Learning in the Plural: Essays on the Humanities and Public Life

Moral Literacy (1994)

17 moral literacy () One of my principal concerns as a writing teacher is my students ’ moral literacy and, in particular, the critical nexus formed in the writing classroom by language, moral sensibility, cultural values, identity development, and ethical behavior. I am well aware of how slippery and risky the term “moral literacy” can be. I do not mean necessarily to imply an individual’s talent or acumen for judging right from wrong merged with the language arts. Nor would I endorse William Kilpatrick’s problematic flip side of the term used in his recent study of the public school’s “moral weightlessness,” subtitled Moral Illiteracy and the Case for Character Education (1992). Moral literacy encompasses, instead, the discourse imagery we use to articulate aspiration, commitment, and identity—in Lionel Trilling ’s (1979) phrase, our “images of personal being”—as we search for inner meaning and truth within the context of interpersonal commitments and wider obligations to society. Intrinsic to higher learning, “moral literacy,” as Alexis de Tocqueville (1945) understood, means that an “instruction which enlightens the understanding is not [to be] separated from [a] moral education which amends the heart” (190). I concur, then, with William Damon’s (1990) assessment of “moral literacy” as “the best route to, and the finest social purpose for, the higher forms of literacy” (51). As the historian of rhetoric James Berlin (1984) has said, “When we teach students to write Learning in the Plural 18 we are teaching more than an instrumental skill. We are teaching a mode of conduct, a way of responding to experience” (86) that “causes reverberations in all features of a student’s private and social behavior” (92). During a recent class session, my students and I got into an argument over “idealism” that illustrates how frustrating and slippery the concept of moral literacy can be. My students and I were discussing the Declaration of Independence and Langston Hughes’s poem “Let America Be America Again.” In that poem Hughes presents starkly contrasting ethical perspectives on the Declaration’s “pursuit of happiness” blocked in against a history of racial discrimination: the rugged individualist credo, as Hughes puts it, “of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak” versus the egalitarian vision contained in Thomas Jefferson’s democratic humanism. I had asked my students to consider Jefferson’s civic republican principles—liberty, social justice, collective self-determination, and so on—and the virtues accompanying them (e.g., toleration, respect for differences, selflessness) in light of Hughes’s sobering reassessment of such principles and virtues from an African American perspective just at the dawning of the civil rights movement. My point was to discuss openly these conflicting visions of national purpose , then seek to reconcile the collision of images in the poem, hopefully along with the ethical freight carried by those images. How we resolve the poem’s central moral dilemma—privilege and power versus egalitarianism in a democracy—tells us, I believed (and still do), something about our own moral lives and how we handle the problem of obligation—the linchpin of moral life—and what moral vocabulary best informs those solutions. In spite of such lofty aims (or, upon further reflection, maybe because of them), it was one of those sessions when you work a class into a knot of disagreements and finally cross a threshold where no one really listens anymore. No reconciliations. No resolutions. My well-worn concept of idealism , in effect, boomeranged on me, along with the pedagogical gambit I had yoked it to. It occurred to me only after class ended that the reason the session fizzled was that my students and I had entirely different connotations for the word. I had tripped unknowingly over what William Damon (1990) describes as a discontinuity of generational commitments, a classic values mismatch, according to Damon, between the moral literacies of Moral Literacy 19 generations. Frankly, I had expected students to solve a moral problem as I would and, along with Hughes, condemn “the same old stupid plan / Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak” in favor of Hughes’s geomoral imagery of America as a “great strong land of love / Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme / That any man be crushed by one above.” But students were more fatalistically inclined. They did not share Hughes’ optimism over idealism as socially transformative, nor did they as strongly oppose biological , filial, and economic determinism as...