose intellectual and imaginative reach is powerful, the positions they come to embrace and reject are well and truly theirs.

A striking feature of the handbooks of colleges like St John's (which is non-denominational) or Thomas Aquinas College in California (which is Catholic) is the honour accorded by them to centuries of serious reflection.  It is obvious from their description of academic requirements and course content that their teaching staffs reject the doctrinaire imposition of ideas about self and world recently satirised in David Williamson's Dead White Males, and they genuinely encourage students to spend as much time as they possibly can in the company of thinkers who conduct complicated arguments about the good life.  Explicitly and implicitly, tutors at these undergraduate institutions take the view that unless ideas and values which may at first appear alien are given a thorough hearing, firmly held convictions are unattainable.  They also make clear the fact that it is very hard work to arrive at intellectual junctures which confer peace of mind -- for the habit of cutting corners, inculcated in the young by the politically correct, is perilously easy to adopt for dangerously self-interested, rather than suitably disinterested, motives.

LARGER HORIZONS AND THE MEDIA

As John Carroll suggested in May 1993, in a conference paper which provoked commentary for months afterwards, when we are concerned about the abuse of authority in institutions, but especially in the home and the school, it is very tempting to oversimplify about the sources of our discontent. ⁽¹³⁾  Among the more disturbing features of Peter Weir's popular film about schooling, Dead Poets' Society, are its romanticism about youthful rebellion, its evasiveness about the full responsibility of teachers to their students, its sentimental dodging of pedagogical issues raised by its central figure, the charismatic schoolmaster John Keating, and its underlying fascination with perpetual youth, demonic egotism, decay, and death.  Yes:  Keating does release real talent in the adolescent boys he teaches by taking them seriously, goading them into thought, and encouraging them to resist the twin pressures in the foreground of their immediate environment, mammon and bourgeois respectability.  But he also betrays both his own authority and his students' trust in him by encouraging them to break all bounds, violate all rules, respect no limits, in order to be free.

What Carroll stressed in his discussion of the authority of the teacher is that although it is of course desirable to react against dullness and mediocrity, to bring poetry to life, to seize the day, more is involved in the human condition than self-realisation romantically conceived in the progressive terms of Rousseau.  Education, as Plato correctly observed, is "the drawing and leading of children to the rule which has been pronounced right by the voice of the law."  It is "the rightly disciplined state of pleasures and pains whereby a man, from his first beginnings on, will abhor what he should abhor and relish what he should relish."  Violations of a "higher order", whether or not we ourselves are the perpetrators of transgression, should create in us the Platonic emotion of "right fear":  a deeply held aversion to lack of discipline and to the view that there is nothing greater than the self, and a concomitant commitment to that higher level of truth which issues in a powerful desire for regeneration and renewal -- a proper caring for the world left to us by our ancestors.

One of the more significant features of more recent films which have rivalled Weir's in both popularity and critical acclaim is their sober cautionary message, harking back to the ancients, that crass or superficial solutions to oppression, grounded in a neurotic preoccupation with sex and power, poison all of us.  In lessons on the media now usual in schools, senior students could do worse than consider the effects of sloth on the thinking of the aimless young men and women depicted in Muriel's Wedding;  the importance of disciplined physical training to the young criminal offenders whose rehabilitation is briefly shown in Once Were Warriors;  or the implications of a casual tendency to treat other people as things, and to opt for comfort and expediency over self-sacrifice and attentiveness, dramatised in Short Cuts. ⁽¹⁴⁾  Unmistakably, in these movies and in other films with moral authority, metaphysical toughness in the face of flagrant abuses of decency is shown to be essential.  In such a context, Iago's celebrated statement about Cassio, that "there is a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly", reverberates in youthful (and more seasoned) minds.

Over the past five to ten years, the term "crisis in authority" has been used with increasing frequency in every area of public life.  In the light of such well-publicised contemporary disorders as family break-up, lack of civic concern, vandalism, youth suicide, a marked decrease in church attendance and a related preoccupation with the occult, this is understandable.  What is less readily understood is its chief source, the absence of sound moral teaching in the home and in the school:  teaching grounded in an awareness of the importance of experiencing the good, the beautiful, and the true in their infinitely diverse forms.  To repair this lack, gifted artists working in film, literature, theatre, and television are currently playing an important role -- which is why there is less reason than ever for continuing to promote products of popular culture of the calibre of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, Paul Zindel's The Pigman, and Robert Cormier's I Am the Cheese, in schools.

