Moral Education

1/15/2011

"The moral education of our children is the first priority of a nation.  We're not just talking about learning subjects here, about history or calculus - whatever.  In the education of our children we're involved in nothing less than the architecture of souls."                                       
William Bennett, 1994

I sense that many of our schools are so focused on cognitive development (SATs, ACTs, No Child Left Behind, etc.) that they have ceased to understand that education has another purpose - to change behavior.  Ample research exists that parents seek schools that produce graduates who are admitted to our best colleges/universities and thus, compete well for first jobs.  Of course, aspirations such as these serve a useful purpose.  Notwithstanding that and as noted in an earlier blog, we (schools) can do more. 

Does it really matter if our students have memorized the poetry of Browning and Kipling and read Kant and Rousseau if he/she is deceitful in action and word?  I illustrate from Hamlet, "This above all:  to thine own self be true,/And it must follow, as the night the day,/Thou canst not then be false to any man." 
Shakespeare, 1600