Another View of School Reform: Values and Ethics Restored

The article discusses a need for action in teaching values and morality in the public schools to gain control of the social problems that hinder school learning. Moral and ethical education are necessary to support parents and the community in teaching appropriate civic and moral values. Problems affecting school learning were substantiated by data collected from a national sample of public school principals reporting an alarming number of serious problems in the schools related to the home and society. Through teacher education programs, teachers must be prepared to provide moral education. Suggestions are offered to address the moral education of children and youth.     

Political and Nonpolitical Authority in Values Education

This article is an examination of the political (public consensus) and nonpolitical authority as a basis for values education in a democratic society. The author advocates that nonpolitical authority can be a basis for defending the teaching of values in public schools.     

Moral education,ubuntu and ubuntu-inspired communities

While it is generally believed that moral education is important in the development of children, there is disagreement over a range of issues concerning the teaching of values and morals in schools. In the forefront of this debate are issues concerning whether morality or values and morals can be taught in schools, ought to be taught, and how they should be taught. In this paper I want to focus on the last of the issues within the background of ubuntu. My broad interest is to stimulate discussion regarding whether ubuntu, ubuntu-inspired communities, and some of its values can contribute to the issue of the teaching of values and morals. In the process of my engagement with moral education and ubuntu, I can be taken to be offering ubuntu and practices in ubuntu communities as an alternative way of teaching values and morals – values that are important for social and political citizenship.     

The pedagogical imperative of values education

Recent research has exposed the potential of quality teaching to exercise a positive influence on student achievement. Extending beyond surface and factual learning, quality teaching has posited conceptions of ‘intellectual depth’, ‘communicative competence’ and ‘self‐reflection’ as being central to effective learning. Implicit in these conceptions are values dimensions reflected in notions of positive relationships, the centrality of student welfare, school coherence, ambience and organisation. The influences of these on student learning, welfare and progress have been observed across public, private and religious sectors, thus confirming earlier studies of similar phenomena in religious schools. Evidence from the Australian Government's Values Education Good Practice Schools Project indicates the benefit to all schools of reflecting on, re‐evaluating and rethinking the implications of values education for curricula, classroom management and school ethos in the interests of student wellbeing and progress. This indicates a pedagogical imperative for values education which extends beyond boundaries of personal or systemic interests and ideologies.     

Time for Values: Responding Educationally to the Call from the Past

This paper rethinks the fostering task of the teacher in a time when it, paradoxically, has tended to become marginalized and privatized despite its public urgency. Following post-holocaust thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and Zygmunt Bauman, the position explored here is radical in the sense that it takes ‘the crisis of traditions’ and the erosion of a common moral ground or value basis seriously, and it is conservative in the sense that it insists on responding educationally to the call from the past by returning to (a) the moral character of our existence and (b) our own embeddedness in the incompleteness of living traditions. The argument is that there is a difference between educating for common values—which entails a belief in pre-existing commonalities—and making values common in and through education. The latter, we argue, entails an aspiration for continuously creating new commonalities and for cultivating the ability to act and judge as a thinking moral agent in specific, lived and worldly cases. In this sense, the fostering task of the teacher is to create commonality of what is not (yet) common, turning the liberal democratic values of the past into contested objects of study.     

Character Education: Christian Education Perspectives

Character is defined broadly by leading authorities, including concepts such as practicing apt behavior and teaching right from wrong. Virtue and moral undertones tend to pervade most experts' use of character, although in secular settings, the notion of ethics is more prominent. Overall, developing in students a desire for the good is how most authorities understand the construct. Implementing character in the public and Christian schools, apart from a Judeo-Christian view of the construct, leaves schools open to values clarification, situational ethics, and other post-modern foundational options. Character development, at least at the conceptual level, is at the heart of all education—Christian or non-Christian.     

Does change in ethical education influence core moral values? Towards history- and culture-aware morality model with application in automatic moral reasoning

In this study, we focus on ethical education as a means to improve artificial companion’s conceptualization of moral decision-making process in human users. In particular, we focus on automatically determining whether changes in ethical education influenced core moral values in humans throughout the century. We analyze ethics as taught in Japan before WWII and today to verify how much the pre-WWII moral attitudes have in common with those of contemporary Japanese, to what degree what is taught as ethics in school overlaps with the general population’s understanding of ethics, as well as to verify whether a major reform of the guidelines for teaching the school subject of “ethics” at school after 1946 has changed the way common people approach core moral questions (such as those concerning the sacredness of human life). We selected textbooks used in teaching ethics at school from between 1935 and 1937, and those used in junior high schools today (2019) and analyzed what emotional and moral associations such contents generated. The analysis was performed with an automatic moral and emotional reasoning agent and based on the largest available text corpus in Japanese as well as on the resources of a Japanese digital library. As a result, we found out that, despite changes in stereotypical view on Japan’s moral sentiments, especially due to historical events, past and contemporary Japanese share a similar moral evaluation of certain basic moral concepts, although there is a large discrepancy between how they perceive some actions to be beneficial to the society as a whole while at the same time being inconclusive when it comes to assessing the same action’s outcome on the individual performing them and in terms of emotional consequences. Some ethical categories, assessed positively before the war, while being associated with a nationalistic trend in education have also disappeared from the scope of interest of post- war society. The findings of this study support suggestions proposed by others that the development of personal AI systems requires supplementation with moral reasoning. Moreover, the paper builds upon this idea and further suggests that AI systems need to be aware of ethics not as a constant, but as a function with a correction on historical and cultural changes in moral reasoning.     

