Giving Compass Take:

• Chester E. Finn, Jr. at Education Next discusses the importance of moral and ethical education in our schools — and two approaches to go about implementing it.

• How might this effort broaden the scope of current school curriculums? In what ways should we update ethics lessons for the 21st century environment?

• Read more about how an education based on philosophical classics prepares students for a modern world. 

Late December brought not one but two excellent disquisitions on moral education, both the importance of rekindling an emphasis on it in American schools and some thoughtful advice as to how to go about it. Each does a nice job of explaining why such rekindling is needed at this time — though unless you’re completely off the grid you already know why: not so much because of troubles with private morality (teenage pregnancy rates are down, etc.) but because of manifest failures in the public and semi-public squares: with honesty, integrity, and trustworthiness, both on the part of elected officials and in the small venues where we observe an excess of selfishness, cheating, laziness, and willingness to be a burden on others.

The moral and ethical renewal that American society needs, and that our schools have an obligation to do their best to infuse into their pupils, is the Aristotelian kind, nicely defined by Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson as human beings “exercising their reason and habituating certain virtues, such as courage, temperance, honor, equanimity, truthfulness, justice and friendship.” Gerson deplores — correctly in my view — today’s tendency among our public officials and many others to disregard Aristotle and instead embrace the version derived from Rousseau, which prizes authenticity and self-expression rather than virtue.

Read the full article about moral education in school by Chester E. Finn, Jr. at Education Next.