The difficulty with media studies is the marked tendency in so many classrooms to bombard students with material on subjects so familiar, or so unsuited to genuine analysis, that very little is learned.  Touching briefly on the values implicit in advertisements, in tediously repetitive talk shows like Oprah Winfrey's or Ricky Lake's, or in popular soapies such as Neighbours and Home and Away and equally popular police dramas like Blue Heelers has potential instructional value.  But dwelling on this topic for weeks, as many teachers do, is wasteful of badly needed time.  What media work in schools requires, if it is to have any real educational worth, is material that rewards close examination and considered judgment.  Only substantial television dramas like the recently screened Martin Chuzzlewit or Pride and Prejudice series, the more significant features of newspapers (in other words, editorials, columns, and feature articles), and films of clear moral complexity provide genuine opportunities for intellectual and imaginative exploration.

Since it is highly unlikely, in our present climate, that media studies will disappear from humanities courses in schools, the choice of subject matter in the broad area of Values Education and the Media is particularly important.  One of the great advantages of film classics as subjects for serious study is their capacity to move audiences in ways which, uniquely, compel examination of unconscious habits.  Tenth-rate pulp fiction, television drama, and cinema cannot and do not produce this desirable effect, nor does abstract classroom talk about edifying principles.  If what young people see and hear on the subject of good and evil doesn't have an immediacy which impinges on them, preventing them from "turning off" and shelving pain, its significance is bound to be marginal.  It is idle to talk about moral instruction, in schools or outside them, without recognising this.

One of the more encouraging by-products of the huge popular appeal of recent movies which have touched raw nerves in vast numbers of people has been the ensuing public discussion of the moral attitudes underlying them.  In senior classrooms, the examination of such films as Forrest Gump, Once Were Warriors, Muriel's Wedding, or Dead Men Walking, ⁽¹⁵⁾ led by able instructors, could offer excellent opportunities for the analysis of the roots of social disorder and harmony.  Extended conversations about broad moral issues raised in these films -- for example, the nature of innocence, the effects of family history on individual choice, the role of popular culture and peer pressure in the lives of impressionable young people, the range of options open to decent youths when institutions let them down, the connections between adversity and moral growth or stagnation, the sources of authentic identity, and the priorities of people who manage to triumph over huge obstacles and setbacks in ordinary settings -- have an obvious place in media units.

In a film like Forrest Gump, representative snippets of dialogue -- Forrest to Jenny:  "Who am I going to be?  Aren't I going to be me?" and Jenny to Forrest:  "Another kind of you" -- invite analysis of the meaning of issues which are of immediate concern to the young.  Forrest's fearless loyalty to his friends Bubba and Sergeant Dan, his calm acceptance of the more tedious features of school or army life for the sake of larger aims, his unwavering love for Jenny no matter how much or how often she disappoints him, his instinctive readiness to fight brutality and cant whenever he meets them, and the relationship between these virtues and his mother's wise and selfless devotion to him, speak volumes to a youthful population overwhelmed by daily treachery, fraud, and violence.  A major reason that the young have responded so strongly to Eric Roth's screenplay is that it takes it for granted that terrible betrayals are commonplace in the modern world at the same time that it dramatises credible and moving ways of working through them.

It's not so much the fantastic elements of Forrest's life that give audiences of every age and composition reason for hope, but the ordinary ones:  his happy mowing of lawns, or the harmonious seclusion of his life with Jenny, or his loving attention to the dying.  The extraordinary tokens of success which come his way, most notably his university degree, the medals conferred on him by US Presidents for outstanding war service and sporting achievement, and the vast sums he makes from business ventures, are so inseparable from farce that viewers attuned to the film's spirit respond to them with delighted, disbelieving laughter.  The suffering he endures, in contrast, inspires an empathy grounded in "straight" realism:  not because he is so simple-minded that viewers condescend to give him busloads of pity, as cynical critics have alleged, but because his heroic fortitude, his love of justice, and his innocent gratitude to those who have been good to him generate powerful feeling for him in his troubles.