Traditional morality, moral reasoning and the moral education of adolescents

While many groups agree that there is a need for schools to give some value training, particularly to adolescents, there is much disagreement as to how this should be done. Two positions on value training seem to be most prevalent today. One has often been identified with Kohlberg--teaching moral reasoning. The other position, supported by most conservative groups in this country today, calls for the teaching of traditional values. Proponents of these two positions have strongly criticized each other's methods and philosophies. This paper examines both positions and attempts to establish a significant common ground. In doing so, it is hoped that educators will be encouraged to incorporate elements of both ideas in the moral education process.     

Teaching research ethics: Can web-based instruction satisfy appropriate pedagogical objectives?

Ethical tasks faced by researchers in science and engineering as they engage in research include recognition of moral problems in their practice, finding solutions to those moral problems, judging moral actions and engaging in preventive ethics. Given these issues, appropriate pedagogical objectives for research ethics education include (1) teaching researchers to recognize moral issues in their research, (2) teaching researchers to solve practical moral problems in their research from the perspective of the moral agent, (3) teaching researchers how to make moral judgments about actions, and (4) learning to engage in preventive ethics. If web-based research ethics education is intended to be adequate and sufficient for research ethics education, then it must meet those objectives. However there are reasons to be skeptical that it can.     

Religion,education and conflict in Northern Ireland

The aim of this article is to re‐evaluate and reaffirm the contribution of the churches and of Christianity to the realization in Northern Ireland schools of legitimate and progressive educational values such as the cultivation of tolerance, moral integrity and civic virtue. Implicit in this is a critique of educational initiatives that seek to undermine the influence of Christianity in schools. There is also discussion of the reasons why the increasing secularization of education in Northern Ireland should be resisted. The paper begins with a brief historical overview of the ongoing tension between religious and secular influences in education and notes the ways in which developments in education have tended to marginalize religion and to denude public education of Christian religious content and influence. Critical attention is then given to the role of religion in the Northern Ireland conflict, for it is the conviction that the conflict is religious that provides much of the stimulus for efforts to secularize education and schools. This is followed by some brief comments on the positive role that religion can play in religious education and in schools. The article concludes with a brief review of the reasons why a proper balance between secular and religious influences in schools in Northern Ireland should be maintained.     

Common and Personal Values in Moral Education

It is arguable that beneath the fast and loose surface of recent official and/or semi-official documentation devoted to advice and guidance on moral education, there lurks systematic error about the bases of moral authority - turning upon a distinction between common and personal values. In what follows, it is claimed that the heart of this error lies in mistaking a logical distinction between different levels of moral evaluation for a statistical distinction concerned more with the distribution of moral values. To the extent that common value is identified with ideas of consensus or agreement, and personal value with values clarification and personal search, it seems that no coherent or viable conception of moral reason could possibly be constructed on the basis of currently available official guidance.     

When Values and Behavior Conflict: Moral Pluralism and Intrapersonal Moral Hypocrisy

The authors review the various ways moral hypocrisy has been defined and operationalized by social psychologists, concentrating on three general types: moral duplicity, moral double standards, and moral weakness. While most approaches have treated moral hypocrisy as an interpersonal phenomenon, requiring public claims, preaching (versus practicing), or judgments of others (versus oneself), this paper also considers intrapersonal moral hypocrisy – that is, conflicts between values and behavior that may exist even in the absence of public pronouncements or judgments. Current attempts to understand and combat intrapersonal moral hypocrisy are aided by moral pluralism, the idea that there are many different moral values, which may come into conflict both between and within individuals. Examples are given to illustrate how taking into account individual differences in values can help to reduce moral hypocrisy. The authors close by considering the possibility that in a pluralistic world, reducing intrapersonal moral hypocrisy might not always be a normatively desired end goal.     

A Critique of Giving Voice to Values Approach to Business Ethics Education

Mary Gentile’s Giving Voice to Values presents an approach to ethics training based on the idea that most people would like to provide input in times of ethical conflict using their own values. She maintains that people recognize the lapses in organizational ethical judgment and behavior, but they do not have the courage to step up and voice their values to prevent the misconduct. Gentile has developed a successful initiative and following based on encouraging students and employees to learn how to engage in communication or action to express their values within an organization’s formal and informal value system. The purpose of this analysis is to examine the Giving Voice to Values approach to empowering the individual to take action to deal with lapses in organizational ethics. We examine the role of Giving Voice to Values in business ethics education, considerations for implementing GVV, and recommendations for business educators and corporate ethics officers. We conclude that while GVV is an effective tool, it is not a comprehensive or holistic approach to ethics education and organizational ethics programs.     

