Teachers, Leaders, and Schools: Essays by John Dewey

Teaching Ethics in the High School (1893)

Teaching Ethics in the High School (1893) IT WOULD BE, I AM inclined to believe, comparatively easy to bring arguments in support of the conclusion that there has never been such a widespread interest in teaching ethics in the schools as at present; or of the conclusion that there is a general consensus among experts against teaching it. I am not going to try to draw out this antinomy, but I want to run over two or three of the reasons in favor of the latter conclusion. One is the pretty widespread conviction that conscious moralizing in the schoolroom has had its day—if it ever had any; that the mistake has been made of identifying ethical instruction with the conning over and drumming in of ethical precepts; that the most efficient moral teaching is that afforded by the constant bearing in upon the individual of the life-process of the school; that set moral instruction other than grows directly out of occurrences in the school itself, or other than that which calls to the attention of the pupil the meaning of the life of which he is a part, is pretty sure to be formal and perfunctory, and to result rather in hardening the mind of the child with a lot of half-understood precepts than in helpful development. And if moral instruction is conceived not so much as set instruction in regulations for conduct, as cultivation of the child’s own conscience, there is the danger of cultivating in some a morbid conscientiousness always prying and spying into the state of feelings, instead of allowing those feelings to develop in their normal intimate connection with action; and in others there is the danger of creating offensive prigs, possibly hypocrites. With all this I agree; indeed, I do not think that the movement against teaching ethics in the schools has gone as far as it is likely to go, or as it should go—provided, that is, ethics is conceived in this spirit. Some of the books which the last year or two have produced, and which are being gradually urged into the schools on account of the great revival of interest in the moral side of school work, seem to me to be based upon an First published in Educational Review 6 (November 1893): 313–21. 46 Teaching Ethics in the High School 47 utterly wrong idea of ethics—upon the assumption that if you can only teach a child moral rules and distinctions enough, you have somehow furthered his moral being. Against all this, we cannot too often protest. From the side of ethical theory, we must protest that all this is a caricature of the scientific method of ethics and of its scientific aims. From the standpoint of practical morals, we have to protest that the inculcation of moral rules is no more likely to make character than is that of astronomical formulæ. If this reaction, however, is simply against all instruction in ethical science in the schools; if it does not rather ask how right instruction in morals may be substituted for wrong, I think we shall not get its full benefit. Rightly read, it is a movement against a false view of morals and a false theory of ethics; the danger is that we are likely to interpret it as meaning that the ethical theory in question may be all right in itself, but is out of place in the schools. At all events, I wish to submit a certain conception of ethical theory upon which that theory seems to me thoroughly teachable in the schoolroom; not only teachable, indeed, but necessary to any well-adjusted curriculum. It is generally admitted, for example, that there has been a talking about number in the school instead of intelligent use of it; that there has been altogether too much attention paid to the examination of the logic of quantity, in the abstract, and altogether too little logic in the attitude of the pupil’s mind toward quantity. The one who should, on account of this, urge that mathematical relations, in their reality, had no place in the schools, would be quite on a par with the one who draws a similar conclusion in ethics, because of the similar abuse there. The greater the evil resulting from a false conception of the nature of number or of moral action, the greater the demand for introducing instruction based on a right idea. Ethics, rightly conceived, is the statement...