Because Forrest Gump knows grief, not self-pity, his ruminations have the same appeal for his movie audience as for the more generous people who share his bench at the bus stop.  One of the more attractive features of the movie, reminiscent of the better fiction written expressly for adolescents over the past thirty years, is its quiet insistence that there are events in life to rejoice about in settings that provoke terror, horror, and anguish.  On the Vietnam War, on army life more generally, on the personal lives of young activists who are supposedly fighting for civil justice, on the effects of substance abuse and casual sex, on American political leadership across a broad spectrum -- that is, on a range of topics whose proper home is both the Right and the Left -- the movie does not flinch from "telling it like it is, baby":  which is of course what good history and literature always do.

BROAD VISION AND THE READING HABIT

In Jill Ireland's Monitor article on literature for older readers, referred to in the previous chapter, one argument that has powerfully moved readers has to do with the emotional effects of the language arts, and in particular fiction produced before the Demidenko generation was born, on children.  Morally, the literature analysed by Mrs Ireland has much more in common with films made by thinkers like Robert Zemeckis than by talents like Peter Weir.  What she argues is that novels which depict the family (warts and all) as a source of growth, and which present characters who combine their resources so that problems can be confronted and resolved in ways that increase understanding, enlarge all of us because they enliven our hearts as well as our minds.  Books which show us that human relationships are worth working at because intimacy deeply fulfils us extend our horizons as the cynical and imaginatively thin materials so often assigned in school classes cannot do.

Two years ago, working with 10-year-olds on an excerpt about playground bullying from Aiden Chambers' novel The Present Takers, I found that virtually everyone in the class wanted to remain in the room during the start of lunch because there was so much that they still wanted to think and talk about.  In rigorously conducted Socratic discussions about vice and virtue for every age group -- discussions anchored in a "canon" of excellent writing from many parts of the world -- this, typically, is what happens. ⁽¹⁶⁾  Whether they are discussing Ramona the Pest's compulsion to "boing" another child's long curls, Hamlet's refusal to talk to Ophelia, Frank Churchill's secretiveness about pianos, or Trotter's strategy for showing Gilly Hopkins her legitimate place in the world, students want to discover answers to pressing questions about how all of us do, and how we should, conduct ourselves.

Human beings naturally want to converse together about things that deeply matter to them;  and concrete dilemmas about human conduct, dramatised over the centuries in the expressive arts, have a power to inspire higher order thinking in every conceivable educational setting. ⁽¹⁷⁾  That is why eminent psychologists like William Kirk Kilpatrick, or philosophers like Christina Hoff Sommers, or educators like Kevin Ryan continue to discuss character formation in schools and homes in the context of teaching literature. ⁽¹⁸⁾  It is certainly the case, as I've suggested through discussion of units on the media, that we can acquire essential knowledge about good and evil in myriad other ways.  But we need to be aware that there are current faddish ways of trying to impart values -- for example, in Sex Education programmes popular in American schools for the last fifteen years -- which have produced results that are the reverse of those intended. ⁽¹⁹⁾

If it were possible to redesign every teacher education course in the world, the requirement that all students should complete a year's course in Moral Education by studying carefully chosen excerpts from Plato, Aristotle, the Bible, Langland, Dante, Shakespeare, Dr Johnson, Dickens, Blake, Emily Dickinson, Flannery O'Connor, Wallace Stevens, and Martin Boyd wouldn't be a bad beginning.  When such an elective was offered to prospective primary and secondary teachers during the last 14-year period, almost everyone who chose it for the first time also selected it in each subsequent year of their programme;  for it was obvious to them that these writers had something substantial to say to them that they had not heard before, and that they badly needed to hear.