‘The teachers put effort into teaching us about life,and what’s right and what’s wrong’: values and moral education in publicly-managed schools in Ireland

In light of cultural and demographic changes in the Republic of Ireland, there is an important and urgent need for research on the articulation of values education in Irish publicly-managed schools. This article reports the findings from a research project on the moral, religious and spiritual values and traditions of staff and students in publicly-managed schools. Data was collected from 18 second-level schools throughout the country, using a mixed methods approach involving the named values of participants’ school, as well as the policies and practices employed within the schools to support these named values. Findings show that both teachers and students identify positive values such as respect and well-being, equality and inclusion, and describe values education in practice. However, some differences emerging in the findings highlight the vacuum left by the lack of sectoral guidance. The implications of this vacuum are discussed, as it provides an opportunity for dialogue and consensus-building on values, and also for schools to develop their own context-relevant set of values.     

Values education in a democratic society

A democratic society requires a degree of consensus on values. But it is argued that the model of values education as the transmission of certain predetermined values is inadequate in a democracy, since for several reasons the transmission of predetermined values can itself be undemocratic. Education for individual autonomy in matters of values is also, by itself, inadequate. Each generation needs the resources by which it can work out its own interpretation of democratic values. What is also needed, then, is an education in a common language of discourse — which can be drawn primarily from philosophy — which will facilitate public debate.     

Contributions of moral education lectures and moral discussion in Hong Kong secondary schools

Moral education in the traditional form of classroom didactic lectures in secondary schools has been prevailing in Hong Kong since the initiation of moral education in the 1980s. However, such a traditional form has not received credit from research in the West. Instead, discussion of moral issues would be a more effective way of moral education than would didactic lectures. Because of the differential ways of moral education in Hong Kong, findings from other places can be subject to a test in Hong Kong. As such, this study employed panel data from 19,069 secondary school students in Hong Kong to analyze the impacts of moral education on moral commitment to sustain societal interests. Findings indicated a weak contribution of moral discussion and an even weaker contribution of moral education lectures to moral commitment. These findings therefore echo those in other places and suggest that real-life moral education contributes in the expected way, albeit weakly.     

Values disparity and academic achievement among Ugandan adolescents

A century ago, Christian missionaries founded Uganda’s earliest schools. Many of these schools continue to espouse values inculcation as a stated goal. In this study of 502 Ugandan children completing primary school (P7), students’ personal values and their perception of their school’s values were measured using adaptations of the Rokeach Values Survey (RVS). A disparity score was computed for each respondent to determine the degree of similarity between personal and school values. The relationship between the disparity score and performance on the Primary Leaving Examination (PLE) was then computed. Results reveal a small but significant correlation between values disparity and academic achievement (r = .35, p < .001).     

Relative Effectiveness of Values Clarification and Symbolic Modeling in Enhancing the Moral Values of Adolescents in Selected Nigerian Schools

Using quasi-experiment, this study explored the effects of values clarification and symbolic modeling on moral intent to act in a sample of 120 high school students from Ogun State, Nigeria. Despite widespread disapproval and outright condemnation by the public, moral offences by the adolescent population have become increasingly frequent and grave in both the urban and rural areas of Nigeria. Believing that programs set by the government could impact the level of moral behavior among the youths of Nigeria, various leaders in Nigeria have attempted to make a difference in the moral life of the nation, such as “Ethical Revolution” by President Shehu Shagari in 1982; “War Against Indiscipline” by General Mohammed Buhari in 1985. In this study, both values clarification and symbolic modeling options demonstrated significant impacts on moral behavior as measured by the Moral Behavioral Inventory (MBI) and the Adolescent Personal Development Inventory (APDI).     

Moral Agency in Other Animals

Some philosophers have argued that moral agency is characteristic of humans alone and that its absence from other animals justifies granting higher moral status to humans. However, human beings do not have a monopoly on moral agency, which admits of varying degrees and does not require mastery of moral principles. The view that all and only humans possess moral agency indicates our underestimation of the mental lives of other animals. Since many other animals are moral agents (to varying degrees), they are also subject to (limited) moral obligations, examples of which are provided in this paper. But, while moral agency is sufficient for significant moral status, it is by no means necessary.     

当代中国人价值观的结构与特点

本研究以事实驱动作为方法学切入点, 系统研究了中国人的价值观结构及特点等问题。研究采用通过系统编制形成的《中国人价值观问卷》, 对工人、农民、专业技术人员、大学生和中学生五类人群进行了测量。其中, 1100份有效数据的探索性因素分析表明, 中国人价值观是一个8因素结构, 具体包括品格自律、才能务实、公共利益、人伦情感、名望成就、家庭本位、守法从众、金钱权力; 随后对1196份有效数据进行结构验证和信度检验, 结果表明中国人价值观问卷(Chinese Values Questionnaire, CVQ)具有良好的构想效度和信度。同时, 通过对中国人价值观现状的分析发现, 中国人价值观具有“好人定位”特点, 并据此提出相应的理论模型。