The Schooled Heart: Moral Reformation in American Higher Education

Chapter 1. Liberal Education, Moral Education, and Religion

29 Liberal Education, Moral Education, and Religion Liberal education comes in various shapes and sizes. I will discuss two historically influential conceptions of liberal education, both of which have clear implications for how we think of moral education. Though their emphases are different, they are, in fact, complementary, and I will argue that an adequate account of moral education requires that we draw on both. I will also argue that serious study of religion is essential to both liberal education and moral education. (What will give this thesis particular punch is that I make this claim regarding public as well as private higher education.) First, however, a few comments about why moral education is such a problem in higher education. WHY MORAL EDUCATION IS A PROBLEM There are several reasons. First, there is the stubborn prejudice that we either learn morality at mother’s knee—or we do not learn it at all. Certainly, it is believed, it is too late in college to learn to be moral. sWarren A. Nord Chapter 1 30 Liberal Education, Moral Education, and Religion Second, it has become increasingly common to think of higher education primarily in economic terms. Surveys of incoming freshmen show that they value higher education chiefly for the jobs that their degrees will buy them (and the money they will make in those jobs). They are not the only ones. More and more, parents, legislators, and policymakers think of education in economic terms (whether the goal be jobs for my kids, educated workers for my business, or American competitiveness for success in the international marketplace). Not surprisingly, higher education has become more narrowly practical in response to the utilitarian values, pressures, and policies of the larger culture. This is not simply a recent phenomenon; almost from the beginning, American public schools and universities had a practical bent. But it is becoming more pronounced. Not surprisingly, both secondary and higher education have become increasingly uncoupled from more traditional emphases on virtue and the search for moral truth. Third, it is widely believed that in a pluralistic liberal democracy, public universities must remain morally neutral; individuals should be free to make their own moral (and religious) judgments. Again, there has been a steady development in this direction over the last two centuries, but many would say that the trend accelerated during the liberal and antiauthoritarian 1960s. Moral education is often seen as synonymous with moralistic education, that is to say, indoctrination. Within most colleges and universities, the availability of electives and the absence of a core curriculum grant students the right to shape, within broad limits, their own educations; the result is cultural fragmentation and skepticism about a common morality. Fourth, in accepting the fact-value dichotomy of the scientific method, many scholars have come to believe that the real world is one of pure factuality , while value-judgments are subjective. Talk of what is good and evil, morally right and wrong, is conceptually impossible within the framework of modern science and much social science. Modern science has also marginalized God and theology, and discredited ways in which religion makes sense of morality. To the extent that students come to an understanding of nature that is derived from the value-free sciences, and of human nature derived from the value-free social sciences, morality will almost inevitably seem irrational—a matter of blind faith, arbitrary personal decisions, or mere social conventions—and hardly a fit matter for education, as opposed to socialization or training. Fifth, while the humanities have also been shaped by modern scienti fic naturalism, postmodernism has flourished in the humanities over the last several decades. In this context I take postmodernism to be the view that we are epistemologically constrained by the particularities of our cultures and subcultures, so that we inevitably interpret the world in terms Warren A. Nord 31 of our own time and language, our own class, race, and gender. There is no way of stepping outside our cultural skins, outside the social locations that shape our ways of making sense of the world, to discover what is objectively true; indeed, it makes no sense to talk of objective truth. A part of what makes this view postmodern is that it rejects the claim that science (the approach to knowledge characteristic of modernity) has any special standing in providing us with knowledge of the world; rather, science simply provides one narrative...