Reading of this kind, combined with other pertinent work -- especially, the analysis of influential presentations of the natural and supernatural virtues in the writing of philosophers and theologians -- not only gives prospective teachers an essential knowledge of the importance of concrete dilemmas in shaping moral consciousness, but it gets them thinking seriously about aspects of their own lives which, typically, are unchallenged in the usual teacher training programmes.  The thoroughgoing analysis of the deadly sins responsible for tragedy, for example, or a literary encounter with the pride and envy which engender revelations that are fundamentally comic (in, for instance, a short story like Flannery O'Connor's "The Artificial Nigger"), give adults who are responsible for the growth of an entire generation a cogent and harmonious sense of continuities which have shaped civilised life from its beginnings.

One major limitation of William Bennett's The Book of Virtues -- a limitation with broad cultural and educational implications -- is its failure to provide the coherent, systematic reflection on good and evil commonly found in the works of writers schooled in moral philosophy. ⁽²⁰⁾  Despite his clear understanding of the role played by literature in the development of human character, Bennett lacks the precise awareness of the nature of vice and virtue, and of the levels of maturity required for effectual instruction in them, possessed by such distinguished exponents of character formation as David Isaacs at the University of Navarre or Paul Vitz at New York University, or by a literary critic of the intellectual calibre of Dorothea Krook. ⁽²¹⁾  As a result, his book is misleading on the range of virtues essential to children at specific stages in their development, and on the nature of virtue itself.

If a man of Bennett's eminence can make an error of this magnitude in his discussion of right and wrong, it is not surprising that ordinary teachers working in 1990s classrooms, lacking his intellect and experience, are disheartened by the community expectation that it is they who should give children primary moral guidance.  With the best will in the world, many of the classroom practitioners who proclaim the importance of teaching values like social justice in the very breath in which they announce that religious instruction has no place in public schools do not know that since the time of the ancient Greeks such values have been regarded as spiritual as well as social ideals.  The inherent connection between social harmony and spiritual well-being, reflected in near-universal acceptance of the natural virtues of prudence, justice, courage, and temperance, is unfortunately no longer taught to university students preparing to teach.

Clearly, there is a need to give prospective teachers forms of training in the broad field of moral education which, for several decades, have not been considered essential.  For the last thirty years or more, educational psychology and sociology, approached instrumentally, have enjoyed an inordinate influence in the teacher education programmes of English-speaking nations.  In these subjects, trainees have imbibed relativistic notions about such important matters as the stages of human moral development (Kohlberg's flawed model) or the sources of civilisation's discontents (through neo-Marxist views about money and social class). ⁽²²⁾  But they have received no instruction on the natural virtues recommended for over 2,000 years by moral and political philosophers, starting with Plato and Aristotle.

One key reason for unmistakable audience responsiveness to such frequently-sought public speakers as economist Glenn Loury of Boston and health professional Kathleen Gow of Toronto is international hunger for discussions of moral virtue anchored in centuries of agreement about what makes a difference in ordinary human lives.  When Professor Loury spoke in Sydney in March 1995, arguing that black and other disadvantaged children need instruction in the great books of the Western tradition and reminders of the universal applicability to "multiculturalism" of the belief in our common humanity, he received an ovation.  Dr Gow, similarly, has inspired countless listeners to assent to her argument, initially put at an international conference, that making a God of self-esteem -- as educational psychologists and health workers have been urging classroom teachers to do -- unnaturally limits understanding of the dimensions of moral vision. ⁽²³⁾

Emulating a case put for the last fifty years by the founder of Chicago's Great Books programme, the distinguished philosopher Mortimer J. Adler, and more recently by outstanding educators like St John's Dean, Eva T.H. Brann, and the President of Thomas Aquinas College, Thomas Dillon, ⁽²⁴⁾ minority spokespeople in a range of academic disciplines (Loury and Gow are only two examples among many) have lately been saying publicly that the politically correct aversion to religion and to spiritual teaching, embraced by the intelligentsia of the Left, has been a social disaster.  What we all desperately need, they have argued, is a return to the awareness that exposure to the foundational truths contained in all the liberal arts, but especially theology, philosophy, literature, history, and science, is fundamental to a properly designed programme in general education. ⁽²⁵⁾

Looking out for Number 1 -- a doctrine inseparable from another idea basic to the self-esteem movement, namely, "I am all I've got" -- has produced a generation far more lost than Hemingway's, Malcolm Cowley's, and Scott Fitzgerald's.  When Allan Bloom argued in his best-selling book, The Closing of the American Mind, that representative numbers of students today cannot understand art depicting a young man whose body is full of arrows because they are woefully ignorant of history (and in particular the history of Christianity, bodied forth in art, music, and literature), nobody could say that he was wrong.  There has been, alas, a tragically close correlation between the callous egotism of adolescents schooled in views about the importance of doing exactly what they want to do, regardless of its inherent moral quality or its probable effects on others, and their frightening ignorance of, and lack of interest in, the major historical achievements of humankind.

