Moral Instruction

In Christian schools, they call it moral instruction.  In public schools, it's called "Character education."  Either way, it seems that the prevailing notion is that our schools aren't simply there to instruct in "core subjects" anymore, but to instruct our students on how to be good people.  It's amazing to me how narrow, paltry, and ineffective this education is, though.  In the public schools, it amounts to putting banners up preaching the virtues of "Responsibility" or "Punctuality," with perhaps some amount of addressing the subject in a  homeroom class or as a subject of a theme in English class.  In Christian schools, the moral instruction focuses on politics and sexual behavior, and is usually so laden with guilt and condemnation that either turns the students against the moral tradition they are being taught, or makes the student so proud of their moral behavior that they become arrogant judges of everyone else's moral fitness.

What's funny is that these two sides would look at Charlotte Mason's approach and say she does nothing, simply because she demands no programmatic, direct moral teaching.  Instead, she believes that the development of the intellect will most effectively bring about moral development.  As Mason states in her book, Ourselves, "Direct moral teaching cannot supply the place of wide and intelligent culture."  The reason for this is that it removes morality from any understanding of why it exists, which must come from an understanding of people and human nature.  That only comes from a foundational knowledge of what people are like, and while a child can certainly gain this from first-hand experience, why limit them to what they experience only by chance when there is a vast store of accumulated knowledge about people that we have built up from our past.  As Essex Chalmondley puts it, "They must gain the insight into human behavior and human nature which can come through much reading in literature, history, biography, Scripture."

Current moral instruction is also so direct that it often feels like an instructional jackhammer to the student.  The end result is often that morality becomes something that is parroted, and mimicked morality is prone to blow with the prevailing wind.  Morality that is arrived at on one's own is much more desireable, but people don't know what this means.  They  think it means you never instruct, and simply allow the child to develop on their own.  They forget that, in the old saying about the horse, leading the horse to water is an act of humanity.  Beating him until he complies is tyranny.

The answer to this is two-fold:  1) we put before the student a healthy dose of truth, beauty, and virtue in the form of those great ideas put down in writing by authors of great literature, history, and religion.  We allow their mind to feed on these great ideas.  And 2) we set good examples for them, and behave in the way we would want them to behave.  We can spoon feed all the "correct" opinions to our students, especially with regards to religion and politics, and have them echo all the thoughts that bring peace to our hearts.  But if we do so while living duplicitous, spineless, conniving, malicious lives, our students will end up twice the sons of hell that we are.

We are too apt to offer ready-made opinions to young people to pass on what we think, or what we believe we think; and this answers its purpose if we consider only the ease and convenience of acting on habitual lines of thought.

An opinion worth having must be the outcome of our thought and knowledge of the subject, it must be our own opinion, and not caught up as a parrot catches up its phrases.

But let us see to it that they (our children) have not only opinions in the one scale but principles to counter-balance these in the other....  No one is without principles, those settled rules of action by which a person chooses to guide his life.  Those guiding lights, our principles of conduct, each of us must accumulate, like his opinions, for himself; that is, we must each choose which we will have, but we are infinitely helped or hindered by the examples and by the motives which are set before us....

--Charlotte Mason