Near-universal acceptance in the current teenage generation of the 1960s dictum "Do Your Own Thing", and the related insistence that "Pleasure NOW" is the most important value for the young to embrace, have engendered the indifference to essential moral continuities perfectly satirised in some of the films mentioned earlier in this chapter, and in such admired recent world literature as Oe's The Silent Cry or Ondaatje's The English Patient.  Esteemed writers for older adolescents like Katherine Paterson, Cynthia Voigt, Eleanor Cameron, Lloyd Alexander, Janni Howker, Laurence Yep, Betsy Byars, and Mollie Hunter regularly render characters who provide a very different kind of teaching.  But contemporary writers of fiction and poetry for adults who do this (as our chapter on Literacy suggests) do not find their way into school syllabuses or book rooms nearly as often as they should do.

The kind of instruction recommended by Gow -- teaching grounded in concern for students and love of the truths at the heart of the discipline being imparted -- points us in one sound direction.  John Carroll's reminder that "right fear", the essence of courage, is powerfully needed in today's educational institutions does much the same thing.  Knowing what we ought to believe, to know, and to do, the three pillars of knowledge essential to all education, is the aim of the journey that these educators are far from alone in urging us to undertake.  The unanswered question for us all is whether we will have the wisdom and the will to preserve what is most precious in our culture and to prepare for its mysterious renewal by placing love of the common good, and an understanding of the many specific ways in which it can be imparted, at the centre of the curriculum where it belongs.

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ENDNOTES

1.  See, for example, in contrast Emma Kate Symons, "Galactic Games", Education Monitor, Vol. 5, No. 3.

2.  One eloquent answer, which looks to stability in family life, and especially the close involvement of mothers in the education of their chldren from earliest infancy onwards, is Anne Manne's moving cover story in Quadrant, "Reflections on Children" (June 1994).

3.  On this feature of PC, and others, see "Political Correctness:  Ideology in Education", The Ethics of Teaching and Learning, 1992.

4.  Affirmative action policies of this type are described in telling detail in many publications, but especially Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Ediication.  In a section of the book on biased treatments of multiculturalism, he objects particularly to romantic views of victimhood and the "aesthetic status" conferred upon it -- a status "not shared or appreciated by those who actually endorse the oppression".  See further Susan Moore's review of this book, "Mind-Forged Manacles", in Quadrant (January-February 1992).

5.  There have of course been many protests against the mind-set here described.  One of the most effective in Australia is David Williamon's recent satirical drama, Dead White Males.

6.  See Paul Ross, "Losing Their Faculties", Review, Vol. 48, No. 2.

7.  In a recent discussion of Political Correctness on the ABC's 7:30 Report (8 April 1996), panel member Pat O'Shane claimed that people who use the term "PC" are Right-wingers whose aim is to "silence" those like herself who are concerned about centuries of oppression.  The idea that sound criticism of PC comes from thinkers who, because they care so much about social justice to Aborigines and other groups whose social histories are in obvious respects painful, want to ssee a much more balanced focus on justice in every educational setting, is clearly not a view she is prepared to examine.

8.  See further Kathleen Gow, "Making a God of Self-Esteem", Education Monitor, Vol. 6, No. 1.

9.  On this subject, see further Ame Waldron Neumam, "The Ethics of Fiction's Reception", Quadrant (November 1995), and "Semantic and Social Deafness", Quadrant (April 1996).  Neumann is particularly lucid on the absurd postmodernist stance that texts do not actually refer to, and therefore affirm, the real world.

10.  The characteristic tone of voice of these resentful young people is reminiscent of some of the speeches of the main character in Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons, which first used the word "nihilist".

11.  On the positive values that the young need training in, and the virtuous habits that they need to develop with the help of the adults responsible for their care at home and at school, see especially James Stenson, Upbringing:  A Discussion Handbook for Parents of Young Children (1991).

12.  I am quoting here from a letter from Anne Waldron Neumann.

13.  See "The Authority to Teach", The Ethics of Teaching and Learning (1993).  Reprinted in slightly different form in SCORE, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 1994).

14.  For a more detailed discussion of Short Cuts, see "Moral Education and the Family", A Stitch in Time:  Repairing the Social Fabric, November (1995).

15.  Susan Moore's analysis of this film will be published in the September issue of Quadrant.

16.  See further, on the benefits of looking analytically at large philosophical and moral issues, Susan Moore's Observation "Philosophy for Children" in Education Monitor, Vol. 6, No. 1.

17.  It is no accident that Encyclopædia Britannica's Great Book series begins with Robert Hutchins' observation about the Great Conversation which started at the dawn of history.  The more effectual means of taking ideas and values seriously in classrooms is rigorous discussion, guided by expert Socratic questioners.

18.  See, for instance, Kilpatrick's Psychological Seduction (1982), Chapter 9;  Sommers' many articles on moral education, reprinted regularly in Network News & Views;  or Ryan's reflections on effective character formation in schools, also in Network News & Views or Education Week (for example, the 17 May 1995 issue).  With Gregory and Suzanne Wolfe, Kilpatrick has just published a paperback, Books That Build Character (Simon and Schuster), which is selling very well.

19.  See further the influential article of Barbara Dafoe Whitehead's, "The Failure of Sex Education", published in the October 1994 Atlantic Monthly and reprinted in such widely-read journals as Network News & Views (the following November).  See, too, Lucy Sullivan, "Choosing Blind", Education Monitor, Vol. 5, No. 1.  Dr Sullivan has published other important material on this topic and kindred ones on family life in News Weekly, Campus Review, Review, and other journals.

20.  See further Susan Moore, "Right and Wrong:  a Review of The Book of Virtues", Review, Vol. 47, No. 4 (1995).

21.  See David Isaacs' book for parents and teachers, Character Building (1993), Paul Vitz's Psychology As Religion:  The Cult of Self-Worship (1977), and Dorothea Krook's Elements of Tragedy (1969) and Three Traditions of Moral Thought (1959).  The latter book, when it was first published, inspired months of controversy on the front pages of the Times Literary Supplement.

22.  For much more detailed criticisms of the typical content and influence of Educational Psychology and Sociology, see Martin Haberman's article, "Can We Learn From the Legacies of Teacher Education?", Education Monitor, Vol. 2, No. 4, and Alan Barcan's Study Paper 16, "The Rise and Fall of the New Sociology of Education", November 1989.  On the limits of Kohlberg's enormously influential theory, see -- for example -- Susan Moore, "Remarkable Gifts", Quadrant (May 1994), and Dan O'Donnell's "First Principles", Education Monitor, Vol. 5, No. 2.

23.  See Loury's Sydney talk, reprinted in edited form as "Multiculturalism and Civic Virtue", in Education Monitor, Vol. 6, No. 1.  The same issue of Monitor contains a much-abridged version of Kathleen Gow's conference speech, referred to earlier, and soon to be reprinted in full in Politicising the Classroom, edited by P. Emberley and W. Newell, University of Toronto Press, 1995.  See, too, "Values and Judgements:  Creating Social Incentives for Good Behaviour", A Stitch in Time, op. cit.

24.  See Eva Brann's case for a four-year course of study organised around Great Books, and for an approach to such study that is genuinely intellectually liberating and rigorous, in Change, Heldref Publications, 1319 Eighteenth Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036-1802.  On similar territory, see Dr Dillon's "A Proposal for the Fulfilment of Catholic Liberal Education", published by Thomas Aquinas College at 10000 North Ojai Road, Santa Paula, California 93060.

25.  The case for the liberal arts put by Adler can be found in a collection of his essays on education of the last fifty years, Reforming Education:  The Opening of the American Mind, Macmillan, 1993.